When Did We Stop Building Cathedrals?
How humanity traded centuries-long ambition for a world measured one lifetime at a time.
I’m not entirely sure what started it.
If I had to guess, I’d probably get it wrong.
Maybe it was the telescope I had as a kid. The one I used to drag outside on clear nights so I could stare at the moon until my neck hurt. To be honest, I don’t think it got enough use out of me because I was too young to set it up myself. Relying on my parents to come set it up each time wasn’t ideal. Maybe it was the movie Treasure Planet, which I watched so many times growing up that I can still picture entire scenes from memory. Even to this day I still enjoy sitting down to watch it on occasion. Maybe it was something even earlier than that. Some strange fascination with the night sky that got lodged in my head before I was old enough to put words to it.
Whatever caused it, space has always occupied a disproportionate amount of real estate in my imagination.
Most of my favorite stories take place among the stars. Interstellar. The Martian. Hidden Figures. The Red Rising series. The Mass Effect games. Even now, if you sat down at my computer, there’s a good chance you’d find some distant galaxy, nebula, or star field staring back at you from the background.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn toward the horizon beyond the horizon.
Not necessarily because I wanted to go there, but because I wanted to know what was out there. How it all works.
There is something deeply unsettling and deeply beautiful about looking up at the night sky and realizing that no matter how much we learn, no matter how advanced we become, the overwhelming majority of existence remains completely beyond our reach. The universe doesn’t care about our politics, our careers, our arguments, or our timelines. It simply exists on a scale so vast that it makes even our greatest achievements feel impossibly small.
And strangely enough, I think that’s part of what I love about it.
Because the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve realized my fascination with space may not actually be about space at all.
The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve realized my fascination with space may not actually be about space at all.
I think it’s about what space does to us.
When you stand beneath a clear night sky, it’s almost impossible not to feel small. Not in a depressing way. In an honest way. The universe has a way of reminding you that there are still things bigger than your problems, bigger than your ambitions, bigger than the endless stream of arguments and distractions that seem to dominate modern life.
Maybe that’s why I’ve always been drawn to it.
Space forces us to look beyond ourselves. It asks questions that can’t be answered in a news cycle, an election cycle, or a quarterly earnings report. It demands patience. Curiosity. Long term thinking. It reminds us that some things are worth pursuing simply because they move humanity forward, even if we never personally benefit from the destination.
And that’s when I started realizing that whenever people talk about space, they usually end up talking about rockets. I don’t think rockets are the interesting part. I think what they represent is.
The Human Instinct to Reach Beyond Ourselves
A rocket is one of the most extraordinary machines ever conceived. It is a controlled explosion powerful enough to overcome Earth’s gravity, assembled from millions of individual components and the collective knowledge of countless engineers, scientists, machinists, and technicians. Yet for all their technological complexity, rockets are ultimately symbols of something much older than aerospace engineering.
They are symbols of aspiration.
Long before humanity built rockets, we built monuments. Before we built monuments, we built temples. Before we built temples, we gathered stones, aligned them with celestial events, and attempted to impose meaning upon a universe that often seemed incomprehensible.
The story of humanity is, in many ways, the story of a species perpetually reaching beyond its immediate needs.
No civilization ever needed to build the Great Pyramid of Giza.
The largest pyramid was constructed around 4,500 years ago using an estimated 2.3 million stone blocks, many weighing multiple tons. For nearly four millennia it remained the tallest human made structure on Earth. Unless of course you think aliens had a hand in it, then I guess the details could vary. Sticking to the general consensus however, the amount of labor, planning, organization, and engineering required to accomplish such a feat remains astonishing even by modern standards.
What makes the achievement so remarkable is the precision involved. The structure sits on a base covering more than thirteen acres and is aligned to true north with an accuracy that continues to impress modern surveyors. The original builders achieved this without satellites, computers, lasers, or any of the tools we take for granted today.
Then there are the measurements themselves.
