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Oldest Pyramid Found Not in Egypt or Americas, but in Indonesia

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Re: Oldest Pyramid Found Not in Egypt or Americas, but in Indonesia

#11

Post by AStrangeMorrow »

civilitty wrote: post #2

This is the third time an article about this pyramid has made it to the front page in several weeks. It’s almost certainly BS. The authors used the SHCal20 radiocarbon dating calibration curve but tested volcanic soil samples. C14 depleted CO2 and carbonate minerals dissolved in groundwater coming from Mount Gede a few miles away will make the samples look significantly older than they actually are. SHCal20 is meant…

Miniminuteman goes over "10000 year old Indonesian pyramid" too in his 4h or so debunking of Graham Hancock ancient civilization Netflix series (the usual "big archeology doesn't want you to know about this prediluvian ancient Atlantean civilization").

Link to the relevant section of the video of this debunking series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iCIZQX9i1A&list=PLXtMIzD-Y-...

Re: Oldest Pyramid Found Not in Egypt or Americas, but in Indonesia

#12

Post by edgyquant »

civilitty wrote: post #2

This is the third time an article about this pyramid has made it to the front page in several weeks. It’s almost certainly BS. The authors used the SHCal20 radiocarbon dating calibration curve but tested volcanic soil samples. C14 depleted CO2 and carbonate minerals dissolved in groundwater coming from Mount Gede a few miles away will make the samples look significantly older than they actually are. SHCal20 is meant…

It doesn’t sound like carbon dating was the only, or based on their words even the main, method used. The claim to have used stratigraphy as well and say they need follow ups with carbon dating to be certain.

Re: Oldest Pyramid Found Not in Egypt or Americas, but in Indonesia

#13

Post by ceejayoz »

edgyquant wrote: post #9
pavlov wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’ve burned all the easily available fossil fuels though. So there won’t be another Industrial Revolution on the same blueprint as the one we experienced. The next one will be much more difficult. I read somewhere that the Earth now has so much more fungi that substantial new fossil fuel deposits won’t develop even over hundreds of millions of years. If that’s true, we were lucky bastards to have chanced on the only…

This is often repeated but is an opinion and nothing more. There are an untold number of ways to discover the use of electricity

There's a significant difference between discovering electricity and powering a civilization off it.

Re: Oldest Pyramid Found Not in Egypt or Americas, but in Indonesia

#14

Post by AStrangeMorrow »

narrator wrote: post #7

I think one implication of there being ancient advanced societies before 10,000 years ago is that it shows that radical eco-primitivism will never be a viable strategy for dealing with resource depletion. This is because advanced society will always reemerge eventually. We either figure out a way to be sustainable in a high technology fashion now or we try it again in 50,000 years.

As they briefly mention in the article, the dates provided are, to say the least, debated.

Contrary to what they seem to imply the consensus is that the pyramid is much more recent than 10000 years. As a general better be weary of all those "ancient civilization" articles, as they often either fall under bad science, if not straight up conspiracy.

What happened here in short is that they found some organic material dated roughly 10000 years by drilling under the pyramid. Ex: ashes or similar. Instead of concluding that 10000 years ago some humans did a fire here, and that thousands of years later other humans people decided that was a good spot to built a pyramid, they concluded those had to be the same humans. It is like finding Celtic artifacts under the Eiffel tower and concluding it had to be built 2400 years ago

Re: Oldest Pyramid Found Not in Egypt or Americas, but in Indonesia

#16

Post by narrator »

pavlov wrote: post #8
narrator wrote: post #7

I think one implication of there being ancient advanced societies before 10,000 years ago is that it shows that radical eco-primitivism will never be a viable strategy for dealing with resource depletion. This is because advanced society will always reemerge eventually. We either figure out a way to be sustainable in a high technology fashion now or we try it again in 50,000 years.

We’ve burned all the easily available fossil fuels though. So there won’t be another Industrial Revolution on the same blueprint as the one we experienced. The next one will be much more difficult. I read somewhere that the Earth now has so much more fungi that substantial new fossil fuel deposits won’t develop even over hundreds of millions of years. If that’s true, we were lucky bastards to have chanced on the only…

Abiotic oil is a pretty well developed theory. Lab experiments have show that temperature and pressures present in the earths core will form hydrocarbons from carbon and water. There's also all the extensive work by Gold on the deep hot biosphere. Also, the entire atmosphere of Titan is hydrocarbons for example, so it's not like hydrocarbons need life to exist. However, abiotic production is perhaps a few billion barrels of oil globally a year. Not close to enough to sustain our current civilization, but enough to try again in 10 or 20 thousand years.

