my bony fealty posted:

alright can you elaborate im ready for some Egypt truths. I know the pyramids were really built by Joseph for grain storage but what else?

this thread hasn't veered into alternative history/archeology outside the mainstream much but it seems like a decent place for it, with the caveat that it's often utter nonsense mudflood! mud-flood!

blatman posted:

biden doesnt care either way about aliens

they may be small but they have no hair to sniff

munce posted:

Ancient egypt video time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KUDu40BC5o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGtDAHRK8s0

The channel has loads and they're all pretty well done. v interesting.

Fly Ricky posted:

There are too many reasons to list, but I’ll throw out the very basics.

Firstly the idea that Pharaoh Kufu or his reign had anything to do with them is based on a single piece of graffiti. Found in 1837 by the way. Nothing else.

Wheeee posted:

imagine how many Antikythera mechanisms we haven’t found

Good Soldier Svejk posted:

Yeah that one fucks my head in.

I'd love to crack open some of those alien probes and dig into the video archives to see what the gently caress we were actually up to millennia ago

Wheeee posted:

imagine how many Antikythera mechanisms we haven’t found

Barry Foster posted:

Extremely same

I never used to care all that much about history but now I can't get enough of it. The further from my own cultural experience the better - Ancient Egypt, Han China, all the pre-contact American cultures

I just like to try and put myself into a mindset and worldview fundamentally different to my own. Inevitably I'm gonna be incorrect (not that we'll ever know without time machines!) but it's a mental exercise I find stimulating and sometimes honestly flat out intoxicating

The flip side - that I'll never be able to experience life as a Phoenician sailor or a Roman citizen or read Lives of Famous Whores whatever - sucks and is frustrating though. So much lost forever

my bony fealty posted:

Fall of Civilizations podcast is the coolest one ive found for kinda getting in that headspace, does a real neat job at making you think "what would it be like to be a person at this moment in history"

Wheeee posted:

imagine how many Antikythera mechanisms we haven’t found

quote:

In the mid-10th century, for instance, the Italian diplomat Liudprand of Cremona described the ceremonial throne room in the Byzantine emperor’s palace in Constantinople. In a building adjacent to the Great Palace complex, Emperor Constantine VII received foreign guests while seated on a throne flanked by golden lions that ‘gave a dreadful roar with open mouth and quivering tongue’ and switched their tails back and forth. Next to the throne stood a life-sized golden tree, on whose branches perched dozens of gilt birds, each singing the song of its particular species. When Liudprand performed the customary prostration before the emperor, the throne rose up to the ceiling, potentate still perched on top. At length, the emperor returned to earth in a different robe, having effected a costume change during his journey into the rafters.

CRUSTY MINGE posted:

Someone start encapsulating modern tech in resin, so future generations can find it and marvel at old tech in thousands of years.

my bony fealty posted:

Fall of Civilizations podcast is the coolest one ive found for kinda getting in that headspace, does a real neat job at making you think "what would it be like to be a person at this moment in history"

Wheeee posted:

thousands of years from now when people want to see the most advanced technologies of the 20th and early 21st centuries they’ll just hop in a saucer or tic tac shaped spacetime machine and check it out directly

quote:

During my routine morning jog in the woods, I saw four pairs of ducks swimming in a narrow channel. From their dance which looked at times like wrestling, it was apparent that the art of dating is focused on collecting enough information to decide whether to have an offspring with a particular partner. Raising an offspring is a tedious task that benefits from good genetic making as well as exceptional companionship skills. Correspondingly, the ducks selected a partner based on both genetic and behavioral qualities.

This realization hit me close to home. I lead the Galileo Project whose space-research goal is to rendezvous and take a close-up photograph of an interstellar object that might have been manufactured by an extraterrestrial technological civilization. An object of interest must appear and behave differently than known asteroids or comets, resembling the first interstellar object discovered by Pan STARRS in October 2017, `Oumuamua, which is gone by now. `Oumuamua possessed an extreme - most likely flat - shape, and was pushed away from the Sun without showing any sign of outgassing. The resolve to chase a particular object mirrors a dating decision. The Galileo research team must be selective because the space mission could cost a billion dollars. In other words, “To rendezvous or not to rendezvous?” is a billion-dollar question. Similarly to a dater who lost a loved partner, the Galileo Project‘s team will need to collect enough data from remote telescopes to decide whether an object is as unusual as its first love, `Oumuamua, was.

And just as in dates, we should always verify that the partner is not related to our family. In September 2020, Pan STARRS discovered the object 2020 SO, which also exhibited a push away from the Sun without a cometary tail, as `Oumuamua did. This object turned out to be artificial for sure, a rocket booster launched by NASA in 1966 and pushed by the reflection of sunlight from its thin walls.

