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A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)

longnow.org

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Re: A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)

#111

Post by bergerjac »

aaronstreet wrote: post #109
aaronstreet wrote: post #108

I’m the author of the original posts on https://oskarjwhansen.org and can confirm that the Star Map restoration project finished near the end of 2025. I’d been planning to get an announcement post up this week but saw the HN attention and wanted to put fears to rest.

Also, since y’all seem interested, feel free to AMA.

“It is likely that at least major portions of the Hoover Dam will still be in place hundreds of thousands of years from now.”

From the article itself, the Pyramids are only 12,000 years old. Every other Ancient Wonder has been destroyed.

Essentially there’s a Major Cataclysm about every 10,000 years, and a ‘Minor’ one about every 5000 years (Burkle Crater impact being the most recent).

How do you assume any parts of the Hoover Dam would be intact or even visible “hundreds of thousands of years from now”?

Re: A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)

#112

Post by fc417fc802 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #107
fc417fc802 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider that every culture's predominant method of writing has undergone significant changes over a given millennia long period. I'm not about to confuse the date on a photograph of a wax tablet for a modern one.

Right. But the long now format is a rarity, and doesn't look like it's ever going to become the norm. If someone from the far future stumbles upon it, they may well not know what millennium it comes from. It's just some date in an unknown format.

That's like supposing that I (in the modern day) would stumble upon an ancient sumerian date formatted in a slightly unusual manner (for the time), lack the context to identify the approximate era, but somehow if it had been written without the extra character (or whatever) I would have been able to figure things out.

Either a future archeologist has sufficient context to localize the writing to within plus or minus 5k years or the situation was hopeless to begin with. In all likelihood the latin script itself will be sufficient. In the unlikely event that latin numerals remain in near continuous use for another 100k years the writing system alone would then prove insufficient but hopefully you see my point.

That said, it seems the latin alphabet has been in use for 2700 years and is used by approximately 70% of the global population at this point so I guess if any alphabet is going to survive that far into the future it's one of the top contenders. But even then the scripts and usage conventions have changed drastically since its advent. Do we really expect anyone to be employing anything that even vaguely resembles a present day font face that far into the future?

Re: A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)

#114

Post by IG_Semmelweiss »

gku wrote: post #113

The 26,000-year cycle is also known as the Platonic Year.

is that the time it would require to complete 1 revolution, shown specifically in figure 1 of the article ?

Also - wouldn't the north star(s) (polaris, deneb etc) also move, even if slightly, in that period of time as well ?

Re: A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)

#115

Post by creshal »

sneak wrote: post #37
vedmakk wrote: post #6

This is the kind of stuff I love about ancient architecture. It seems they were full of such clever things (or maybe only the few constructions which survived until today). Its nice to see that some people still care about creating such thoughtful art for modern constructions. It seems that most building of our time are just optimized for fast and efficient construction. I hope there are many more out there, so that…

The buildings then were also optimized for fast and efficient construction. Those buildings are, of course, gone now.

A few pharaos remain only known for being so poor architects that their hastily built temples needed renovations after only 2-3 generations.

Re: A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)

#116

Post by staplung »

The star map comes up at the end of Joan Didion's essay "At the Dam":

""" I walked across the marble star map that traces a sidereal revolution of the equinox and fixes forever, the Reclamation man had told me, for all time and for all people who can read the stars, the date the dam was dedicated. The star map was, he had said, for when we were all gone and the dam was left. I had not though much of it when he said it, but I thought of it then, with the wind whining and the sun dropping behind a mesa with the finality of a sunset in space. Of course that was the image I had seen always, seen it without quite realizing what I saw, a dynamo finally free of man, splendid at last in its absolute isolation, transmitting power and releasing water to a world where no one is.

"""

Re: A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)

#117

Post by staplung »

anentropic wrote: post #102

Could plate tectonics conceivably throw off the alignment of this monument within the ~10ky timescales involved?

Not really. The axis of the earth's rotation is not affected by plate tectonics and the star map is recording where the earth's northern axis is pointing as precession slowly moves it around a circle. The star map could certainly move around or get broken up by plate tectonics over that timescale but it's not really aligned with anything in a meaningful way so that doesn't matter.

The stars themselves will move - relative to us - and eventually some of them will disappear but nothing much is expected on that front for much longer than 10ky timeframes.

Re: A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)

#118

Post by staplung »

I think the most likely end fate of the Hoover dam is that humans dismantle it. Eventually, Lake Mead will silt up enough to make the hydro plant useless (it will take centuries to silt up completely but silt will choke the plant long before that). De-silting the reservoir is not a realistic option.

Hopefully, we'll have alternate means of power generation that nullify the dam's economic viability long before then but water supply and flood mitigation are other functions that need consideration. Silt will eventually destroy those functions as well however.

Re: A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)

#119

Post by aaronstreet »

bergerjac wrote: post #111
aaronstreet wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, since y’all seem interested, feel free to AMA.

“It is likely that at least major portions of the Hoover Dam will still be in place hundreds of thousands of years from now.” From the article itself, the Pyramids are only 12,000 years old. Every other Ancient Wonder has been destroyed. Essentially there’s a Major Cataclysm about every 10,000 years, and a ‘Minor’ one about every 5000 years (Burkle Crater impact being the most recent). How do you assume any parts of…

That quote actually comes from Zander Rose’s Long Now Foundation article, not from me or Oskar Hansen.

Re: A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)

#120

Post by kazinator »

Aloisius wrote: post #63
kazinator wrote: post #22

[flagged]

> Leading zeros don't do what you think they do It's has been pretty normal for clocks with digital displays to include leading zeros for seconds, minutes, hours and/or days for about a century. Doing the same for years, while unusual, doesn't seem particularly confusing. And of course, there is precedent with things like ISO86011 - where 0400 is the year 400 CE. I'm not sure why one would assume it was a truncation…

If it is not reasonable that someone would assume 01931 is a truncation of some figure where some nonzero digits are implied, why is it reasonable that someone would assume that about 1931? (And that adding a 0 fixes it?)

How about this: 1931 is a complete decimal integer requiring no further adornment.

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