For generations, researchers and enthusiasts have pointed out a curious relationship hidden within the pyramid’s dimensions. Multiply its original height by 43,200 and the result comes strikingly close to the Earth’s polar radius. Multiply the perimeter of its base by the same number and you arrive at a figure remarkably close to the Earth’s equatorial circumference. The number itself is intriguing, surfacing repeatedly in theories about ancient astronomy, timekeeping, and humanity's attempts to map the heavens long before modern science is thought to have existed. Thousands of years later we are still discovering mathematical relationships within a structure built by people working with stone, rope, sight lines, and the night sky.
The pyramid also of course served practical purposes. It was a tomb. It was a political statement. It was a religious monument. But ultimately, it was something else.
It was a declaration.
It announced to the world that the people who built it possessed the ability to organize themselves around a vision larger than any individual life.
The same pattern appears repeatedly throughout history.
At Göbekli Tepe, constructed more than eleven thousand years ago, massive carved stone pillars were erected by people who had not yet developed many of the technologies we associate with advanced civilization. Archaeologists continue to debate aspects of the site, but what is undeniable is that human beings devoted enormous effort toward creating something monumental long before they were thought able to have such abilities, and definitely well before they were required to do so by practical necessity.
At Machu Picchu, high in the Andes Mountains, the Inca constructed an extraordinary city whose architecture appears deeply connected to both the surrounding landscape and celestial observations. The site demonstrates not merely technical skill but a desire to harmonize human creation with something greater than itself.
Across cultures separated by oceans, languages, and thousands of years, the pattern remains remarkably consistent.
Human beings have always sought to build things that transcend utility.
The Age of Cathedrals
Perhaps nowhere is this instinct more clearly displayed than in the great cathedrals of Europe.
When modern people visit structures such as Cologne Cathedral, Chartres Cathedral, Notre Dame de Paris, or the great Gothic churches scattered throughout Germany, France, and England, they often focus on the architecture itself. The soaring ceilings. The stained glass. The seemingly flying support beams. The immense stone towers that seem to defy gravity.
What is often overlooked is the timescale.
Construction on Cologne Cathedral began in 1248. It was not completed until 1880.
More than six hundred years.
Entire nations rose and fell during that period. Generations lived and died. Wars were fought. Dynasties disappeared.
Yet the cathedral remained.
Imagine dedicating your life’s work to a project that your children would never see completed, your grandchildren would never see completed, and perhaps even your great grandchildren would never see completed. That was not unusual.
It was expected.
The master stonemason who carved a section of a cathedral wall understood that the completed structure existed beyond the horizon of his own life. He would never stand beneath its finished towers, and yet he worked. Not because he would personally benefit from the final result, but because he believed he was participating in something meaningful and larger than himself.
The cathedral represented continuity between generations. It was a physical manifestation of a society’s belief that some things were worth building even if the builders themselves would never enjoy them. This is a concept that feels increasingly foreign to the modern world.
We live in an age obsessed with immediacy. Political cycles last years. Business cycles last quarters. Social media cycles last hours. We measure success through metrics that are constantly updated and instantly consumed.
The people who built cathedrals measured time differently. They thought in centuries.
Apollo: The Last Great Cathedral
When people hear the phrase “cathedral,” they often imagine religion. I think that definition is too narrow. A cathedral is any project that requires a civilization to organize itself around a purpose larger than immediate self interest.
By that definition, the Apollo Program was a cathedral.
When President John F. Kennedy announced that the United States would land a man on the moon before the decade was out, the country had no clear roadmap for accomplishing the task. The necessary technologies did not yet exist. The risks were immense. The cost was staggering.
Yet less than a decade later, human beings were walking on another world.
The moon landing was not economically rational in the conventional sense. It was not designed to maximize quarterly profits. It was not undertaken because the return on investment could be clearly calculated. It was undertaken because a civilization decided that accomplishing something extraordinary mattered.
Apollo was one of those rare moments in the modern age when humanity remembered how to reach.