We should also keep in mind the remote possibility that a technological civilization predated us on Earth. If it existed hundreds of millions of years ago, any of its relics on the ground would have likely been destroyed by now or buried deep underground through geological activity. However, if this early culture launched equipment to space, some of it might still be around and could be detected by the Galileo Project.

But there are those who argue that they would not waste their time or money on the dating scene of the solar system because there is nothing of interest to be found there. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy which reinforces the notion that we are alone for the simple reason that we choose not to engage in the search for others. Of course, we could wait for a partner on a white horse to show up at our front door without any prompting effort on our side. This would constitute the equivalent of waiting for “extraordinary evidence” to show up near Enrico Fermi at Los Alamos in the summer of 1950, when he asked the question:

“where is everybody?” without allocating the billion dollars needed to find the answer in space. Carl Sagan’s standard: “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” should be supplemented by the amendment: “… and extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding.”

Most dating episodes do not end well. But a billion dollars to confirm that a weird object is not extraterrestrial equipment is money well spent. Of course, “experts” who were trained on solar system rocks would insist that any object in space must be natural and is very unlikely to be artificial in origin. The Greek poet Archilochus wrote, "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Asteroids or comets are the one big thing known to solar system experts. Narrow-mindedness will not serve them well in discovering new partners on the dating scene of the solar system. As one of them confessed to me: “`Oumuamua is so weird; I wish it never existed.”

We know from experience that even promising dates do end up in a long-lasting relationship. CERN’s Large Hadron Collider consumed extraordinary funds of about 10 billion dollars without providing extraordinary evidence for supersymmetry. Risk is common practice when exploring the frontiers of science as it is in dating sites. We should be willing to accept risk also in our archaeological search for technological relics in space.

Given this perspective, I will continue to seek the funding required for the Galileo Project. As Marcus Aurelius noted in his Meditations, "The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, in so far as it stands ready against the accidental and the unforeseen, and is not apt to fall.” Discovering `Oumuamua was certainly accidental and unforeseen and admitting that it is an object of a type `never seen before’ required wrestling with some planetary scientists.

There is no better way to close my meditations than with another quote from Aurelius’ Meditations: “Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.” This is indeed the message I received while running in the woods this morning.

munce posted:

Ancient egypt video time

Evidence for Ancient High Technology - Part 1: Machining

Proof of Ancient High Technology at the Serapeum of Saqqara, Egypt. Chapter 1

The channel has loads and they're all pretty well done. v interesting.


edit: added titles

Good Soldier Svejk posted:

Isn't part of what makes us jump to "this had to be ancient advanced technology" the assumption that something was done quickly as we would do it today?
Like, given the timescale for ancient construction was many many lifetimes

like if you gave me a slab and my whole lifetime and my job was to make the slab level and that's it and then my children would work on the slab we'd probably get it pretty good even if I was grinding it flat with sand and a big grinding rock

D-Pad posted:

I said this upthread but it is commonly accepted that the pyramid at Giza was built in 20 years. It has 2.3 million blocks averaging 2.5 tons each. That would require one block every 4 minutes.

I don't even think we could do that today without a serious loving effort. You don't have to believe it was aliens to know the egyptologist views are not all correct.

I would highly suggest anybody interested listen to the Joe Rogan ( I know I know but these are actually great episodes) podcast episodes with Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson (not the ones with Hancock by himself).

Hancock was considered an absolute crank for decades but recently a lot of mainstream archeologists are coming around to things he has been claiming for years. He's certainly not right about everything but those podcasts do a good job of laying out strong evidence that there was a human culture around 12k+ years ago that was as advanced in many ways as Egypt and the various other Mediterranean empires that got wiped out by an impact event around 12k years ago.

There is quite a lot of evidence for the impact event in the geological record and as someone else mentioned Gobekli Teppe, which was only discovered relatively recently, is much much more advanced for its age than is possible with conventional wisdom. They also go over the Sphinx erosion evidence. Very slowly many of his ideas are starting to be accepted. The mindset in academia regarding these subjects is very much like the NDT brain UFO stuff but as more and more evidence is found it's getting harder for them to ignore it.

Harry Potter on Ice posted:

Lol I recommend everyone listen to Joe Rogan to learn about the pyramids

Wheeee posted:

was the excision of all context a deliberate decision in crafting this shitpost, or are you simply illiterate?

Harry Potter on Ice posted:

Listen to joe Rogan to find out!

Wheeee posted:

condolences on your succumbing to mindless identity politics

The Demilich posted:

Forcing me to look up Joe Rogan, how dare you.
I'm going to need an episode number chief, looks like they have a few episodes with both those people and u dying want to waste 3 hours listening to the wrong one.

Azathoth posted:

You shouldn't bite on such an obvious shitpost

Bilirubin posted: