For some reason people seem to think they’re fundamentally smarter than people were back then.
Yeah, you may have technically had a better education, but you’re not inherently more intelligent than the average person back then, and a genius from that time is still miles ahead of you.
Yeah they had less lead in their environment. They probably were actually smarter, just had less access to foundational knowledge
I don’t know. Looking at the pyramids I’m tempted to think all they had was foundational knowledge.
Yeah, it’s been linked to systemic racist thought patterns (which are often unintentional but should be acknowledged). I explain it to people like this: take a handful of sand and turn your fist so that your palm faces perpendicular to the ground. Now release the sand slowly… What shape does it form? It isn’t rocket science.
Ancient aliens literally has Nazi origins. They didn’t just have race-science, but race-history. I guess you could call their thinking ancient-Aryans because they believed that impressive structures built by brown people must have been led by a Northern European diaspora who eventually vanished because of race-mixing.
You can watch the History channel all you want, but nobody is going to question the Parthenon or the Colosseum. Stonehenge is the only one I can think of where Aliens had to help white people.
The two things you named were built thousands of years after the pyramids are believed to have been built though. You said it yourself, people think aliens helped with Stonehenge. That’s because it’s much older and there is no written history from when it was built.
I don’t doubt racism is factor in all sorts of aspects in life but this seems like a massive fucking stretch. Maybe come up with better examples.
https://hyperallergic.com/470795/pseudoarchaeology-and-the-racism-behind-ancient-aliens/
Pseudoarchaeology has a pretty long and not-so-awesome background due to the profession’s colonial roots with treasure hunters, adventurers, and the like, especially in antiquarian circles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_archaeology
In the late 18th to 19th century archaeology became a national endeavor as personal cabinets of curios turned into national museums. People were now being hired to go out and collect artifacts to make a nation’s collection more grand and to show how far a nation’s reach extends. For example, Giovanni Battista Belzoni was hired by Henry Salt, the British consul to Egypt, to gather antiquities for Britain. In nineteenth-century Mexico, the expansion of the National Museum of Anthropology and the excavation of major archaeological ruins by Leopoldo Batres were part of the liberal regime of Porfirio Díaz to create a glorious image of Mexico’s pre-Hispanic past.[22]
So that’s great evidence for racism being in archeology in general but I still don’t see the connection between that and people crediting aliens for things we don’t completely understand.
Edit: There are definitely good examples in the article but they also use your argument about things that were built way more recently compared to things that were built before written language. Egyptians definitely built the pyramids, they’re in Egypt so by definition that’s what happened. But I really don’t believe people getting excited over the mystery around how it happened and then pointing to aliens as a possible answer is rooted in racism at all. That being said, there seems be all sorts of nefarious reasons to put that alien explanation on things that are much easier explained without aliens.
Yeah, and it is hard for many people to see the direct correlation of “Chariot of the Gods” etc. with Nazis because it isn’t hitting them in the face. I try to show people that people were smart back then, too, instead of punishing these icky mindsets because they tend to be a bit reactionary anyway. Some people just don’t know any better for a variety of reasons.
Mind blown
I was thinking “three ridges” first 😅 (I imagined the sand running between the four fingers of my semi-closed fist)
So you’re saying the pyramids are just giant rocks piled on top of each other?
If so, then what was dropping them and how could the intricacies inside the pyramids be possible if they were just dropped on top of each other?
Pyramids = basic engineering shape for a sturdy structure. Wide base, tapered top. A lot of early monumental structures were constructed with that basic concept in mind.
its not the basic shape thats impressive, its the truly gigantic pieces that have tighter tolerances than a tesla.
TBF that’s not hard
I don’t think people have ever been blown away from the shape of them.
Edit: and it’s actually really silly to think about someone who would be… “Woah! How are those things triangles???” Like what?
I probably didn’t have as good an education as the highest educated classes in most ancient Egyptian dynasties.
I don’t know about that. Intelligence is attractive and it’s a predictor of lifetime success.
It’s fair to imagine the challenges a building team would face 2k plus years ago.
Like in this example, building levers that are strong enough to lift the load. I bet they broke a bunch of stuff.
But eventually they figured it out, via trial and error. Levers, ramps, etc. They probably couldn’t describe why those things were inherently the best way, but more approached from the “we tried 9 other ways and they suck. This is the best way.”
Next, the phrase “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” is relevant here, but in a backwards way.
Since we struggle to imagine what it would take for an ancient society to master the techniques to build these things, we therefore begin to grasp for unrealistic conclusions (magic…read…aliens).
Same goes for Europeans building cathedrals and stuff, the trick is the history, the methods and the results were more documented and understood.
There are some racism concerns that I think go beyond and around what I’ve discussed, which is more abstract. I’m not discounting the other topics, just not covering them here.
