Commitment to the bit. It doesn’t require doing it correctly, but it does require not slacking off.
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The level he assed it at is “social media influencer from white collar background who has never actually built very much before and so thinks this is the best something can be built”.
You see this kind of thing a lot around the fringes of the “maker” YouTube genre (full of people who do know what they are doing) where it starts to overlap with the “influencer” areas (full of people who know how to get clicks but not much else).
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I think this was more about the process than the viability of the project, as others have said, nothing is going to hold up over the long run. Or at least I hope he had fun.
Digging holes is BUUUULLLLSSSHHHHIIIIIIITTT. One of my gripes in the movies when they have to dig holes and its like no thing at all.
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I assume that Brian Eno is doing the audio?
Seems like humanity has already buried enough useless trash for one Anthropocene.
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now where’d i put that “archaeologists prefer backhoes” bumper sticker…
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I think we have commiserated about this before, but I’m happy to do so again. Digging is one of the worst jobs in all of human endeavour. It also drives me goddam crazy when characters dig an 8’ grave with a shovel in 20 minutes in the dark, and are just slightly sweaty at the end. Hollywood writers should all be required to go dig a goddam hole once in their lives as part of their schooling. It could honestly be a source of very interesting plot points. Characters should be stealing backhoes or stalling for hours of time so they can do it. Or perhaps they need to hire a crew, then find a way to keep them quiet. Many options better and more interesting than, “Old out-of-shape man with lung cancer (aka Walter White) digs a HUGE hole in the desert for his oil drums by himself with a shovel in an hour”. 
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It could make a good scene where you got some old gangster digging his own grave:
Jimmy: “Guys, I’m going to need a little help here.”
Goon 1: “It’s your grave, Jimmy, you dig it.”
Jimmy: “Look, I don’t know how many times you guys have done this, but digging a hole in hard earth isn’t easy. You didn’t even bring me a pick to break it up! It would take a 20 year old 8 hours to dig this thing, and I’m 55 and live on a diet of spaghetti and cannoli.”
Goon 2: “Shit I gotta get Tina from dance in 5 hours… And I ain’t getting this suit dirty, it’s Armani!”
Jimmy: “Look, I got a cousin who does excavations, we could get him down here, with a back hoe, he would be in and out in 30 minutes, tops!”
And then he uses some code word when calling his cousin that he comes and rescues him.
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I’m 55 and live on a diet of spaghetti and cannoli.
Sounds like we need to get somebody to take care of Fat Jimmy.
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But all those old booby traps in the Indiana Jones movies worked just fine. He just needs to find a way to create a dedicated group of inter-generational caretakers to maintain the thing.
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For a more serious take on building things designed to last millennia into the future I like reading about the Long Now Foundation’s various projects such as the clock they designed to last 10,000 years.
One of the guiding principles behind the clock design was that they limited themselves to using materials humans have already worked with for at least 10,000 years so they could predict with confidence how such materials will hold up over a similar period of time. For example we know how a bronze object is likely to hold up over that period of time because we have artifacts from the Bronze Age, but we can only make educated guesses about what effect that period of time would have on steel and concrete.
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Makes sense, but I’m reading through the website right now and it mentions use of 316 Stainless Steel, titanium and concrete being used in the clock design:
Oh well, I guess they changed their plans from the last time I read about the project. I wonder if it was an issue relating to budget (easier to pour concrete than to cart in a bunch of marble) or just an issue of figuring out how to build precision mechanisms out of bronze-age materials.
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The co-founder of the organization is Danny Hillis, a former Imagineer and very creative guy who unfortunately developed a reputation for constantly changing his mind on the scope of projects and caused projects to take far longer to complete than expected. I once interviewed at his company Applied Minds and they showed me the high-tech RV project they were working on. Years later I read a news article about it and it still wasn’t done because he kept changing his mind on stuff, and meanwhile his daughter that he was supposedly building the thing to go camping with kept getting older…
Edit: never mind, I got the wrong co-founder, it wasn’t Danny’s daughter that the thing was being built for, although he was involved with the project.
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Interesting context! That would explain it I guess…
Just as an aside: Rome has some structures made out of concrete some 2000 years ago that are still pretty solid.
Edit: tyop.
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There’s still a big difference between 2,000 years and 10,000 years (but then again I’m not a math geek so…)
I do enjoy the thought experiments behind designing things to endure those kinds of time scales though. Makes me think of the Dune books.
5x, not exactly orders of magnitude.
According to some sources1), Nabataea traders in regions of what is Syria and Jordan today used concrete to make concrete floors, housing structures, and underground cisterns as early as 6500 BCE. Allowing for the usual delay contractors have been racking up since the dawn of men I’d round up the total to ~9000 years of using some sort of concrete in construction; close enough.2)
1) I must admit that so far I’ve been mostly looking at Roman use of concrete and have stumbled across the Nabataeas only recently. The sources I’ve come across so far are a bit thin as a lot of them seem to simply copy each other without giving further details. One more item on the list of the things I’ll have to look into when I find the time (i.e. when I’m retired, probably).
2) Yes, this is how civil engineers do maths. The square root of 50 is 7. Because 7x7=49, and 49 is basically 50. As long as you do this in a way that the errors result in giving you an extra margin of safety you’re fine.
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