Grandiose projects and thinking big

I have started to think more about technological projects in the past and at present that are governed by resource flooding logic I explained in this post. Unfortunately, I don't see that many.

Here are some:

Musk's Starship seems like a grandiose project for today's standards - fully reusable, 100 metric tons to LEO, 1000 Starships to colonize Mars at a one per day production rate?! Whaaat?!

However, it pales in comparison to the scale of thinking of project Orion::

The biggest design above is the "super" Orion design; at 8 million tonnes, it could easily be a city. In interviews, the designers contemplated the large ship as a possible interstellar ark. This extreme design could be built with materials and techniques that could be obtained in 1958 or were anticipated to be available shortly after.

I get it, this type of thinking big is way easier when it is done on the drawing boards like Orion, as opposed to Starship that is getting built. Still, Orion was seriously funded by US government for 5 years and the best the US government can do now is SLS turd built on legacy hardware.

Anyway, to me the lack of these big projects points to something bigger which is obvious in retrospect: a decline in grandiose thinking in our culture.
How to get it back? To me it starts with what do we actually want? question

In my opinion, the prerequisites for it are as follows:

• shared goal, something that moves people : call it Humanity's will-to-power, will-to-transcend, vitality, not being afraid to be alive
  • e.g. do we want to conquer the Universe?
• first principles technological reasoning:
  • what do laws of physics don't allow for? - everything else is possible!
• high asabiyyah between agent
  • you don't want to think that you are ngmi because others will stop you with NIMBY attitude
• societal ergophilia - the love of work, not being afraid of it

As I am writing this, I have realized that that these grandiose projects all live in the world of atoms: I am biased, but building AGI doesn't vibe with me as much as having 10x more energy per capita. At least to me it is clear why: we are implemented on top of atoms, not bits.
Grandiose thinking is also related to energy, aka Human Power over Nature - no wonder Atomic Age was the era when these projects were conceived: Project Orion, Project Independence, Project Plowshare, Project Oilsand

Enough nostalgia for the past though - what are some of the grandiose projects am I looking forward to?

• revived Project Independence - a nuclear power plant for every neighborhood
  • resource flooding, you dummy!: more energy per capita is crucial for expanding our technology tree and making all other projects below a reality
• Project Metropolis: 100 m² per capita housing urbanistic project for 8 billion people, EPCOT style
• Project Boring: removal of asphalt and lame modes of transport from the surface of the Earth, multi-level cities (ties with project Metropolis)
• project Feast: vertical farming at scale - I want to live in kickass cities with wild nature around as opposed to being surrounded by monoculture farming

To finish, just as a reminder:
Dyson spheres won't build themselves.

I will leave the reader with a couple of quotes:

Like all revolutionary new ideas, the subject has had to pass through three stages, which may be summed up by these reactions: (1) ‘It’s crazy — don’t waste my time.’ (2) ‘It’s possible, but it’s not worth doing.’ (3) ‘I always said it was a good idea.’
— Arthur C. Clarke. "Next—The Planets!", Report on Planet Three. 1972

I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
— J. B. S. Haldane. "Possible Worlds" 1927

"The idea itself is not crazy. The idea that we might do it might be crazy." 
— Arthur C. Clarke. "To Mars By a Bomb" documentary