It's actually an achievement in its own right, it wasn't a 8 lane road bridge, it was a fucking walkway, maybe 10 meters long. If they laid down a pair of tree trunks and hammered a few planks on it, it would last hundreds of years.
I feel like this is what happens when you want to copy something you don't understand, and thereby only get the trappings of it.
Because it looks like they wanted a "modern" bridge to make them look more advanced and smart, but had no idea how those work. Rather than sticking with what they know, like tree trunks.
In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.
Well, now you see how many rituals came about. Something worked before (or seemed to work because of coincidence), but for some reason, it doesn't any more, but that doesn't matter, because the people forgot the real reason behind WHY they were doing that ritual many generations ago, anyway.
Imagine your tribe lives in a place where your water is seasonally bad.
Once or few times a year a lot of people get sick and start shiting and puking themselves to death. So you bang some drums and waft some smoke over them to drive the bad spirits out.
Maybe half of them have a good enough immune system to weather it, so they recover. And just like the drum banging and smoke cure dysentery/cholera/typhoid, at least some times.
It's actually an achievement in its own right, it wasn't a 8 lane road bridge, it was a fucking walkway, maybe 10 meters long. If they laid down a pair of tree trunks and hammered a few planks on it, it would last hundreds of years.
I feel like this is what happens when you want to copy something you don't understand, and thereby only get the trappings of it.
Because it looks like they wanted a "modern" bridge to make them look more advanced and smart, but had no idea how those work. Rather than sticking with what they know, like tree trunks.
Cargo Cult Science, from 1974:
Well, now you see how many rituals came about. Something worked before (or seemed to work because of coincidence), but for some reason, it doesn't any more, but that doesn't matter, because the people forgot the real reason behind WHY they were doing that ritual many generations ago, anyway.
Imagine your tribe lives in a place where your water is seasonally bad.
Once or few times a year a lot of people get sick and start shiting and puking themselves to death. So you bang some drums and waft some smoke over them to drive the bad spirits out.
Maybe half of them have a good enough immune system to weather it, so they recover. And just like the drum banging and smoke cure dysentery/cholera/typhoid, at least some times.