Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids

mcsweeneys.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 194 posts

Re: Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids

#151

Post by pseudohadamard »

thewebguyd wrote: post #33
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #17

"I personally can't conceive of how one might built this, and I must be a million times smarter than people 4500 years ago, ergo people didn't build this." is how the Ancient Aliens theory always sounds to me.

There's a ton of people that, for some reason, just can't grok that humans have been largely behaviorally and biologically identical for the past 200k years. The average ancient roman plebeian's life would not look dramatically different from ours today, minus technology of course. They worked a day job, ate at thermopoliums (basically fast food), lived in crowded apartment complexes with various forms of slum lords,…

> With the pyramids, we have the Wadi al-Jarf papyri

Yeah but that was planted by the aliens, who got the idea from God when she was planting all the dinosaur fossils in 4,004 BC.

Re: Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids

#152

Post by marshray »

sscaryterry wrote: post #122
marshray wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone interested in modern humans' ability to move material around when it is economically advantageous to do so, try a web image search for "largest open pit mines".

There is a big difference though between placing blocks precisely, and running dump trucks.

Look up a photo of one of the large mining trucks and compare it to the size of the blocks used in the Egyptian pyramids.

Working with blocks of this size is just not a problem for modern equipment.

Re: Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids

#153

Post by bryanrasmussen »

card_zero wrote: post #77
bjt wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the "steal an ancient roman baby" premise. The "roman citizen" example is not as strong. Cognitive ability is not just genetics. The grown-up roman would be missing a lot of advantages during their upbringing that weren't available back then. Also, limiting it to just "citizens" means limiting it to their upper class. Compared to Roman times, we've had pretty big advances in nutrition, healthcare, educat…

Well no, not even as good. For instance, your comment invokes the idea of prejudice, and the value of being unprejudiced. Did Romans know about that, and consider it important? Maybe, I couldn't say offhand, but my point is that they might not have had some valuable idea like that. I think we can say with certainty that they must have lacked some idea of great value to thinking. That makes the ancients all worse at t…

They certainly understood the value of being unprejudiced, indeed many of the ideas of how to think that permeate Western Civilization came from the Ancient Greek and Roman civilizations.

>I think we can say with certainty that they must have lacked some idea of great value to thinking.

I believe there is one idea that they lacked which is that of the Scientific Method, and perhaps some others that helped ignite the Industrial Revolution.

However

>That makes the ancients all worse at thinking, all of them.

No, that does not follow at all. For that to follow you would have to show that those ideas were more valuable to the process of thinking than all the others that they did have.

Furthermore there has been sufficient argument already put forth here in this thread that their abilities at memorization and rhetoric provided a better ground for thinking than a lot of modern people possess, you would have to show that these ideas they did not possess are of so much greater value that they essentially negate the things in which they show superior skills.

You might suppose that to do this all you would need to do is to point around at the highly technological world we live in, but this would be seem to be a categorical error because we are discussing their ability to think not their technological levels. You could make the argument that the superior technology is the output of the process of thought, but I don't think an HN post will be sufficient to make that argument.

Finally assuming the Scientific Method was so superior an idea that it made the Ancients worse at thinking it would actually only make them worse at thinking than people who reasonably understand and apply the Scientific Method in their daily lives, which one look at the news should tell you is not that many people.

Re: Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids

#154

Post by eesmith »

throw2ih020 wrote: post #98
marshray wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you see how far "some Apollo program last-minute production-floor manufacturing changes were not written down" is from "humans lost fundamental technology needed to land on the moon"?

In aerospace, those are the same statements. Those production floor changes are often the difference between a payload working or failing.

Okay, but dgallow at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48589728 asked "Have we actually forgotten how to land to the moon?", not "can we build a Saturn V rocket which is fundamentally the same as the ones from nearly 60 years ago?"

Reading about the design for the F-1B engine gave me some understanding of the issue.

The F-1B was meant as a modernized version of the Apollo Saturn F-1 main engine.

The original design used extensive hand-welding, and the specific details of how to handle tricky situations likely not included in the manufacturing processes details because it was simply expected from an expert welder of the time.

