New evidence strongly suggests Indonesia's Gunung Padang is oldest known pyramid • Hacker News Board

Re: New evidence strongly suggests Indonesia's Gunung Padang is oldest known pyramid

#41

Post by beenBoutIT » Thu, Nov 09, 2023, 8:15 AM UTC

adastra22 wrote: post #7

beenBoutIT wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any way that someone now can deliberately add a verifiable date to an object/structure/etc.? Something that a million plus years from now would objectively demonstrate the age to a researcher of the future. Considering the strong tendency to disregard old written historical records people of the future will likely face a similar dilemma attempting to accurately date any ruins of our present day buildings.

There's no need. All of our biological waste (e.g. wood) will provide reliable carbon dates within the range of ~50k years. Radioisotope ratios in our metals and construction materials can be used to date our inorganic ruins on geologic time scales. Radioisotope dating doesn't work for stone structures like the one described in this article, because it would date the age of the stone, not the structure. But concrete…

Someone could put hermitically sealed cartridges of something that will decay nicely into a high visibility container that's designed to stay permanently built into the structure itself. Future humans could drill through the solid exterior and retrieve samples of the decaying inner material providing definitive means of precisely dating the structure. Designing it to be used more than once by successive generations would help keep future history more accurate than ancient history.

Re: New evidence strongly suggests Indonesia's Gunung Padang is oldest known pyramid

#42

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft » Thu, Nov 09, 2023, 3:01 PM UTC

7thaccount wrote: post #24

Terretta wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, as noted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38186510 , this is not news. This writeup is covering activity from 2011 - 2015... “The integrated surveys at Gunung Padang were conducted for 3 years, from November 2011 to October 2014...” ... completed so long ago it served as an episode in last year's Netflix documentary “Ancient Apocalypse”, aka “the most dangerous show on Netflix”: https://www.theguardian.…

I think conspiracy stuff is fine on Netflix if presented as entertainment, but I wish they would label it as such in some manner. I'm not sure how one best goes about doing that though outside of hiring some actual anthropologists and archaeologists to do an episode at the end of the series that points out what I assume to be a lengthy list of flaws and assumptions (probably too expensive). I once watched one of the…

> but I wish they would label it as such in some manner.

That might have the opposite effect. If the label is perceived as "being cool", or "presenting stuff they don't want you to know", then some will be more intrigued, more likely to believe it.

Re: New evidence strongly suggests Indonesia's Gunung Padang is oldest known pyramid

#43

Post by adastra22 » Thu, Nov 09, 2023, 5:12 PM UTC

beenBoutIT wrote: post #41

adastra22 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no need. All of our biological waste (e.g. wood) will provide reliable carbon dates within the range of ~50k years. Radioisotope ratios in our metals and construction materials can be used to date our inorganic ruins on geologic time scales. Radioisotope dating doesn't work for stone structures like the one described in this article, because it would date the age of the stone, not the structure. But concrete…

Someone could put hermitically sealed cartridges of something that will decay nicely into a high visibility container that's designed to stay permanently built into the structure itself. Future humans could drill through the solid exterior and retrieve samples of the decaying inner material providing definitive means of precisely dating the structure. Designing it to be used more than once by successive generations w…

Why bother? Radiocarbon dating is only good up to about 50k years. Longer than that and you would use longer lived radioisotopes which are in the construction materials anyway.