Westall incident

[Cyber]

Nan Madol didn't use large pieces of rock. It's made of columnar basalt, which was available on Pohnpei:
List of places with columnar jointed volcanics - Wikipedia

It's impressive for the scale of the construction, but not for the scale of the components.

Keep in mind archaeologists claim locals used canoes to carry up to 90 tonne
Nan Madol Ruins – Pohnpei Eco-Adventure Guide
And how did they erect such massive stones in elevated positions? again coconut fibre is a rather lazy method to explain this away
Gunung Padang is a pyramid in Indonesia could date back 20,000–25,000 years
Gunung Padang - Wikipedia
The site is composed of up to 50,000 hexagonal columnar basalt blocks, some of which weigh around 650 pounds ( 0.3 tonnes) and others as much as 880 pounds (0.4space 0.4 tonnes).
25,000 yrs ago how do you mobilize hunter gatherers who spend the whole day to hunt food to work day and night to create an engineering masterpiece?

 

[Cyber]

I saw a video a few weeks ago that claimed there was a branch of the Nile that ran close to Giza, which would explain why they were built there. And they were capable of building canals to connect to/from the river and quarries and building sites.

There's still discussion about the finer details of how they got the materials up the larger pyramids, but that's about efficiency. It clearly wasn't magic.

Ask yourself what's the heaviest stone you could carry on a wooden raft? I know archaeologists claim up to 90 tonnes, but has this been demonstrated using a replica ancient barge? answer - no. And even then what about 1000 tonne obelisks?. I'm sorry but archaeologists also engage in far fetched speculation too.

 

[Hypnalis]

Ask yourself what's the heaviest stone you could carry on a wooden raft? I know archaeologists claim up to 90 tonnes, but has this been demonstrated using a replica ancient barge? answer - no. And even then what about 1000 tonne obelisks?. I'm sorry but archaeologists also engage in far fetched speculation too.

There's a 331 tonne obelisk in St Peter's Square that was brought to Rome in 37 CE on low-tech wooden ships.
Nobody thinks there's anything strange about that, because there are records of ancient Romans doing many things on that scale.

Building large river barges is much easier then building large sea-going ships, because they don't have to deal with waves. The don't need deep keels, nor do the sides need large curved ribs like a sailing ship.

And while 100 tonnes is a lot to lift vertically, it's not that much to move on water. Barges for a 100 tonne rectangular block probably wouldn't need to be longer than 30 meters.
There's a record of an Egyptian one from 1500 BC here:
List of longest wooden ships - Wikipedia
but the upper end of that (95 meters) is big for a simply constructed barge.

A 1000 tonne single-piece Obelisk would be a challenge for low-tech societies, even a well-organized one like ancient Egypt.
Wikipedia says there's an unfinished one that big still in the quarry. It's more than twice the original weight of the next largest one. They may have believed they could move it, but they never proved it

Or the construction guys might have been told by a Pharaoh to make him an even bigger one, and got started even if they knew it would be too heavy. They could probably make a reasonable estimate of the weight. But back then it might have been difficult to explain the consequences of making one that big without being executed /lol.

Given that they stopped, it's even possible they got started, then someone who could count came along and explained that they'd have trouble moving it using their existing infrastructure.

 

[Hypnalis]

25,000 yrs ago how do you mobilize hunter gatherers who spend the whole day to hunt food to work day and night to create an engineering masterpiece?

AFAIK nothing on that scale was ever made by hunter-gatherers, nor has anything like that been dated to 25K years ago. This place is interesting:
Göbekli Tepe - Wikipedia
(about 12K years old)

* The Egyptians were building quite big things 5000+ years ago, but they were already well organized then.
* Gunung Padang has been dated to Roman times (**)
* Nan Madol was started in Viking times (**)
(**) Those two were built at a lower tech level than the comparisons (Roman, Viking) OFC. But much of the world was well past simple hunter-gather societies by then.

Note that columnar basalt is a very convenient building material, ideal for moderately organized low-tech societies.
There's no need for large-scale stone shaping because its natural cross-section is hexagonal, with nice flat sides.