Not merely for practical gain, but for inspiration. For possibility. For the expansion of human horizons. And perhaps that is why those grainy black and white images still resonate today. They remind us of what we are capable of when ambition extends beyond the boundaries of personal benefit.
What Happened to Our Ambition?
This is the point where many people would argue that humanity never stopped building. In a literal sense, they would be correct. We build skyscrapers. We build bridges. We build data centers, airports, power plants, and global communication networks. The modern world contains engineering achievements that would have seemed miraculous to earlier generations, but I would argue that something important has changed.
The defining monuments of previous civilizations were often expressions of collective aspiration. They reflected a desire to connect with eternity, divinity, posterity, or the unknown. Much of modern construction, by contrast, is driven by optimization.
We build faster.
We build cheaper.
We build more efficiently.
Those are not bad goals. Efficiency has improved countless lives. The problem arises when efficiency becomes the only goal. Because civilizations require more than utility.
They require vision.
The Burj Khalifa in Dubai for example, stands as one of the few modern examples of a structure built primarily because humanity still occasionally feels the urge to create something awe inspiring. At over 2,700 feet tall, it is a reminder that the impulse has not entirely disappeared. Yet it feels increasingly like an exception rather than the rule.
Our culture excels at maintaining systems.
It struggles to imagine horizons.
The Return of the Frontier
For decades after Apollo, humanity largely retreated from the frontier. We continued launching satellites. We built the International Space Station. Scientific progress continued, but something changed in the public imagination. The moon stopped being the next step and simply became a historical achievement. The future began to feel smaller.
Recently, that trend has begun to reverse.
NASA’s Artemis program seeks to return human beings to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972. Private companies like SpaceX have dramatically reduced launch costs with their new advancements in areas like reusable rockets. Discussions about permanent lunar bases and eventual missions to Mars have re-entered mainstream conversation.
Whether these efforts succeed remains to be seen. What matters is that the conversation itself has returned.
Love Elon Musk or despise him, agree with him or disagree with him, he remains one of the few prominent figures openly advocating for a future measured in generations rather than election cycles. His vision of making humanity a multi-planetary species may ultimately succeed, fail, or evolve into something entirely different.
That is almost beside the point. What matters is the willingness to ask the question. What comes next? And be bold enough to reach for it. Civilizations flourish when enough people are willing to ask that question and do something about it.
Building for People We Will Never Meet
The older I get, the more I believe one of the greatest challenges facing modern society is not technological.
It is temporal.
We have become extraordinarily good at thinking about ourselves. Additionally, we have become remarkably poor at thinking about our descendants.
The people who built cathedrals expected future generations to inherit the results of their labor. The people who planted ancient forests knew they would never sit beneath the largest trees. The people who constructed monuments aligned with stars and solstices often worked toward outcomes they would never personally witness. They built anyway.
Not because they were guaranteed success.
Not because they would receive recognition.
Not because they would benefit.
They built because they understood something that we seem to be forgetting. The most meaningful achievements often require sacrifices made on behalf of people who do not yet exist. That principle built civilizations. It built monuments. It built cathedrals. And eventually, it built rockets.
The Horizon Beyond the Horizon
Perhaps that is why I continue returning to space. Not because I expect to visit Mars, or because I believe humanity will solve all of its problems among the stars. Not even because rockets themselves are particularly interesting.
I return to space because it reminds me of a mindset that once seemed common throughout human history. A willingness to pursue goals that exceed the boundaries of a single lifetime. To devote resources toward something larger than immediate gratification. To build for people we will never meet.
The stars remind us that there is always another horizon, another mystery, another challenge waiting beyond the edge of what we currently understand. For thousands of years, humanity responded to those horizons by building cathedrals.
Some were carved from stone.
Some were built from marble.
Some rose as pyramids, temples, monuments, and observatories.
Today, they rise on pillars of fire reaching to the stars.
The rocket is not the destination. It is however, the latest cathedral. And whether humanity continues reaching for the stars may depend on whether we can rediscover the ancient belief that some things are worth building even when we know we will never live to see them finished.
— Ethan Paine