• li10@feddit.ukEnglish
    801·
    11 个月前

    For some reason people seem to think they’re fundamentally smarter than people were back then.

    Yeah, you may have technically had a better education, but you’re not inherently more intelligent than the average person back then, and a genius from that time is still miles ahead of you.

    • fossilesque@mander.xyzOPMEnglish
      256·
      11 个月前

      Yeah, it’s been linked to systemic racist thought patterns (which are often unintentional but should be acknowledged). I explain it to people like this: take a handful of sand and turn your fist so that your palm faces perpendicular to the ground. Now release the sand slowly… What shape does it form? It isn’t rocket science.

      • Blóðbók@slrpnk.netEnglish
        1·
        11 个月前

        I was thinking “three ridges” first 😅 (I imagined the sand running between the four fingers of my semi-closed fist)

      • CaptnNMorgan@reddthat.comEnglish
        05·
        11 个月前

        So you’re saying the pyramids are just giant rocks piled on top of each other?

        If so, then what was dropping them and how could the intricacies inside the pyramids be possible if they were just dropped on top of each other?

        • fossilesque@mander.xyzOPMEnglish
          11·
          11 个月前

          Pyramids = basic engineering shape for a sturdy structure. Wide base, tapered top. A lot of early monumental structures were constructed with that basic concept in mind.

          • CaptnNMorgan@reddthat.comEnglish
            61·
            11 个月前

            I don’t think people have ever been blown away from the shape of them.

            Edit: and it’s actually really silly to think about someone who would be… “Woah! How are those things triangles???” Like what?

    • charlytune@mander.xyzEnglish
      3·
      11 个月前

      I probably didn’t have as good an education as the highest educated classes in most ancient Egyptian dynasties.

  • anzich@feddit.deEnglish
    49·
    11 个月前

    Pretty sure the Egyptians were smart enough. But the European cathedrals cannot be explained w/o aliens

  • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.worldEnglish
    442·
    11 个月前

    Lifting it is like 1/100th of the challenge. Moving it across hundreds of miles, cutting it, getting it to the top of the pyramid, and setting it in place are all bigger problems than simply lifting the stone.

    • psud@aussie.zoneEnglish
      61·
      11 个月前

      Lifting is the hard part, you can move blocks short distances on rollers, long distances on barges, really short distances by a dozen men pushing

    • Olgratin_Magmatoe@startrek.websiteEnglish
      3·
      11 个月前

      Nobody has so far given you a serious answer, so:

      Cutting - They only had IIRC bronze, which is not enough on its own to cut through the granite. However using sand to add friction makes it cut significant faster/easier.

      Moving miles - Boats are incredibly capable of carrying heavy loads with minimal energy expenditure to move said boat. Using logs and levers also goes far.

      Getting to the too of the pyramid, that’s a little more of a mystery. But there is evidence they included ramps within the structure as they built the bigger ones as they went. And IIRC the smaller ones had pulley systems going through the center.

      It doesn’t require fancy tech, just of patience and application of basic physics.

      Here is a guy using some of the basic movement techniques in his backyard with multi ton stones:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ewtm1s02Ih8

    • Stern@lemmy.worldEnglish
      64·
      11 个月前

      Slavery: It get shits done.

      Moving material gets done via cart, or rolling on top of logs. I had heard various theories for how they got the big bricks up, from rolling up a dirt pile (put into place by, you guessed it.) to building a waterproof chute with the bricks in it on a raft, and just filling the chute with water to make the raft go up.

    • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.worldEnglish
      33·
      11 个月前

      If you take the heaviest stone and divide it by a reasonable weight to walk long distances- say 20lbs, you find you need a few thousand people to carry one stone. You need several thousand ropes for each worker, but again each rope only needs to lift 20 lbs of the whole.

      Modern estimates put the number of workers at 10,000. So they just had to carry them.

      It’s no wonder they didn’t document it. Lift stone and walk. What’s the big deal?

  • GBU_28@lemm.eeEnglish
    421·
    11 个月前

    It’s fair to imagine the challenges a building team would face 2k plus years ago.

    Like in this example, building levers that are strong enough to lift the load. I bet they broke a bunch of stuff.

    But eventually they figured it out, via trial and error. Levers, ramps, etc. They probably couldn’t describe why those things were inherently the best way, but more approached from the “we tried 9 other ways and they suck. This is the best way.”

    Next, the phrase “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” is relevant here, but in a backwards way.

    Since we struggle to imagine what it would take for an ancient society to master the techniques to build these things, we therefore begin to grasp for unrealistic conclusions (magic…read…aliens).

    Same goes for Europeans building cathedrals and stuff, the trick is the history, the methods and the results were more documented and understood.

    There are some racism concerns that I think go beyond and around what I’ve discussed, which is more abstract. I’m not discounting the other topics, just not covering them here.