Any group with easy access to a source if it would use it for construction, starting with simple structures (dwellings, storage, etc), and scale up as they developed skills and techniques.

People always take advantage of available, exploitable resources. It would be unnatural if they didn't.

And how did they erect such massive stones in elevated positions? again coconut fibre is a rather lazy method to explain this away

You're underestimating the quality of coir rope, and possibly the ease with which it can be made.

And perhaps missing something equally important: rope is extremely scalable, because it's easy to share a large load across many separate ropes. Coir rope was use for rigging in medium-tech wooden ships for centuries (this is an indication of reliability and strength vs size).

The site is composed of up to 50,000 hexagonal columnar basalt blocks, some of which weigh around 650 pounds ( 0.3 tonnes) and others as much as 880 pounds (0.4space 0.4 tonnes).

Given access to wood and stone axes (or better) to shape it, raising columnar stones at these weights would be easy, and while good rope would be handy (and they probably had access to it), it wouldn't be necessary.

Not by building a crane of course: You lift them with levers.

Get a 3-meter-long lever under one end (dig a small hole for the first lift, lift it 20 cm or so, and put a block under it. Do the same at the other end.
Repeat.
A gang of 4 guys could do this at a few minutes per vertical meter.

Pieces of the right kind of wood the size of railway sleepers are easily enough to hold up a multi-tonne object, and you can build the supports quite high.
Modern jacks are easier of course, but wood is actually a great material for the supports.

I've done this (as past of a project that lifted and moved a building about the weight of a 3/4 bedroom house).
We used modern lifting and horizontal jacks of course, but the supports were actual old railway sleepers.
We lifted it high enough to get a suitable truck underneath it for transport, so perhaps 1.5 meters.

The building was somewhere between 5 and 20 tonnes (we needed to know to get a big enough truck, but it was a very long time ago and I've forgotten - probably low double-digits).

This is why I don't see 1- or 2-tonne objects as being difficult for low-tech societies, and a few 10's of tonnes as being possible if they can get a fairly big work gang together.

Up in the hundreds of tonnes, you'd need a lot of prep and organization.

IMO 1000+ tonnes would be possible, but very difficult even for the Romans (who had metal tools, and were very well organized).

For example, at 1000 tonnes, even raising the object vertically a meter or two with a more sophisticated and scaled-up version of the leverage approach I described would be very difficult.

OFC you can lift and move really big objects by e.g. building a boat around them, constructing a big enough pool, connecting it to a canal/river, and floating the whole system.

But you'd definitely prefer to do the same thing with ten conveniently sized modules rather than one huge object.
Big stone pillars were made that way, and some have stood for thousands of years.

 

[Cyber]

There's a 331 tonne obelisk in St Peter's Square that was brought to Rome in 37 CE on low-tech wooden ships.
Nobody thinks there's anything strange about that, because there are records of ancient Romans doing many things on that scale.

Yes, if Caligula was able to bring it to Rome in 37CE then why not the Egyptians right? Problem is this is based on stories about 900 men working day and night with ropes and pulleys and 3 x giant ships both of which were sunk in Rome's harbour. Ships were described as "giant" purpose built for this one exercise and never repeated before or again. Is it possible Caligula made this up?

 

[Jonn]

It is plausible alien abductions are a form of secret human experimentation.

IMO, it is more than plausible:
MK-ULTRA is a proven American and Canadian transgression against human decency, period.
Freedom of information will give you hard facts about that.

Some argue that MK-ULTRA was not illegal, and yet the government agencies frantically destroyed almost all evidence of their nefarious and "ungodly" experimentation on innocent, ordinary citizens across the world.

Investigative efforts were hampered by CIA director Richard Helms's order that all MKUltra files be destroyed in 1973; the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission investigations relied on the sworn testimony of direct participants and on the small number of documents that survived Helms's order.<a href="MKUltra - Wikipedia"><span></span></a>

Take a look at Wiki says:

MKUltra<a href="MKUltra - Wikipedia"><span>[</span>a<span>]</span></a> was an illegal human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used in altering human behavior.