Egyptians didn’t just decide “hey, let’s build a pyramid”. Mastabas were first, the shape of a Pyramid evolved later.
Not to mention that there’s a few faulty pyramids (e.g. Bent Pyramid which were finished quickly or all together abandoned before completion.
Merer forgot to mention aliens in his diary too.
But hey, aliens did it. They couldn’t just land on Earth. Their ships were designed to land on a Pyramid because that’s how intelligent race would build their spaceships. Don’t question it, just trust the specialists (who wrote books!).
Anyway, for anyone interested in Ancient Egypt, the best thing out there (I think) are Bob Briers lectures also available on Audible.
Don’t know why you replied this to me, but cool links.
I never suggested there’s any validity in the alien-pyramid thing, only described how it could have entered the discussion in the first place.
(“We don’t know what they did, seems hard even for us, must have been magic”. Pathway)
Not advocating anything, not arguing anything, no tinfoil on my frog’s heads, they live naturally.
Pretty sure they were just agreeing with you. It’s like an argument you imagine in the shower, but co-op mode.
Just covering my ass, cause Lemmy
One thing is for sure: you can’t leverage those stones with a primed FJ 1x6 from Lowe’s. I’ll bet they went through quite a few of those!
Lowe’s definitely made lots of USD getting the pharaohs to think the pyramids were a good idea
Now what were you thinking about a backsplash here?
But imagine the size of the lever. And how would they haul it on top of the pyramid? Wouldn’t we have found traces of a 500m long lever ?
you mean like they lifted the rock from the ground , all the way up in one trip?
sounds good enough for me. I bet they didn’t, they had the aliens lower it with antigravity technology
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The constant barrage of Joe Rogan clips of idiots claming it was impossible to move these huge stones over those distances with the tech at the time was what drove me to disable YouTube shorts.
You can disable shorts??
I need to do that. I get stuck in a loop of watching them, and 90% of them just piss me off anyway.
Honestly, the first and arguably most important step is recognizing how much of online content is specifically designed to get a reaction out of you, primarily in the form pissing you off.
Yep, might explain some of the irritability of people online.
What’s funny (I guess funny lol) is ever since I got my current job about 2.5 years ago, I no longer need to use social media. I am much, much happier without it. But I still get into little fights on forums and I really wish I didn’t. Every now and then I resolve to be less hostile, and things really do improve, but somehow I always get dragged back into old habits. But I’m a little hesitant to completely abandon things like Kbin because they are often my only window into events/what is going on/my hobbies. Idk what the answer is.
Well, the fact that you have the self awareness to realize is a great place to be. Not sure what to say other than try to treat your body with respect and your mind will follow.
I honestly I’m surprised how much of a problem this is for people. All I’ve done is made sure to hit the “not interested” type buttons on YouTube and tiktok whenever they pop up, and I’ve run into next to nothing after like 3 times of doing that. Sometimes I’ll watch something the algorithm thinks is adjacent to ragebait or alt-right bullshit so it’ll try to feed it to me, and after not-interested’ing the video it goes back to feeding me the stuff I actually want…
Do people just not use those features or is my experience with the algorithms really that different?
So you’re actually thinking of it a little more narrowly, which is understandable. What I mean by “content designed to piss you off” is VERY broad.
Conservatives like Fox News, but it makes them pissed off, right? Social media can be exactly the same way.
Ah that’s fair, I think I might’ve been injected other related conversations I’ve seen into this one. My bad!
No worries
i turned off watch history. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/95725.
now i dont get any recommendations from youtube and only watch what i am interested in.
There’s probably a way to do it in browser with ublock origin or another extension.
On android, ReVanced.
I use ReVanced on my phone and it has an option to hide shorts permanently. In the browser I use an extension for that, there are multiple ones.
The creation of the feature is what made me disable shorts. If I wanted vine then I’d go back to 2013.
Hey take that back. Vine and 2013 were marvellous times
Pretty sure the Egyptians were smart enough. But the European cathedrals cannot be explained w/o aliens
Great Wall of China? Come-on, no body can do that. And its not aliens, its GOD, who show favors protecting his favorite people, the Chinese.
Not to mention the Chrysler tower. Def aliens
Lifting it is like 1/100th of the challenge. Moving it across hundreds of miles, cutting it, getting it to the top of the pyramid, and setting it in place are all bigger problems than simply lifting the stone.
I think they started at the top and then built down
they were just trying to find the upper block limit after hitting bedrock
He who cast the first stone built the pyramid
Nobody has so far given you a serious answer, so:
Cutting - They only had IIRC bronze, which is not enough on its own to cut through the granite. However using sand to add friction makes it cut significant faster/easier.
Moving miles - Boats are incredibly capable of carrying heavy loads with minimal energy expenditure to move said boat. Using logs and levers also goes far.
