The old man and the mountain

This is a fable in Chinese where an old man, annoyed by having to walk round a mountain to get to his fields, resolves to remove the mountain. A old wise man (whom I recall being portrayed as a confusion scholar, though I cannot find confirmation of it now) tells him he is foolish. The old man reposts that the wise man in foolish, because he will have sons who will in turn have sons who will continue his work, while the mountain has no way to get bigger. And so, victory over the mountain is only a matter of time. 

It is kind of like Pascal's wager applied to generational projects. Any probability of God existing multiplied by the infinite good of eternal life is a proper bargain. So any project, multiplied by the infinite power of generational effort, is doable. 

Sometimes you read Western foreign policy experts say that we look 5 years out while the Chinese have a time horizon of 10 or 20 years. They are clueless.