Semi-sensible thousand-year plans?

[Bedrockgames]

If you've got a thousand years, you can go full Merlin I think with your plans

 

[briggart]

I was going with finishing painting all the minis, but you set a thousand year limit

I think there will be a fundamental difference depending on what "long-lived" means.

Long lived mortals, like D&D dragons or elves, will have long term goals which are not dissimilar to those of shorter lived creatures (safety, power, wealth, revenge, legacy, etc.), but won't have thousand-year plans. They have more time, but they still have a finite amount of it, so I don't see them embarking in a specific project that could take their whole life and possibly fail.

On the other hand, I feel that most functionally immortal beings will gravitate toward some kind of vanity project whose only purpose is providing a level personal artistic gratification. And since art is subjective, this can be anything, from breeding the most perfectly proportioned sea cucumber to destroying a moon to create a set of planetary rings.

Like the souls in the Good Place, they have done everything, but they still have infinite time left. So either they become a mush brained zombie, or they find some hobby to keep themselves busy. They don't mind spending millennia on a single task that could be ruined 600 hundred years down the line by a freak circumstance. After all, for them it truly is about the journey and not the destination.

 

[Retreater]

This is tricky because it's so much longer than the human experience, even longer than most earthly civilizations (excepting a few ancient cultures).

Create the structure of a new philosophy, school of thought, or religion, with the eventual goal of enlightenment. This would be more than publishing a pamphlet or book. It would be a plan that would include temples and schools throughout the world, missionary teachers, and politicians who could infiltrate world governments.

 

[Tonguez]

Breeding an ape to have increased intelligence and tool use

Creating a city and its underlying culture

Growing an perfect forest habitat of owlbears

 

[kigmatzomat]

I like the idea that elves, rather than gods, are why the default d&d setting is unchanging. An elven childhood is a full human lifespan, cradle to grave. The adult elven lifespan exceeds human dynasties, being 5-6 centuries long.

When the other races cross some line, the elves spend several decades, maybe even a century, to manipulate the other cultures into self destructing. Then they get another couple of centuries of peace and quiet.

 

[Autumnal]

Change in salinity leads to change in water currents that should be measurable. Once you start narrowing it down, the rushing sound of the geyser should be findable by sonar.

That’s true but I was thinking of the bottle dropped somewhere in the Pacific abyss. I haven’t bothered doing any math, but my visualization of the Cosmic All suggests that the flow wouldn’t produce anything especially noticeable at the surface, that any significant halocline or thermocline would smear it around, as would currents between sea floor and surface. But my sense of scale could be hideously wrong.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Create a Rube Goldberg-style doomsday device. The triggering chain gets interrupted after 267 years? Start over, you have time.

Play God by adopting a particular family/city/nation as “pets”, and tend to them, for good or ill as you see fit. Bonus points if you’re into selective breeding to improve your pets.

 

[Autumnal]

Establish a pristine wilderness area across several biomes, where a stable population of monsters can live fence it with regions for regular species to live in, blessed for as long as they leave the wild zone alone. Transgressing communities get exiled and replacements moved. A thousand years should entrench the customs and have some flourishing all around.

 

[Bohandas]

I think the Long Now Foundation designed a clock that's designed to operate on a timescale of about a millennium without needing winding, charging, or repair

 

[Bohandas]

It started out as an online joke but you could do it as a real plot: Open a decantur of endless water under an ocean and have it slowly flood the world over a few thousand years.

Or go fully allegorical with it and have it that people are using decanters of endless water to power waterwheels for industrial purposes and thisnis gradually causing sea level rise

I like the idea that elves, rather than gods, are why the default d&d setting is unchanging. An elven childhood is a full human lifespan, cradle to grave. The adult elven lifespan exceeds human dynasties, being 5-6 centuries long.

When the other races cross some line, the elves spend several decades, maybe even a century, to manipulate the other cultures into self destructing. Then they get another couple of centuries of peace and quiet

Sounds a little bit like the backstory of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann


EDIT:
Also, there's this long-term project from Order of the Stick, The Throne of Jealousy