> It’s proof that humans will build absurdly long-horizon projects anyway
They used to. But these days the people who control the economy and funding for things like this are either politicians interested in 4 year cycles or VCs interested in 5-10 year cycles.
Nobody gives a damn about long horizon stuff anymore. We landed humans on the moon half a century ago, and we still haven't reached Mars. Instead we're building some stupid apps for people who are forced to work 7 days a week in the office on some boring ads optimization algorithm to have someone to walk their dog for them and deliver their groceries for them and monitor their health because they can't get enough exercise (that would solve their health problem the way the body intended) and don't get time to leave the confines of their <strike>jail</strike> office.
To be fair to our generation, people didn't build so much stupid shit in the 60s not because they weren't interested in stupid shit but because the whole world was too poor to be able to afford it. Our generation created the economic conditions in which people could have the spare cash to spend on stupid shit.
I would put good money on a bet that there are more people today who deeply care about the long-term horizon than did in the 60s. I don't think we spent money on long-shots in the 60s because people cared more. I think we did it because it was relatively low-hanging fruit in a gigantic culture war between US-centric Western powers and USSR-centric Eastern powers. We don't have that kind of "most people agree it's an existential threat" level of cultural difference anymore. China? They sell us most of our stuff. We don't hate China, not really. But we hated the Soviets.