The thousand years architecture of Venice

Venice was settled 1604 years (and few months) ago.

The thing is, Venice was built a swamp, which means that every building is slowly shrinking.

To mitigate that, the builders have put millions of wooden piles, 1-3.5m tall.

Most of them being there for centuries, while modern industrial buildings are built to last 50 years.

Paradoxically, these piles age and rot, attacked by a bacteria, but it's slower, which means they have to be slowly replaced.

Do some of them break, yes, of course, but the system is preserved as a whole.

To give a comparison point, the oldest human buildings are 12000 years old, making Venice 0.13 of that.

If we compare to computer science, arbitrarily taking 1948, the release date of the first computer, we had few big systems:

• ARPANET lasted for 21 years (0.27)
• Internet has fully connected the world in 1992, 33 years ago (0.43)

Beside those, very few systems survive beyond few years, and they all require major changes in their infrastructure.

The internet today has dozens of protocols today, while it was mainly limited to TCP/IP in 1992, there is a governance, politics, etc.

Sure, entropy applies to all systems, but only mature fields have conceptualized enough to keep a minimal maintenance cost, computer science is not there yet.