When King Edward I, suppressed
the NW of Wales he had four large imposing castles built in a short period of time to dominate the region. Two of them were completed in less than a decade and work on the other two was started. They are still there to this day and are probably the most impressive structures in the region
How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid?
71–80 of 112 posts
Re: How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid?
#72When King Edward I, suppressed the NW of Wales he had four large imposing castles built in a short period of time to dominate the region. Two of them were completed in less than a decade and work on the other two was started. They are still there to this day and are probably the most impressive structures in the region
Re: How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid?
#73This is almost the literal exemplification of the classic "if 1 woman takes 9 months to give birth to a baby, 9 women will do it in a month". The math is interesting and a fun exercise of imagination. But it ignores so much and oversimplifies that it shouldn't really be seen as anything more than "fun". Which is still fine for an article that took no more than 25 minutes of work based on word count and expected typing speed.
Re: How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid?
#74This is very cool to see. The main takeaways for me were: 1. It's easy to underestimate what is possible when you limit thinking to a short timescale. I think of the cathedrals, temples, mosques, etc. that have been built all over the world, where the people who started the work knew they wouldn't live to see it finished, but that didn't dissuade them. Or conversely, it's easy to overestimate the difficulty of someth…
There is a star trek episode where they encounter a civilization which has built a benevolent AI a long time ago and has since lost capabilities to do much more than give commands to the AI. Our society has managed to write down some things like math for example so our knowledge as species won't be lost if mathematicians suddenly died. But it's harder to find permanent storage for the more skills based human activiti…
Even with math, there is much more "unwritten shared knowledge" than usually assumed. The corpus of current mathematics lives much more in the shared understanding of mathematicians than in the pages of articles. Math fields may indeed be lost if they are not actively practiced. There was a beautiful essay on this by Bill Thurston, that I don't have handy at the moment, but should be easy to find.
[EDIT:] maybe this: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/43690/whats-a-mathematici...
Re: How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're correct about the importance of the context in which the expertise exists in. But even so, I think it's clear that with more broad documentation, we are in a better position to pick up the expertise of the past. So in the future, all the wonderful, nutty youtubers that keep alive old arts and give demos would be especially invaluable. Not just in clarifying specific techniques and knowledge, but by dem…
Totally agree with you, with the one caveat that Youtube is not operated with long term accessibility in mind. Videos routinely are removed by their creator, or get taken down for silly reasons. And one day Youtube will disappear as well. Archive the channels you care about - they might otherwise be impossible to find in a few decades, or a few years. Youtube-dl is one of my favorite pieces of software. Digital artef…
> If you publish an ebook on your website and die and no one cares, the probability of anyone discovering it by happenstance 200 years later goes down to 0.
This seems overly pessimistic given the existence of archive.org (they accept donations!).
If archival institutions keep existing and improving their search and accessibility, it seems very possible that random websites will be accessible for a long time to come; 200 years is definitely within the realm of feasibility.
Re: How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid?
#76Now divide total number of blocks by 30 years and you get 1 multi ton block being laid every 9 minutes. The current theories are joke, this numbers don’t add up. Don’t be afraid to challenge the “academic” theories, as you see, there is no math behind them.
I hear you! Combining your results with the scientists' we can only conclude that the Ancient Egyptians had some technology available to them that has been lost to time. Even modern cranes can't do that. Therefore the only other option is aliens!
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Re: How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a star trek episode where they encounter a civilization which has built a benevolent AI a long time ago and has since lost capabilities to do much more than give commands to the AI. Our society has managed to write down some things like math for example so our knowledge as species won't be lost if mathematicians suddenly died. But it's harder to find permanent storage for the more skills based human activiti…
Sometimes writing it down means very little. Like Perelman's Poincaré conjecture solution. It took some of the best mathematicians years to even prove it being correct.
I don't think they proved the correctness, just read it very thoroughly and were convinced by Perelman's reasoning.
Re: How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid?
#78This is very cool to see. The main takeaways for me were: 1. It's easy to underestimate what is possible when you limit thinking to a short timescale. I think of the cathedrals, temples, mosques, etc. that have been built all over the world, where the people who started the work knew they wouldn't live to see it finished, but that didn't dissuade them. Or conversely, it's easy to overestimate the difficulty of someth…
There is a star trek episode where they encounter a civilization which has built a benevolent AI a long time ago and has since lost capabilities to do much more than give commands to the AI. Our society has managed to write down some things like math for example so our knowledge as species won't be lost if mathematicians suddenly died. But it's harder to find permanent storage for the more skills based human activiti…
Which episode is that?
Re: How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid?
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally agree. I was searching for this comment. It's extremely unlikely that a work year was 300 days thousands of years ago. But I don't think the workers had weekends either. So, might be more than 100 days but still should be roughly 3 times than the article shows.
I don't think the workers had weekends either. Weekends didn't exist until the Industrial Revolution, which was ~4300 years after the pyramids were finished.
Isn't the sabbath a "weekend"?
Re: How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid?
#80> we can say with some confidence how many people were required to build it
When someone claims that "by appealing to simple physics" they can say "with confidence" how many people were involved in a construction from almost 5000 years ago I have to doubt anything that follows is more than pure speculation.
The problem is too complex for simple physics to provide any relevant answer. The same simple physics would have us believe 14000 strong men could throw a tiny 1Kg object straight into orbit.