A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
The creation of the feature is what made me disable shorts. If I wanted vine then I'd go back to 2013.
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.
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
"Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world,"
ay good one, Archimedes
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.
Famously impossible thing to detect in historical records: massive amounts of uranium-235.
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)
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
Actually I was listening to a podcast that explains this. They didn't have levers yet. They did have other devices but no lever.
I think the lever here is a stand-in for mechanical advantage. I don't believe anyone is seriously proposing they lifted the blocks with a very long stick.
“Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world. ”
I know how they're built because I watch Witual. Internal ramp theory babeeee!
Friendly reminder the Mayans had a highway
The aliens had to come to Earth to learn how to build pyramids from us
Woah
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)?
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
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