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Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

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Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Egypt is special because of the incredibly dry desert conditions. How many other places are there like Egypt where a tremendous empire existed for thousands of years surrounded by an environment so dry that it could preserve papyrus for 4000+ years?

3 tremendous empires, depending how you count. Egypt, Greece, Rome...

Greece and Rome hardly count. They aren't surrounded by incredibly dry deserts where paper or papyrus would last for 4000 years. Would it even last a year in Italy or Greece? Doubtful.

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#72
post #11
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use coinage and alphabets, transmute rocks into metal, have near-universal literacy, fly through the air like birds, bring the fire of the Sun to Earth to slay our enemies, walk on the Moon, transplant hearts and kidneys from one person to another, and bring forth plentiful harvests within glass temples in frozen wastelands. We craft elephants of iron that swallow us when we wish to travel from one city to another…

All of those things and more are described in ancient texts that we consider mythology. The only thing we can be sure of is that our stuff will leave little more than a trace given enough time. What silly stories they would make [say] after the next ice age? If only we could see, just once more, those 5000 kg African elephants run though the desert pulling a multi ton brick (or the vimanas if that is what they used).…

I suppose that when we have a tradeoff between longevity and literally any other useful feature of an artifact, we generally sacrifice longevity; at a 3% annual discount rate, if you can make a durable good last forever instead of 40 years, the extra NPV is only about 44% (or lower if the scrap value is nonzero), and for a substantial number of things we use an even higher discount rate than 3%. Even so, the remains of our civilization would be impossible to avoid seeing for many millennia if it collapsed. Numerous recognizable artifacts would survive for hundreds of millions of years if humanity died today.

I mentioned that the Burj Khalifa will be gone in a century or two; because it's built in a place with corrosive groundwater, it relies on cathodic protection to prevent corrosion in its foundations, and even its above-ground structure will spall due to the corrosion of the steel frame in a few decades, but the crumbled chunks of concrete will remain visibly artificial for hundreds of millions of years. Similarly no lathes and almost no papyri have survived from Khufu's time, but lathes clearly date back at least to Old Kingdom Egypt, before hieroglyphics, because we have the turned stone vessels they made.

What would be left of our own vimanas 4500 years from now if they are left out to weather? The steel parts will surely be just rust. I suspect that the aluminum and titanium parts, if not "looted" by "treasure hunters", will survive for that period of time with only a logarithmically thicker layer of hard protective oxide. The inconel superalloys of the jet engine gas turbines will not weather, though some lesser stainless steels will cease to be so stainless over such a timespan.

The polymers vary widely: cellulose acetate and most of the elastomers are inherently unstable and will degrade into a nasty goo in only a few decades, while PTFE (teflon), polyimide (kapton), polyethylene, polypropylene, and I think PVDF (kynar) are stable over geological timescales. Other organic polymers are in between; in particular I think the glass-fiber-reinforced epoxy circuit boards will last millennia without difficulty, and though the phenol-formaldehyde thermoset used for single-sided circuit boards is also a thermoset, I suspect it might only last a few centuries. PVC has to be mixed with stabilizers to avoid spontaneous degradation in a matter of years, and I don't know how long those stabilizers will last. Surely the naugahyde business-class seat cushions and the polyurethane seat cushions will become as brittle as a mummy; perhaps they will crumble into dust even without disturbance.

Also stable over geological timescales are the glass in the instrument panel and the hair-fine copper wires of the wiring harness, though those, too, will tend to attract treasure hunters. The silicon chips may not still be operable 4500 years from now (due to Flash decay, dopant diffusion, and tin whiskers) but the microscopic patterns on their surfaces will remain, protected by a thick layer of amorphous quartz. The harsh acids today's treasure hunters use to remove their gold bond wires leave the passivated silicon unharmed.

In the playground of my elementary school, I collected thousands of shards of the painted pots from the lost civilization of the Anasazi. They bore abundant silent witness to the perfection enjoyed by the art of pottery in that ancient civilization before its collapse, even devoid of the ephemeral leavings of soups and seeds they once held, and of course lacking any writing. Many of the timbers of the Anasazi survive aboveground, but few places are dry enough to permit that; but the carpentry Eythra 1 well from 7000 years ago, before the Copper Age, was found to have wedged tenons: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

So I feel safe in asserting that neither the Anasazi nor Khufu's subjects nor the heroes of the Mahabharata knew any art capable of building vimanas. I'm less sure of the settlements predating Jericho and Çatalhöyük: today most of them are under tens of meters of water, and Atlit-Yam seems to have escaped notice for thousands of years despite being in the harbor of Haifa, right in the cradle of civilization. The Antikythera Mechanism survived in a recognizable, if not operable, form, despite two millennia of brine; how many other such paragons of the mechanical art have been lost?

