Humanity has never been particularly good at knowing when to stop.
Give us a mountain and we’ll build a tunnel through it. Give us two oceans that are inconveniently far apart and we’ll dig a canal between them. Give us a river that keeps flooding and we’ll throw a wall of concrete across it the size of a small mountain.
Long before billion-dollar infrastructure projects and government budget overruns became routine, civilizations were already committing absolutely unhinged amounts of money, manpower and time to projects that seemed impossible. Some took decades. Some took centuries. Some required moving entire towns, mountains of dirt, or occasionally entire populations out of the way.
These are the historical megaprojects that prove humanity has always looked at an absurdly difficult engineering problem and responded with the same basic thought: “Yeah, we can probably build that.”
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