That sort of expertise is far less common now. But rather than try to find those welders, the designers of the new engine used newer methods like additive manufacturing to replace welding entirely.

The old F-1 engine used a lot of complicated mechanical control methods. The F-1B used computer controls.

The new design had fewer components, was lighter, and was designed for a 15% performance boost over the original design.

So, sure, perhaps we can't exactly build a new Saturn V rocket following the 1969 blueprints, due to missing production floor changes. But we would never try because we are not limited to 1960s building methods if we wanted to use the Saturn V design as the basis for going back to the moon.

Re: Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids

#155

Post by limbicsystem »

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #87
thewebguyd wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a ton of people that, for some reason, just can't grok that humans have been largely behaviorally and biologically identical for the past 200k years. The average ancient roman plebeian's life would not look dramatically different from ours today, minus technology of course. They worked a day job, ate at thermopoliums (basically fast food), lived in crowded apartment complexes with various forms of slum lords,…

It has always been my understanding that if talking about homo sapiens sapiens: then if you could „snatch“ a newborn from 200k years ago and raise it just like any other human baby today, there is nothing in terms of biology etc. that would stop said baby from becoming an engineer, astronaut, formula one race driver, lawyer, programmer, or CEO (or any other modern profession for that matter). Never read up if that pe…

I used to think that as well. This book recently made me think again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_10,000_Year_Explosion

Re: Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids

#156

Post by consumer451 »

thewebguyd wrote: post #33
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #17

"I personally can't conceive of how one might built this, and I must be a million times smarter than people 4500 years ago, ergo people didn't build this." is how the Ancient Aliens theory always sounds to me.

There's a ton of people that, for some reason, just can't grok that humans have been largely behaviorally and biologically identical for the past 200k years. The average ancient roman plebeian's life would not look dramatically different from ours today, minus technology of course. They worked a day job, ate at thermopoliums (basically fast food), lived in crowded apartment complexes with various forms of slum lords,…

There is even a controversial theory that individual human intelligence peaked around 3000 years ago.

> Crabtree bases his argument on the fact that, for more than 99 percent of human evolutionary history, we have lived as hunter-gatherer communities, which has led to big-brained humans. Since the development of agriculture and cities, however, natural selection on our intellect has effectively stopped and mutations have accumulated in the critical intelligence genes.

https://wcuquad.com/101393/news/humans-are-no-longer-as-inte...

Re: Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids

#157

Post by inglor_cz »

bji9jhff wrote: post #92

I think the more likely explanation is racism. If the pyramids were in Europe, nobody would challenge their human origin but pyramids are in Africa Surely aliens are involved.

Maybe you are just really, really determined to find racism in everything? Your claim is wildly wrong; I live in Europe and there is no shortage of kookiness and crackpotry around all the megalithic structures that dot the landscape, down to having actual cults worship them.

This isn't recent either. When Tolkien put the lines about Orthanc and the Stone of Erech looking unearthly into the Lord of the Rings, he reflected on the early Medieval people and their superstitions regarding Roman ruins. "There once was a race of giants that built X" was a common idea, and fanciful medieval authors would invent all sorts of humanoids that weren't human and were responsible for various wonders or evils.

Burial mounds in Ireland (sídh) are linguistically associated with the "fair folk" (aos sí) until today.

Re: Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids

#158

Post by gnoll_of_gozag »

sscaryterry wrote: post #6

I can sympathise and understand why people don't believe this is within human capabilities. Look at how fractured the government and political systems of the west have become. Humans forget. We've forgotten how to build pyramids, we've forgotten the second world war and the lessons learned.

theres a huge pyramid right now in memphis tenessee??

Re: Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids

#159

Post by gnoll_of_gozag »

jmclnx wrote: post #113

It would be interesting to know who by Country or Language who believes ETs built the pyramids. Personally I expect US would be the leader. The reason is because over the last 50 years there have been lots of shows describing how and why Space Aliens built the pyramids. Some of these shows were well produced. In the US, it seems we are at the point if a show is based on fantasy, it is believed as fact.

id say theres more here on the balkans
Post reply on HN