I thought about this when I visited the Hoover Dam.
The audacity of the thing and sheer impossibility of doing anything remotely like it in today's America makes it seem like a relic from an ancient civilization.
#1 reason we wouldn't do things like that today: 112-154 people died during construction (number depends on if you believe that carbon monoxide poisioning during construction was purposely mis-diagnosed in order for the company to skip on paying death benefits).
You say that as though dams can't be built without killing people.
They aren't gifts bestowed by the gods upon the completion of sufficient human sacrifice. Deaths and injuries are minimal with construction equipment and safety techniques.
The Hoover Dam was build for about $800 million inflation adjusted. I'm 100% certain that you couldn't build that structure today for that much without killing people.
That's quite different. The astronauts were small in number and accepted the risks for themselves. It's not as if hundreds of contractors died building the Saturn V itself.
Dams specifically are... complicated. There are a lot of reasons why dams are more likely to be torn down these days than built. Some are necessary for flood control but dams often have very significant negative environmental effects.
It's also hard to imagine building the interstate highway system today but, in general, a greater concern about the environmental impact of infrastructure projects isn't really a bad thing.
> It's also hard to imagine building the interstate highway system today but, in general, a greater concern about the environmental impact of infrastructure projects isn't really a bad thing.
Yes, but Japan and Western Europe surely care as much about the environment as the US does, don't they?
Plus a lot of the times you have a incredibly amount of money spent on environmental review for things like, a housing complex in the middle of SF being torn down to make way for a taller housing complex. That's not going to impact "the environment" as the term is usually used. It's not dropping new development in a forest or building a dam.
They are not building many interstates, but existing ones are being expanded around cities. They are also upgrading a lot of little two lane country roads to freeways - except for the name they are interstates.
Yes. But by and large those don't involve new right of ways. The interstate highway system involved a huge amount of land taking by eminent domain. The legal challenges today would be immense. In part because the country is just more built up but it's also generally harder for the government to just buy up land because they're the government, to say nothing of environmental etc. challenges.
That reminds me a lot of watching my Dad and my uncles work on my grandfather's farm when we would visit there when I was a kid in the mid 70s. Lots of heavy equipment, no shirts, climbing w/o safety lines, cigarettes in everybody's mouth. Just an attitude of "get it done"
It is no wonder "farmer" is one of the most dangerous occupations in the US. They're the last to be impacted by health and safety regulations.
SpaceX is well on their way to re-inventing the Apollo program. Those rockets are huge compared to a Falcon Heavy, and they would literally need a much larger facility to build them, but they'll do it. And they'll do it with hard hats, shirts, safety lines, and in a smoke free environment.
A fair comparison is not what SpaceX is doing today, but what SpaceX could be doing with today's technology with multi-percentage points of US GDP as their funding.
In that context it's not at all impressive that they're just getting past beating 60s technology, and not even in all cases. Yes they've got reusability, but there's still nothing as big as the Saturn V.
Edit: To clarify, I think SpaceX is very impressive, but I think we as a species are doing proportionally less impressive things than in the 20th century given the level of technology we have. It's not their fault we aren't spending multi-percentage points of GDP on similarly impressive projects.
One of my favorite photos looks down on him running a small horizontal drill rig into a cliff while suspended on a rope several hundred feet above the river. Just a rope knotted around his waist, no harness.
Definitely would not pass today's construction safety regulations.
I agree about the relic-feeling. I guess there were giants in those days.
I get the same feeling even for smaller scale projects. I was looking at the I-90 at Snoqualmie Pass from below - it's effectively a very long bridge over the area there - and wondering whether I will see such infrastructure projects in my lifetime.
For the curious, here are some photos of that place:
Maybe not in the US but certainly in other countries. HK currently demonstrates that with their bridge to Macau and France's Millau Viaduct is at least as impressive as the Snoqualmie Pass [1].
Hypothesis: nicotine is a nootropic [0] good for say, 6 IQ points on average (Danish study I saw referenced, not linking unless I can find the original paper). The Hoover Dam and many other great infrastructure projects were created in the earlier 20th century when smoking was pervasive. Perhaps we were somewhat smarter in aggregate back then and that's why we can't engineer infrastructure at the same level anymore.
When they built the Hover Dam people lived in tents. In the desert. Without air conditioning. And, there was during the height of construction, (from memory so forgive inexactness) one day off a year. Christmas Day. And that was optional.
And people were happy to be working because they were in many cases about half starved. So they put up with it.
Contrast that with now. Medium articles about toxic passive aggressive workplaces from people making $120K/year and who spend a lot of that screwing around and in meetings. In air conditioned offices. And that's just the start!
Not suggesting we return to the bad old days, but that is one of the major differences. Nicotine is an extremely minor one.
There aren't 6 point differences between France, China, Japan, and the USA. It's more like 2 points. And if 2, or 6 points could double construction costs, then in the poorest countries like Africa everything would have to cost something like 100x more, which is definitely not the case.
This is only true for certain scales relating IQ to construction costs. The average IQ in Africa is, what, ~15 points lower than America? Suppose the first 2 points increase construction costs by a factor of 1.5, and each subsequent 2-point reduction by a smaller factor, until you reach some limit (IQ average too low to be realistic, NGO aid, something like that).
I don't believe we are lacking of people not smart enough to construct a dam. It's simply come down to litigation that prevents large scale infrastructure from being constructed. It's very difficult to build infrastructure in California due to lawsuits from environmental groups for example.
That's an interesting theory, but the Flynn effect raised IQ scores way more over the same time period. But if it makes you feel better, I still see a lot of people smoking on construction sites, so builders may be keeping the flame alive, so to speak.
The audacity of the thing and sheer impossibility of doing anything remotely like it in today's America makes it seem like a relic from an ancient civilization.
It felt like visiting the pyramids in Egypt.