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'Big Void' Identified in Khufu's Great Pyramid at Giza

bbc.co.uk

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Re: 'Big Void' Identified in Khufu's Great Pyramid at Giza

#11

Post by yodon »

tomkinstinch wrote: post #5

Curious that Luis Alvarez (yes, that Luis Albarez) and his team did not find it in their 1970 exploration using a similar approach[1]. 1. http://lappweb.in2p3.fr/~chefdevi/Work_LAPP/Arche/alvarez_70... Edit: Thanks to jbmouret for pointing out Alvarez studied a different pyramid in the same complex!

Yes, this work is clearly based on the cosmic ray muon detector approach that Nobel prize winner Luis Alvarez developed in the 1970’s, and looks to be a significant effort that would need considerable international support to accomplish, so somebody obviously thinks there is reason to believe Luie’s team missed something.

In addition to the results, I’m very interested to understand what led them to think there might have been something missed in the analysis of the great pyramid of Khufu/Cheops.

Re: 'Big Void' Identified in Khufu's Great Pyramid at Giza

#12

Post by dominotw »

yoodenvranx wrote: post #2

Slightly off-topic but perhaps someone has an answer: After finishing "Dark Forest" / "Death’s End" I somehow ended up with the questions if our way of doing archaeology is actually a good idea. Currently we i) remove a lot of things from the ground / graves / ruins, ii) analyze them, iii) put them in a museum and iv) write books about them. This means that all the knowledge about those artifacts and our history is s…

save them from isis and rebels ? Better in museums than on ebay.

Re: 'Big Void' Identified in Khufu's Great Pyramid at Giza

#13

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

jacobush wrote: post #9
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With launch costs coming down it'll soon be more practical to launch a satellite into orbit that can store this information for a long time.

Never to be found again

Orbits decay, often at a plannable rate. Eventually it crashes back to earth and becomes an archeological relic for future explorers. I bet you could even design the sattelite to burn specatularly (in many colors) on the way down so it's more likely to be seen and sought after.

Re: 'Big Void' Identified in Khufu's Great Pyramid at Giza

#14

Post by f_allwein »

Interesting how the pyramids have been around for 4500 years and we still don't know all about their structure...

Fun fact: there's a Neolithic site in Ireland, Newgrange, that's actually older than the pyramids. Fascinating and worth a visit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newgrange

Re: 'Big Void' Identified in Khufu's Great Pyramid at Giza

#15

Post by krapp »

yoodenvranx wrote: post #2

Slightly off-topic but perhaps someone has an answer: After finishing "Dark Forest" / "Death’s End" I somehow ended up with the questions if our way of doing archaeology is actually a good idea. Currently we i) remove a lot of things from the ground / graves / ruins, ii) analyze them, iii) put them in a museum and iv) write books about them. This means that all the knowledge about those artifacts and our history is s…

Human minds and physical artifacts are still the least fragile and volatile storage medium known. Software requires infrastructure, hardware, regular maintenance and domain knowledge, a brittle chain.

Consider that we still have cuneiform tablets from ancient Babylon, and we can decipher them due to physical and cultural artifacts persisting over generations. But... we have already lost the masters of the Apollo moon landings, and much of the knowledge of how the software written back then will die out when the engineers who worked on them do, because software knowledge isn't passed on generationally the way culture and language are.

It's likely that archaeologists from the year 4017 will be picking through our garbage, rather than our software, and that their ability to accomplish the latter will depend entirely on whether they find a "Rosetta Stone" in the former that lets them reconstruct everything from first principles.

Re: 'Big Void' Identified in Khufu's Great Pyramid at Giza

#16

Post by dredmorbius »

jacobush wrote: post #9
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With launch costs coming down it'll soon be more practical to launch a satellite into orbit that can store this information for a long time.

Never to be found again

Stuff in the middle of a lot of not-stuff is fairly findable.

Particularly if it has a strong signature on radar or microwave imaging.

Re: 'Big Void' Identified in Khufu's Great Pyramid at Giza

#17

Post by maxerickson »

dominotw wrote: post #12
yoodenvranx wrote: post #2

Slightly off-topic but perhaps someone has an answer: After finishing "Dark Forest" / "Death’s End" I somehow ended up with the questions if our way of doing archaeology is actually a good idea. Currently we i) remove a lot of things from the ground / graves / ruins, ii) analyze them, iii) put them in a museum and iv) write books about them. This means that all the knowledge about those artifacts and our history is s…

save them from isis and rebels ? Better in museums than on ebay.

Seems to me that stuff sitting in museums is more vulnerable to such bad actors than stuff sitting under a meter of dirt.

Re: 'Big Void' Identified in Khufu's Great Pyramid at Giza

#18

Post by mc32 »

krapp wrote: post #15
yoodenvranx wrote: post #2

Slightly off-topic but perhaps someone has an answer: After finishing "Dark Forest" / "Death’s End" I somehow ended up with the questions if our way of doing archaeology is actually a good idea. Currently we i) remove a lot of things from the ground / graves / ruins, ii) analyze them, iii) put them in a museum and iv) write books about them. This means that all the knowledge about those artifacts and our history is s…

Human minds and physical artifacts are still the least fragile and volatile storage medium known. Software requires infrastructure, hardware, regular maintenance and domain knowledge, a brittle chain. Consider that we still have cuneiform tablets from ancient Babylon, and we can decipher them due to physical and cultural artifacts persisting over generations. But... we have already lost the masters of the Apollo moon…

For the most part you want to remove access to these artifacts from "graverobbers" who could not care any less about historical or any other value than how much they can get --which is often peanuts compared to their historical value, or what is paid by collectors.

Re: 'Big Void' Identified in Khufu's Great Pyramid at Giza

#19

Post by chrisseaton »

yoodenvranx wrote: post #2

Slightly off-topic but perhaps someone has an answer: After finishing "Dark Forest" / "Death’s End" I somehow ended up with the questions if our way of doing archaeology is actually a good idea. Currently we i) remove a lot of things from the ground / graves / ruins, ii) analyze them, iii) put them in a museum and iv) write books about them. This means that all the knowledge about those artifacts and our history is s…

> Is there any project which strives to preserve our current knowledge about humanity in some sort of long-term storage

...but that's museums books, which you just criticised.

Re: 'Big Void' Identified in Khufu's Great Pyramid at Giza

#20

Post by jbmouret »

tomkinstinch wrote: post #5

Curious that Luis Alvarez (yes, that Luis Albarez) and his team did not find it in their 1970 exploration using a similar approach[1]. 1. http://lappweb.in2p3.fr/~chefdevi/Work_LAPP/Arche/alvarez_70... Edit: Thanks to jbmouret for pointing out Alvarez studied a different pyramid in the same complex!

Alvarez was in a different pyramid (Kephren) and from a single point of view.

Also, the precision of the detectors improved a lot since the sixties (this is the kind of detectors that are used in the LHC, for instance).

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