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#73
post #38
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use coinage and alphabets, transmute rocks into metal, have near-universal literacy, fly through the air like birds, bring the fire of the Sun to Earth to slay our enemies, walk on the Moon, transplant hearts and kidneys from one person to another, and bring forth plentiful harvests within glass temples in frozen wastelands. We craft elephants of iron that swallow us when we wish to travel from one city to another…

So basically everything is amazing and nobody is happy

Perhaps happiness is not produced by amazement alone.

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#74
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use coinage and alphabets, transmute rocks into metal, have near-universal literacy, fly through the air like birds, bring the fire of the Sun to Earth to slay our enemies, walk on the Moon, transplant hearts and kidneys from one person to another, and bring forth plentiful harvests within glass temples in frozen wastelands. We craft elephants of iron that swallow us when we wish to travel from one city to another…

Wow this belongs in the comment museum, excellently written and insightful. It reminds me of the The Body Rituals of the Nacirema[1]. I wish more people wrote things like this, it gives a dash of objectivity to how things are. I agree with both you and GP though, in some ways things really haven't changed at all despite these technological changes. If you can't see the constancy too then I don't think you see the big…

Thank you.

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#75
post #8

The nobleman Ankhhaf, mentioned in these texts and described the article as the ostensible project manager of the pyramid at Giza, was the subject of a truly remarkable bust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankhhaf_(sculpture)

Amazing. The fact that this survived is awesome.

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#76

This is so frustrating, they were renovating not building. Anyone who can remotely work with numbers and has seen a building made with rocks should be able to calculate how much time IN THEORY the Great Pyramid needed from foundation to pinnacle. Let's say it's not that number (supposedly 30 years since that's how long that kheope guy reigned), remember you are actually a common person not an archeologist that needs…

Isn't it some sort of cement and the blocks were cast in place?

That's the theory that makes the most sense. I think some of the blocks have lines that show where they seemingly ran out of cement that day and came back and finished it later.

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India How do you know that? Leadership and management are real jobs but there's often existing demand, goals and plans that these people are employed by those around them for. I'm willing to go out on a limb and wager that's the way it always is actually. Everyone's a product of their environment and their times, standing on t…

It's pretty obvious from recent well recorded history that leaders with the necessary skills, motivation and right time/place fitment to actually do world changing things are incredibly rare and when those kind of people do pop up we get world changing events that would have never otherwise happened or if they did would have happened with vastly different details and consequences. The great man way of describing hist…

> but the "somebody else would have done it" crap is even worse

Except for that it is not so much the exception as it is the rule.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India How do you know that? Leadership and management are real jobs but there's often existing demand, goals and plans that these people are employed by those around them for. I'm willing to go out on a limb and wager that's the way it always is actually. Everyone's a product of their environment and their times, standing on t…

It's pretty obvious from recent well recorded history that leaders with the necessary skills, motivation and right time/place fitment to actually do world changing things are incredibly rare and when those kind of people do pop up we get world changing events that would have never otherwise happened or if they did would have happened with vastly different details and consequences. The great man way of describing hist…

I would say it's pretty obvious that the opposite is true: Almost all nation-states, corporations and militaries all march on perfectly fine regaardless of their leadership or management. You find only a few notable exceptions.

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#79
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India How do you know that? Leadership and management are real jobs but there's often existing demand, goals and plans that these people are employed by those around them for. I'm willing to go out on a limb and wager that's the way it always is actually. Everyone's a product of their environment and their times, standing on t…

There are some great recent counterexamples to this. Here are two: when Steve Jobs took the helm of Apple in the early 2000s, and Elon Musk with reusable rockets and rebooting space in general. We seem wired to rally around leaders to get things done. Most people seem to wait around to be told what to do. This makes modern people very uncomfortable (for some very rational reasons) to the point that we engage in denia…

But for the most part CEOs and presidents are replaced regularly with very little effect on the stability of very large and powerful organizations. A handful of debatable counterexamples don't change that it's the majority and the norm. Of course stability and efficiency are much more transparent than disruption.

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3 tremendous empires, depending how you count. Egypt, Greece, Rome...

Greece and Rome hardly count. They aren't surrounded by incredibly dry deserts where paper or papyrus would last for 4000 years. Would it even last a year in Italy or Greece? Doubtful.

I mean both Greece and Rome operated Egypt as a major part of their overall empire. So Egypt was, for hundreds of years, not an Egyptian Empire
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