As a Stonemason, this shit always bothers me. Recent example was an article on stone henge. “Scientists still mystified as to how the stones were stood so that to caps were level!”
Mfr! Give me a straight piece of wood, a length of string and a rock, I will make you a basic level. Don’t want to lift the stone in and out multiple times to adjust the level? Get logs and cut them to the same length as the upright stones. It’s not fucking rocket surgery!
Trying to picture how you do this with those. Brain is stuck on hanging rock from wood with string which feels like I’m going the wrong way
I swallowed my rock, can I be excused?
Drafting* class taught me that you can build any structure with just a T-square, a compass, a pencil, and some basic math.
*As in the precursor to Computer-Aided Drafting. My school was cheap and didn’t let us use AutoCAD till the 2nd semester.
But anyway, place the straight piece of wood across a gap. One end of the string goes around the middle of the wood, the other end hangs down where you tie the rock. You can visually tell with decent enough accuracy if the rock is hanging closer to one side (not level) or just straight down (level). If you can’t tell, get a longer string.
some basic math.
The pyramids at gizeh predate most of that. They predate algebra by some 800 years.
Of course, despite Pythagoras not being born for some 2000 years, they DID have Rope stretchers to create square angles. They also had square levels and plumb bobs for making straight blocks and level surfaces.
You don’t even need maths, just rope and gravity.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mathematics
“From 3000 BC the Mesopotamian states of Sumer, Akkad and Assyria, followed closely by Ancient Egypt and the Levantine state of Ebla began using arithmetic, algebra and geometry for purposes of taxation, commerce, trade and also in the patterns in nature, the field of astronomy and to record time and formulate calendars.”
The first “true” pyramids were not built until ~2613. Prior to that it was all step pyramids, which are much less complex - just put a bunch of consecutively smaller squares in a stack. Even then, Djoser was started in ~2670, several hundred years after the “introduction” of basic math. Just because we don’t have extant physical mathematical texts surviving from that time doesn’t mean they didn’t know how to do math.
Only idiots listen to Joe rogan
Ok he’s finally triggered me. As an engineer, no. We absolutely can build pyramids. At least technologically. Financing it isn’t happening. But we can build pyramids on the size of the great pyramid without modern technology even. It’s impressive sure, but it’s not like people of the past were idiots, they just had less tools at their disposal, and better tools are great for inventing even better tools.
As you said financing it isn’t happening, but it would be hilarious to quietly build a 1:1 replica on The Moon. Conspiracy Theorists would have aneurisms trying to sort everything out.
You’d need a huge tarp painted to look exactly like your building site, so that it just appears fully built one day.
Less tools and more slave labor.
There’s actually a belief that the pyramids weren’t built by slaves, but rather paid workers during the seasons when fields couldn’t be worked.
In the modern era we’d call it a job program.
Government needs something done, unemployed workers need to be kept busy for social order, and fed so they’re ready when the fields are workable again.There is evidence of a levy based job program, with wages paid in food, not coin, for some pyramids.
So, you know, forced labor.
Also, they would still have used regular slaves, because that’s literally what slaves are for, and the fuckin things were built over a period of a thousand years.
Do you honestly think your “job program” looked the same that entire period?
No? Why so hostile? I’m literally referring to other people who know more than I do on the topic.
Do you have some particular attachment to it being slave labor? I just thought it was an interesting thing that the common conception of how they were built is believed to be incorrect by experts.
My boyfriends grandmother loves to watch shows like ancient aliens and stuff. Normally I just ignore them as background noise, but sometimes I’ll catch something, shake my head and move on.
One time though she was watching the one with William Shatner, unexplained mysteries I think it’s called. And the person Shatner was talking too said “and there is no way we could build the pyramids today” and Shatner just said nodded and then said “why?” The guy mean mugged the shot outta him and they cut to a commercial. When it came back they were talking about something else. Really made me laugh.
But like fr though, bass pro shop built a pyramid, we build crazy skyscrapers and have hundreds of building styles all over the world, I’m sure we could build a pyramid today if we had too.
Checkmate.
Pyramids are the easiest structure to build. You stack rocks. Want them to look nice, cut the rocks into bricks.
fr where does he get the idea that a simple triangle can’t be built with today’s technology
Same place he gets his COVID takes.
It’s like sending people to the moon. Can we do it? Yes. Do we have a reason to? No.
Technically we can’t send people to the moon anymore but that’s not really relevant to whether or not we can build a pyramid because one of them requires special technology and the other requires a general purpose crane
We could send people to the moon, we haven’t lost the knowledge or resources needed. It’s just that it’s no longer a priority. It was incredibly expensive the first time. Although it would be less expensive the second time, this is a case where there’s absolutely no justification for not working from home (i.e. using robots).
we haven’t lost the knowledge or resources needed
Yeah its not that simple. Knowledge is pretty much lost in terms that there is not any easy or practical way to reconstruct for example the computer that navigated the Apollo and assume that this will provide a flawless trip. This hardware is also outdated so it would had been dumb to attempt to reconstruct something so many decades old. Also the code that run there was coded for this specific hardware which makes it unsuitable for modern hardware. So yeah, the knowledge exists in archives but is not really usable as is
I don’t know why you’re talking about Apollo hardware and software. The programmers and engineers who wrote that stuff did it from well known scientific and engineering principles. They didn’t have to start with a previous moon mission. The scientific and engineering principles are even better known today, and we have much more experience for space flight.
The only advantage you’d have with Apollo era stuff is that it has been tested and the bugs are well known. But, so what? Any modern mission to the moon would start from first principles again, not by trying to extend the Apollo stuff.
It’s like the guy hasn’t learned about cranes and construction site elevators
And all you need is lots of money, lots of labor, and some clever engineers, which are all things the ancient Egyptians had in spades.
It’s really not that hard.
Well, it’s very hard, it’s just not impossible.
There was a documentary I saw once where they used the best estimates for how long it took the Great Pyramid and how large the work force was and then scaled it down. Like if it took a work force of X people Y number of years to build the Great Pyramid, then a few dozen guys would be able to build a two storey tall pyramid in two months with the same technology.
So they did that. And despite being inexperienced with the ancient technology and having to figure out how to push these massive stone blocks on rollers and make the corners around a spiral ramp winding around the pyramid, they got their little pyramid done on time. The math all checks out on people being able to build the pyramids provided they had a large enough workforce and enough time to do it.
Yes the Pyramids are impressive but it’s because it took a lot of work over a lot of time to build them. But it required no special technology. Just a lot of dudes pushing heavy blocks on rollers up a ramp over many years.
Meanwhile on YouTube some dude in nowhere America has a set of videos showing how he can lift, rotate, leverage and pivot massive stone blocks and an entire house using stone-age technology… ropes and wooden levers… by himself!
Rogan appeals to people who want to hear that the world revolves around them. They believe and want to confirm that if they haven’t figured it out no one else has. They are literal morons, but too stupid to know it. They are extremely satisfied when Rogan panders to their narcissism.
