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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

#21

Post by Turing_Machine »

Someone wrote: post #17
edgyquant wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

> If you have to manually dig a few hundred meters down to even reach coal

You don't, though.

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

53% of the recoverable coal reserves in the United States can be recovered with surface mining.

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

#22

Post by Turing_Machine »

ceejayoz wrote: post #20
Turing_Machine wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 technolog…

How much readily accessible surface coal is left?

As the reference also says, 53% of it is recoverable by surface mining. Bagger 288 is only notable for being a big shovel. It doesn't do anything that couldn't be done by guys with smaller shovels. 30 meters deep is nothing. The Big Hole in South Africa was dug to 240 meters deep by hand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Hole

Edit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coal_mining

"By 1856, the average depth in the Borinage was 361 meters (1,184 ft), and in 1866, 437 meters (1,434 ft) and some pits had reached down 700 to 900 meters (2,300 to 3,000 ft); one was 1,065 meters (3,494 ft) deep, probably the deepest coal mine in Europe at this time."

Maybe time to take the L and move on?

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

#23

Post by Qwertious »

ceejayoz wrote: post #13
edgyquant wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there, though? Perhaps discovering electricity (I.e. electric generator and motor) inevitably leads to industrialization. We don't know, since we invented both complex water-powered textile machines and steam engines well before we invented electricity, so we don't really know how a complex medieval society would have reacted to it.

Also, if civilization collapses it's still fairly likely that a powerdrill will survive (not necessarily functioning, but intact enough that people will look at it and play with copper spirals). Actually, so will internal combustion engines probably, although that won't do much without the requisite metallurgy.

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

#24

Post by fatherzine »

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…

For the better. The future society will develop technology at a slower pace, and their technology will be naturally constrained by sustainability concerns from the get-go. We've turned 'medieval' into a pejorative during the Enlightenment period (17th, 18th centuries) predominantly for political reasons. Think red vs blue false dichotomy in contemporary politics. From a spiritual, technological and cultural perspective the Medieval age wasn't quite the dark pit of despair its political enemies made it to be. Visit a village e.g. in the French country side, there is something deep inside us that recognizes it as more organically fulfilling than either Industrial towns, or Contemporary sprawls.

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

#25

Post by ceejayoz »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #21
Someone wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

> If you have to manually dig a few hundred meters down to even reach coal You don't, though. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/how-much-coal-is-le... 53% of the recoverable coal reserves in the United States can be recovered with surface mining.

"Surface mining" involves quite a bit of industrial-scale digging. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_surface_mine goes down 1,640 feet from the surface and looks like https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Bannerak....

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

#26

Post by ceejayoz »

Qwertious wrote: post #23
ceejayoz wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is there, though? Perhaps discovering electricity (I.e. electric generator and motor) inevitably leads to industrialization. We don't know, since we invented both complex water-powered textile machines and steam engines well before we invented electricity, so we don't really know how a complex medieval society would have reacted to it. Also, if civilization collapses it's still fairly likely that a powerdrill will su…

> intact enough that people will look at it and play with copper spirals

We've mined out all the easy copper, too.

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

#27

Post by Qwertious »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #19
hotnfresh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Particularly peat, which notably forms in peat bogs at a rate of 1mm per year, on the surface. If society collapses then a millennium later there'll be a metre-thick new layer of the stuff in some areas.

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

#28

Post by ceejayoz »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #22
ceejayoz wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 technolog…

How much readily accessible surface coal is left? As the reference also says, 53% of it is recoverable by surface mining. Bagger 288 is only notable for being a big shovel. It doesn't do anything that couldn't be done by guys with smaller shovels. 30 meters deep is nothing. The Big Hole in South Africa was dug to 240 meters deep by hand . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Hole Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hist…

The mine Bagger 288 services goes sixteen hundred feet deep.

The Big Hole is absolutely miniscule in comparison - 42 acres - and mining for diamonds is a lot more lucrative by volume.

You're not digging out https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Bannerak... by hand.

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

#29

Post by Turing_Machine »

ceejayoz wrote: post #25
Turing_Machine wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you have to manually dig a few hundred meters down to even reach coal You don't, though. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/how-much-coal-is-le... 53% of the recoverable coal reserves in the United States can be recovered with surface mining.

"Surface mining" involves quite a bit of industrial-scale digging. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_surface_mine goes down 1,640 feet from the surface and looks like https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Bannerak... .

As I noted in the other post, the Big Hole in South Africa was dug to a depth of 240 meters by hand.

Coal mines of that depth nothing special, even with 19th Century steam technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coal_mining

"By 1856, the average depth in the Borinage was 361 meters (1,184 ft), and in 1866, 437 meters (1,434 ft) and some pits had reached down 700 to 900 meters (2,300 to 3,000 ft); one was 1,065 meters (3,494 ft) deep, probably the deepest coal mine in Europe at this time."

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

#30

Post by zeteo »

stareatgoats wrote: post #3

This site is one of the building blocs that Graham Hancock uses to paint an alternate prehistory, involving a forgotten antediluvian civilization that was supposedly responsible for transmitting esoteric seeds of civilization to such disparate places as North America, Mesopotamia, Central America, Polynesia, Indonesia and more. He builds on older, fantastical stories about Atlantis, the lost continent of MU and other…

It's not really a pyramid, just an ancient volcanic core where people deposited stones on top of it for long periods of time. There is no indication of architecture, engineering or organized work crews being involved in the construction. It may be the world's largest cairn/tumulus but definitely not the oldest pyramid.
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