Life, the universe, and everything

 I came across an interesting article on Google Reader today, Voyager and the Will to Explore.  It's talking about how amazing it is that there are still working components on the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.  It goes on to talk about the estimated decay of the current components and how 50 years after its launch into space it will still function.  They were originally intended for a 3-10 year mission, to Jupiter and Saturn, but are currently in what is called an extended mission, for over 20 years.  They've both been in space for over 33 years and traveled about 8.452 billion miles, a little over What amazes me is the amount of time involved in a project like this.  Not just the time involved in designing and testing the materials and components before the actual launch into space, but the scope of the entire project.  Certainly there were short-term goals for the mission, but they had to think about possible benefits of the extended mission.  According to the article, there are only two members of the original team still alive.  Can you imagine beginning work on a project that you may never see to completion?  Not because of funding or lack of interest in the project.  Just something that will simply outlive  you.

The only other type of job I can think of, offhand, where one will not see the finished product of one's work is landscaping.  I'm not talking about simple bushes and trees around someone's home.  In Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, he talks about Frederick Law Olmstead.  Olmstead designed several public park areas around the country, most notably Central Park in New York City, and his biggest complaint in Devil in the White City was that people weren't patient enough to see his designs to fruition.  Larson details how Olmstead would create a plan for a space and then return a year later to find the owners had modified it on their own and completely ruined the design that would take 10-20 years to develop.  Larson even states that the plan used for Central Park was one Olmstead would never have seen completed as it was designed for 50-100 years of development.  Of course, with Landscape Architecture on that scale one has to think not only 20-50 years, but hundreds of years, in the future and even then it's always going to grow and change.

Both of these jobs require a tremendous amount of forethought and knowledge of the materials at hand.  I can't even conceive of that amount of time, let alone plan an entire project to extend that long.  It gives me a different perspective on life.