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[Maximum Spin]

That's...really not how things work. Concrete can last a long time, but you trade off in weight (cheap material but can be expensive to build with and just plain ugly, and weight adds a limit on height).

Even concrete is unstable to solutional degradation, forming calthemites, which requires a certain amount of maintenance to keep the structure viable. There are various other things that can happen to concrete as well.

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[McTraveller]

The fun/sad thing is that "debt passed onto future generations" is often quoted in dollars, which is meaningless. True debt at a national level or international level is in terms of labor, not money.

Future generations can't pay more money to people who are dead.  What future generations may have to do is spend more effort to produce some standard of living than they would have otherwise.  This is very very difficult to measure because there are "natural" sources of debt, such as overfishing and depleting a resources and "man-made" sources of debt like contracts where you "borrowed" someone's bread today so you can eat, with a promise to make them two loves of bread in the future¹.

That doesn't even account for things like asteroids, solar flares, or other disasters which aren't due to human activity at all - those are things that can increase labor needs without being due to "debt."

Spoiler: 1 (click to show/hide)

If you borrow to eat today, but you don't use your ability to eat today to make food (or something that can be traded for food), you're going to lock yourself into poverty. This is a massive problem with "consumer debt" - most consumer debt isn't productive, which is why consumers get locked into the debt cycle.  When a company or government borrows, if they do it to fund creation of infrastructure or new production, that is fine.  It's only when borrowing is just to keep things going now, without making anything new, that borrowing causes massive problems.

[MorleyDev]

The other thing is ancient buildings are relatively simple in their requirements.

You can pile up a pyramid of giant stones and it'll last awhile because the wear and tear on those stones doesn't hit as hard, but when you start to add in multiple floors all of which need room for air-conditioning and electronical wiring and plumbing...

Say you build a wooden building of a few rooms out of flexible material that can survive an earthquake, but then all it takes is one pipe bursting to cause water damage that undermines the integrity enough that it requires repairs that mean tearing down half of it anyway, or an electrical fault that starts a fire because the only flexible material available was also flammable or....

Basically, modern society needs a lot of stuff to keep trucking, everything fades faster than you expect, and everyone dies terrified and alone.

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[Maximum Spin]

But isn't it fair to say that those are not the consideration going into our planning processes?

Broadly speaking, no. I know what goes into some of these planning processes, and these things are absolutely considered.

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[McTraveller]

Labor? Why not misery?

I think we are saying the same thing - in my brain misery is a side effect of "having to work harder to attain a given standard of living." Everything boils down to labor. Even the example of "not enough resources to build a spaceship" - I mean we aren't likely to be transmuting elements, so it's just a matter of labor to recover it from other sources, fight for it, or whatever.

I do fully appreciate that this a very reductionist approach, probably even bordering on reductio ad absurdum.

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[ChairmanPoo]

It's not like we can still observe thousand of year old ruins that maintained their structural integrity in the modern age.

Well... we really can't. The Colosseum, to pick an example, is slowly crumbling away all the time and needs regular restoration work. It wouldn't last long at all if you tried to use it as an office space or even as an arena like it was intended. We see thousand-year-old ruins that appear to maintain their structural integrity due to constant protection and work that is deemed valuable only because we value those ruins for their cultural heritage.

This is a partial truth at best. There are obvious examples of unmaintained buildings that endured to the modern age. Most of the ones in operation (eg: the so-called Tower of Hercules) did get substantial maintenance over the millennia. But many others didnt and nonetheless endured to our day.

[MorleyDev]

In a livable/usable state by realistic modern standards? Because "building still standing" isn't enough for a building to actually be considered fit-for-purpose

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[Maximum Spin]

This is a partial truth at best. There are obvious examples of unmaintained buildings that endured to the modern age. Most of the ones in operation (eg: the so-called Tower of Hercules) did get substantial maintenance over the millennia. But many others didnt and nonetheless endured to our day.

I intentionally discounted certain categories of structure that wouldn't be useful as a template for modern construction, but I'm curious to hear what your examples are, in case there are any that would be.

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