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Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids

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Re: Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids

#41

Post by dgellow »

alberth wrote: post #27
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #17

"I personally can't conceive of how one might built this, and I must be a million times smarter than people 4500 years ago, ergo people didn't build this." is how the Ancient Aliens theory always sounds to me.

Ancient Aliens conflates two very different ideas. The show’s core argument is that ancient civilizations were more advanced than we give them credit for. That may be true, but “more advanced” does not mean they had superior technology or help from aliens. It can simply mean they had technical knowledge, methods, or craftsmanship that we have since lost or forgotten. Elon Musk has made a similar point about the US sp…

Have we actually forgotten how to land to the moon? That sounds very fishy, I’m pretty skeptical that’s not the case, that was done at a time where we had good records and still have access to them. And it’s close enough to current time that people who worked on it are still alive (not all of course). Coming from musk makes me believe that’s not true, he’s far from a reliable narrator

Re: Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids

#43

Post by irishcoffee »

echelon_musk wrote: post #20
WalterBright wrote: post #4

Saying that aliens built them is as likely as claiming magic built them.

The Testament of Solomon indulges this craziness. > the text describes how Solomon was enabled to build his temple by commanding demons by means of a magical ring that was entrusted to him by the archangel Michael. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testament_of_Solomon

> The Testament of Solomon is a pseudepigraphical composite text ascribed to King Solomon but not regarded as canonical scripture by Jews or Christian groups. It was written in the Greek language, based on precedents dating back to the early 1st millennium AD, but was likely not completed in any meaningful textual sense until sometime in the Middle Ages.

Yeah that’s super reliable…

Re: Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids

#44

Post by applfanboysbgon »

comrade1234 wrote: post #39
thewebguyd wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a ton of people that, for some reason, just can't grok that humans have been largely behaviorally and biologically identical for the past 200k years. The average ancient roman plebeian's life would not look dramatically different from ours today, minus technology of course. They worked a day job, ate at thermopoliums (basically fast food), lived in crowded apartment complexes with various forms of slum lords,…

There are ideas that ancient human thinking was very different and primitive compared to modern. For example (and others): The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes (1976)

In much the same way there are 'ideas' that aliens built pyramids.

Re: Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids

#45

Post by FLHerne »

jrmg wrote: post #15
sscaryterry wrote: post #6

I can sympathise and understand why people don't believe this is within human capabilities. Look at how fractured the government and political systems of the west have become. Humans forget. We've forgotten how to build pyramids, we've forgotten the second world war and the lessons learned.

Modern construction firms would have no problem^ planning and building you a pyramid if you were willing to pay for it. ^ well, maybe some problems like any project, but they would overcome them.

Sure, but no-one on Earth today is willing to pay for a pyramid - or anything like it - even with the convenience of modern construction.

I have a similar feeling looking at the great cathedrals.

These structures took up a huge proportion of the community's money, labour and talent, for decades on end. They're orders of magnitude bigger than any 'normal' building of the time or for centuries later. All with no prospect of any tangible return.

If we set out now to build the largest structure that the limits of our technology allow, designed almost purely as a work of art with little regard to any function, what would that look like? I don't know, no-one's done it for centuries.

The closest thing is the Eiffel Tower. It's a national icon, the wrought-iron equivalent of a pyramid - but it took two years to build, not twenty. What would an Eiffel Tower with 10x the resources look like? And that's more than a century ago.

It's not hard to believe that humans could build these things, but it's occasionally hard to believe that they chose to.

Re: Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids

#46

Post by ceroxylon »

spogbiper wrote: post #10
empath75 wrote: post #5

the wild thing about this is that _we have contemporaneous records of how they were built_. They know the names of architects and managers. There's no mystery to it at all.

the aliens could have planted those records tho

There are no photos of Merer, they were actually extraterrestrial /s

Re: Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids

#47

Post by Avshalom »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #17

"I personally can't conceive of how one might built this, and I must be a million times smarter than people 4500 years ago, ergo people didn't build this." is how the Ancient Aliens theory always sounds to me.

It's more specifically "I personally can't conceive of how one might built this, so non-white people definitely didn't build this"

Re: Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids

#48

Post by crooked-v »

comrade1234 wrote: post #39
thewebguyd wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a ton of people that, for some reason, just can't grok that humans have been largely behaviorally and biologically identical for the past 200k years. The average ancient roman plebeian's life would not look dramatically different from ours today, minus technology of course. They worked a day job, ate at thermopoliums (basically fast food), lived in crowded apartment complexes with various forms of slum lords,…

There are ideas that ancient human thinking was very different and primitive compared to modern. For example (and others): The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes (1976)

That one is an interesting scifi premise, but deeply unpersuasive when it comes to actual humans.

Re: Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids

#49

Post by theturtletalks »

thewebguyd wrote: post #38
alberth wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ancient Aliens conflates two very different ideas. The show’s core argument is that ancient civilizations were more advanced than we give them credit for. That may be true, but “more advanced” does not mean they had superior technology or help from aliens. It can simply mean they had technical knowledge, methods, or craftsmanship that we have since lost or forgotten. Elon Musk has made a similar point about the US sp…

> It means knowledge, systems, expertise, and institutional capability can fade over time This has also been happening since ancient times. Famously, how to make roman concrete was lost after the fall of the empire and Europe did not reinvent high quality concrete until much later in the 18th century. They also lost entire industrial-scale manufacturing pipelines for pottery and had a regression back to crude, hand-s…

This reminds me of Gall’s Law. You cannot create a complex system, you must create a simple system and improve it over time.

The issue arises when you get so many iterations in, you’ve forgotten the process. Any catastrophic event can mean you won’t be able to create the silicon chip or airplanes and so much other technology.

Maybe I’m wrong and people and books do exist that can explain the process and human might would succeed.

Re: Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids

#50

Post by card_zero »

thewebguyd wrote: post #33
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #17

"I personally can't conceive of how one might built this, and I must be a million times smarter than people 4500 years ago, ergo people didn't build this." is how the Ancient Aliens theory always sounds to me.

There's a ton of people that, for some reason, just can't grok that humans have been largely behaviorally and biologically identical for the past 200k years. The average ancient roman plebeian's life would not look dramatically different from ours today, minus technology of course. They worked a day job, ate at thermopoliums (basically fast food), lived in crowded apartment complexes with various forms of slum lords,…

Romans, huh? Many of them were slaves, they believed they could learn the future by looking at the patterns of birds in flight, a Roman's bloodline was very important to the Roman's importance. You can take "behaviorally identical" too far, ideas got better over time, people in the past had bad ideas.
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