Getting to the too of the pyramid, that’s a little more of a mystery. But there is evidence they included ramps within the structure as they built the bigger ones as they went. And IIRC the smaller ones had pulley systems going through the center.
It doesn’t require fancy tech, just of patience and application of basic physics.
Here is a guy using some of the basic movement techniques in his backyard with multi ton stones:
Lifting is the hard part, you can move blocks short distances on rollers, long distances on barges, really short distances by a dozen men pushing
If you take the heaviest stone and divide it by a reasonable weight to walk long distances- say 20lbs, you find you need a few thousand people to carry one stone. You need several thousand ropes for each worker, but again each rope only needs to lift 20 lbs of the whole.
Modern estimates put the number of workers at 10,000. So they just had to carry them.
It’s no wonder they didn’t document it. Lift stone and walk. What’s the big deal?
Slavery: It get shits done.
Moving material gets done via cart, or rolling on top of logs. I had heard various theories for how they got the big bricks up, from rolling up a dirt pile (put into place by, you guessed it.) to building a waterproof chute with the bricks in it on a raft, and just filling the chute with water to make the raft go up.
The pyramids were not built by slaves.
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2010/jan/11/great-pyramid-tombs-slaves-egypt
But we all know the lever was invented by Jayzus Christ in America when Washington and Lincoln were reading the Bible and praying together!
There’s a whole chapter on levers called Leviticus
A couple years ago my chemistry teacher told my class that the Egyptians had really advanced technology (technology even more advanced than our own) thousands of years ago but it all got lost because they started a nuclear war
Edit: she told us that the evidence was that there were smartphone paintings
Sounds like he was sneaking sniffs in the flammable cabinet a little too often.
Pfff I’m sorry but no, it was the cats.
You see cats have powers similar to Telekinesis. Why do you think they choose rivers surrounded by deserts to start the first civilizations. Sandboxes everywhere they please.
But one dark day the Faraó Ramses forgot to refil the food pile because and I quote “but it still had food from yesterday”.
This one mistake doomed humanity to the eternal silence treatment.
(and that’s why his tomb sucked, his was the first that humans actually had to build)
I do really enjoy the theory that the great pyramids are actually industrial reactant chambers.
She must go to some good parties.
“Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world,”
“Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world. ”
- Archimedes
Friendly reminder the Mayans had a highway
Actually I was listening to a podcast that explains this. They didn’t have levers yet. They did have other devices but no lever.
But others have levers
I know how they’re built because I watch Witual. Internal ramp theory babeeee!
The great pyramid of Giza weighs around 6 million tons https://weightofstuff.com/how-much-does-the-pyramid-of-giza-weigh/
An average human can apparently develop about 200N https://www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/ergonomics/push1.html
Meaning that an average human would need a lever about 3×10^8 m long (considering a 1 metre load arm) to move the pyramid.
Do you find this credible?
ETA: some people think I’m serious. This is quite the flabbergast.
Don’t worry I got what you were putting down. People can be very reactionary with their downvotes here, if your joke is too subtle it can fly over their heads.
It made me smirk! For my reference, how many zeros is that (I’m shit at maths but want to try and imagine such a long lever protruding into deep space)?
8 zeros, so 300 000 kms (but I’ve probably messed up somewhere)
WhERe woUlD yUo fINd a TReE tHaT BIg???
That’s almost as far away as the moon! Therefore, the only logical explanation is ALIENS
Take that scientists!
I’m going to go out on a limb and say i don’t think they found the pyramid whole and moved the entire thing. I think they took small pieces, possibly block shaped and moved those one at a time
I would never have thought of that! But I still don’t understand how these satanic Duplo work, so who am I to judge
You’re gonna need a bigger load arm. The pyramid is way more than a meter across.
How much more? One metre, tops?
The ancient Egyptians utilized neither wheels nor work animals for the majority of the pyramid-building era, so the giant blocks, weighing 2.5 tons on average, had to be moved through human muscle power alone. But until recently, nobody really knew how. The answer, it seems, is simply water. Evidence suggests that the blocks were first levered onto wooden sleds and then hauled up ramps made of sand. However, dry sand piles up in front of a moving sled, increasing friction until the sled is nearly impossible to pull. Wet sand reduces friction dramatically beneath the sled runners, eliminating the sand piles and making it possible for a team of people to move massive objects.
https://daily.jstor.org/scientists-have-an-answer-to-how-the-egyptian-pyramids-were-built/
Nah, we all know the Great Pyramids were part of the “Giza Mass Autism Array” fired during the Finno-Korean Hyperwar. RIP Finnish social skills
were part of the “Giza Mass Autism Array”
*will be part of
remember that the Finno-Korean Hyperwar is going to have been the war where we first learn how to manipulate chronodirectionality.
Ancient alien theory is extremely racist and I am shocked people don’t reject it on those grounds alone.
Maybe everyone dislikes humans as much as the aliens