Re: Oldest Pyramid Found Not in Egypt or Americas, but in Indonesia

#17

Post by Someone »

edgyquant wrote: post #9
pavlov wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’ve burned all the easily available fossil fuels though. So there won’t be another Industrial Revolution on the same blueprint as the one we experienced. The next one will be much more difficult. I read somewhere that the Earth now has so much more fungi that substantial new fossil fuel deposits won’t develop even over hundreds of millions of years. If that’s true, we were lucky bastards to have chanced on the only…

This is often repeated but is an opinion and nothing more. There are an untold number of ways to discover the use of electricity

The problem isn’t how to use lots of energy, but how to produce it.

Before we started using coal as an energy source, wood was a popular source, but that was far from sustainable. See for example the graph in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forestry_in_the_United_Kingdom...

If we had to start from that point again, there still would be lots of coal, but mostly not in places that are as easily accessible as what was there in the 1800s. If you have to manually dig a few hundred meters down to even reach coal, and (likely) wouldn’t even know where to dig, would you even consider starting digging?

Oil and gas similarly would be problematic. There’s very little at or near the surface left.

So, likely, the jump would have to be from wood to wind, solar or nuclear.

That has been shown to be possible for wind (https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/10/wind-powered-facto...), but it will have to be different from what happened in the Industrial Revolution.

Re: Oldest Pyramid Found Not in Egypt or Americas, but in Indonesia

#18

Post by Turing_Machine »

pavlov wrote: post #8
narrator wrote: post #7

I think one implication of there being ancient advanced societies before 10,000 years ago is that it shows that radical eco-primitivism will never be a viable strategy for dealing with resource depletion. This is because advanced society will always reemerge eventually. We either figure out a way to be sustainable in a high technology fashion now or we try it again in 50,000 years.

We’ve burned all the easily available fossil fuels though. So there won’t be another Industrial Revolution on the same blueprint as the one we experienced. The next one will be much more difficult. I read somewhere that the Earth now has so much more fungi that substantial new fossil fuel deposits won’t develop even over hundreds of millions of years. If that’s true, we were lucky bastards to have chanced on the only…

There's still plenty of coal (hundreds of years worth), which is what fueled the original Industrial Revolution.

Petroleum and gas came much later.

Edit: 435 years worth of recoverable coal in the United States alone, of which 53% is recoverable by surface mining.

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/how-much-coal-is-le...

Re: Oldest Pyramid Found Not in Egypt or Americas, but in Indonesia

#19

Post by Turing_Machine »

hotnfresh wrote: post #10
pavlov wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’ve burned all the easily available fossil fuels though. So there won’t be another Industrial Revolution on the same blueprint as the one we experienced. The next one will be much more difficult. I read somewhere that the Earth now has so much more fungi that substantial new fossil fuel deposits won’t develop even over hundreds of millions of years. If that’s true, we were lucky bastards to have chanced on the only…

Yeah, oil and coal in the quantities we found them were the result of a very specific set of physical and biological circumstances for the planet. It’s happened once. There’s a good chance it will never happen again in the remaining 900ish million years that the planet can support large, complex animals.

Oil, yes. Coal, no. There's still plenty of coal, mainly because we switched to burning oil and gas along the way.

Re: Oldest Pyramid Found Not in Egypt or Americas, but in Indonesia

#20

Post by ceejayoz »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #18
pavlov wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’ve burned all the easily available fossil fuels though. So there won’t be another Industrial Revolution on the same blueprint as the one we experienced. The next one will be much more difficult. I read somewhere that the Earth now has so much more fungi that substantial new fossil fuel deposits won’t develop even over hundreds of millions of years. If that’s true, we were lucky bastards to have chanced on the only…

There's still plenty of coal (hundreds of years worth), which is what fueled the original Industrial Revolution. Petroleum and gas came much later. Edit: 435 years worth of recoverable coal in the United States alone, of which 53% is recoverable by surface mining. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/how-much-coal-is-le...

We're doing deep underground mining for coal, mountain-top removal mining, and stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288 ("surface" mining, technically) to get at it even today. How much readily accessible surface coal is left?

Note that your link says "include only the coal that can be mined with today's mining technology". A fresh industrial revolution likely wouldn't start with "today's mining technology".

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