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.
She must go to some good parties.
Famously impossible thing to detect in historical records: massive amounts of uranium-235.
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, 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.
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.
I probably didn’t have as good an education as the highest educated classes in most ancient Egyptian dynasties.
You’ve cracked vertical lifting, now onto moving blocks a thousand miles from the quarry!
Fig. 1
I stand corrected. It all seems so obvious, why do people still disagree?
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
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
You’re gonna need a bigger load arm. The pyramid is way more than a meter across.
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/
Actually I was listening to a podcast that explains this. They didn’t have levers yet. They did have other devices but no lever.