    • IHadTwoCows@lemm.ee
      English
      5·
      11 个月前

      One thing is for sure: you can’t leverage those stones with a primed FJ 1x6 from Lowe’s. I’ll bet they went through quite a few of those!

    • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      41·
      11 个月前

      But imagine the size of the lever. And how would they haul it on top of the pyramid? Wouldn’t we have found traces of a 500m long lever ?

      • peopleproblems@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        11 个月前

        you mean like they lifted the rock from the ground , all the way up in one trip?

        sounds good enough for me. I bet they didn’t, they had the aliens lower it with antigravity technology

  • niktemadur@lemmy.worldEnglish
    352·
    11 个月前

    But we all know the lever was invented by Jayzus Christ in America when Washington and Lincoln were reading the Bible and praying together!

  • RandomVideos@programming.devEnglish
    19·
    11 个月前

    A couple years ago my chemistry teacher told my class that the Egyptians had really advanced technology (technology even more advanced than our own) thousands of years ago but it all got lost because they started a nuclear war

    Edit: she told us that the evidence was that there were smartphone paintings

    • isles@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      11 个月前

      I do really enjoy the theory that the great pyramids are actually industrial reactant chambers.

    • Something_Complex@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      11 个月前

      Pfff I’m sorry but no, it was the cats.

      You see cats have powers similar to Telekinesis. Why do you think they choose rivers surrounded by deserts to start the first civilizations. Sandboxes everywhere they please.

      But one dark day the Faraó Ramses forgot to refil the food pile because and I quote “but it still had food from yesterday”.

      This one mistake doomed humanity to the eternal silence treatment.

      (and that’s why his tomb sucked, his was the first that humans actually had to build)

  • jol@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    181·
    11 个月前

    Actually I was listening to a podcast that explains this. They didn’t have levers yet. They did have other devices but no lever.

  • state_electrician@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    182·
    11 个月前

    The constant barrage of Joe Rogan clips of idiots claming it was impossible to move these huge stones over those distances with the tech at the time was what drove me to disable YouTube shorts.

    • li10@feddit.ukEnglish
      141·
      11 个月前

      You can disable shorts??

      I need to do that. I get stuck in a loop of watching them, and 90% of them just piss me off anyway.

      • BolexForSoup@kbin.social
        7·
        11 个月前

        Honestly, the first and arguably most important step is recognizing how much of online content is specifically designed to get a reaction out of you, primarily in the form pissing you off.

          • BolexForSoup@kbin.social
            1·
            11 个月前

            What’s funny (I guess funny lol) is ever since I got my current job about 2.5 years ago, I no longer need to use social media. I am much, much happier without it. But I still get into little fights on forums and I really wish I didn’t. Every now and then I resolve to be less hostile, and things really do improve, but somehow I always get dragged back into old habits. But I’m a little hesitant to completely abandon things like Kbin because they are often my only window into events/what is going on/my hobbies. Idk what the answer is.

            • paradiso@lemm.eeEnglish
              1·
              11 个月前

              Well, the fact that you have the self awareness to realize is a great place to be. Not sure what to say other than try to treat your body with respect and your mind will follow.

        • NattyNatty2x4@beehaw.orgEnglish
          1·
          11 个月前

          I honestly I’m surprised how much of a problem this is for people. All I’ve done is made sure to hit the “not interested” type buttons on YouTube and tiktok whenever they pop up, and I’ve run into next to nothing after like 3 times of doing that. Sometimes I’ll watch something the algorithm thinks is adjacent to ragebait or alt-right bullshit so it’ll try to feed it to me, and after not-interested’ing the video it goes back to feeding me the stuff I actually want…

          Do people just not use those features or is my experience with the algorithms really that different?

          • BolexForSoup@kbin.social
            3·
            11 个月前

            So you’re actually thinking of it a little more narrowly, which is understandable. What I mean by “content designed to piss you off” is VERY broad.

            Conservatives like Fox News, but it makes them pissed off, right? Social media can be exactly the same way.

  • drolex@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    8·
    11 个月前

    The great pyramid of Giza weighs around 6 million tons https://weightofstuff.com/how-much-does-the-pyramid-of-giza-weigh/

    An average human can apparently develop about 200N https://www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/ergonomics/push1.html

    Meaning that an average human would need a lever about 3×10^8 m long (considering a 1 metre load arm) to move the pyramid.

    Do you find this credible?

    ETA: some people think I’m serious. This is quite the flabbergast.

  • Spendrill@lemm.eeEnglish
    7·
    11 个月前

    “Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world,”

  • Epicurus0319@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    61·
    11 个月前

    Nah, we all know the Great Pyramids were part of the “Giza Mass Autism Array” fired during the Finno-Korean Hyperwar. RIP Finnish social skills

    • Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.eeEnglish
      5·
      11 个月前

      were part of the “Giza Mass Autism Array”

      *will be part of

      remember that the Finno-Korean Hyperwar is going to have been the war where we first learn how to manipulate chronodirectionality.