Project MKUltra began in 1953 and was halted in 1973. MKUltra used numerous methods to manipulate its subjects' mental states and brain functions, such as the covert administration of high doses of psychoactive drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals without the subjects' consent. Additionally, other methods beyond chemical compounds were used, including electroshocks,> hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, and other forms of torture.

Consider:
The NAZI mind control experiments.
They were also sanctioned by the Nazi government of the time, yet you would be hard-pressed to find modern-day citizens considering them anything other than reprehensible and morally corrupt.
Are these the standards that anyone these days is willing to support?
Of course not.

FYI:
Are you aware of: "Project Paperclip"?

Project Paperclip was not given carte blanche. Experts selected by the program had to be screened by the JIOA, and, according to official policy, anyone who had been more than a nominal member of the Nazi Party was to be excluded. The ethical and moral concerns of the project were immediately obvious to many within the U.S. government.

What is quoted in bold above is absolute crap.
It may have been "official Policy", but it wasn't adhered to, as can be seen through the creation of the MK-Ultra Program.

experimentation directly on humans is severely limited due to most countries being international signatories to ethical and moral frameworks involving human and animal experimentation. So I would not be surprised if people are being abducted and it's now camouflaged, covertly as "aliens".

You should be more than "not surprised".
The evidence is looking directly in your face.

This is how the real world works, Neo.
Take the red or the blue pill.
The choice is yours.

Morpheus out.

 

[Cyber]

Get a 3-meter-long lever under one end (dig a small hole for the first lift, lift it 20 cm or so, and put a block under it. Do the same at the other end.
Repeat.
A gang of 4 guys could do this at a few minutes per vertical meter.

Ok so it might be possible to come up with low tech solutions (I'm not an engineer) using our 21st century brains. However in ancient times it's also a question of mobilisation of men and resources to tackle an overwhelming building problem. the further back in time you go (Gobleke tepe or Gunung Padam) the harder it is to understand the motivation. Also can you create complex constructions without understanding mathematics and engineering rather than trial and error? remember in Gobleke tepe (for example) the builders were hunter gatherers. would they really have had time to sit around a communal fire after a tough day of hunting and come up with complex calculus and division of labour?

Going back to ancient Egypt, transportation and construction is only one dilemma. You also have cutting. Here's where it gets interesting. According to conventional archaeology stone tools were used to pound both monuments and artifacts into exquisite highly symmetrical works of art. Problem is nobody can replicate the cutting executed without modern lathes, power tools, 3D printers or lasers.

Not suggesting they needed aliens but ancient people managed to create works of building and art that certainly need more careful examination.

 

[Jonn]

I just came across this video.
Part of the content is relevant to this discussion about faking up UFO propaganda.

MSN

I will add some screen dumps here:

 

[Cyber]

^^^ Yeah but aren't these select few Rogan brings on professional grifters who he knows bring in clicks.
there's astronomy professors from Harvard
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/the-scientific-revolution-of-interstellar-objects-b8d9278bc05f
Psychiatry professors from Harvard
NOVA Online/Kidnapped by UFOs/John Mack
Medical professors from Stanford
Interview - Dr. Garry Nolan — M E R G E D
astronomy professors from Stockholm and Vanderbilt Universities
Unexpected patterns in historical astronomical observations - Stockholm University
All of whom say the same thing - Something unknown is here

 

[Jonn]

"The Great Pyramid is literally impossible."
Therefore, the construction must have involved aliens.

 

[Cyber]

"The Great Pyramid is literally impossible."
Therefore, the construction must have involved aliens.

AI?

 

[Hypnalis]

AI?

Parts of the video are.

But the ideas aren't - it's standard "pyramidiot" content.

There are actually still genuine questions about how they built it efficiently to that scale. Videos about that are often interesting, and they seem to be getting closer and closer to solid answers.

This guy is cool:
Wally Wallington - Wikipedia
He demonstrates interesting low tech ways to work with large, heavy objects. For example AFAIK he independently (re)discovered the trick for "rolling" square-section objects using tracks like the one I think I linked for bicycles with square wheels.
Here's one example video (only 2:19 long):

I also like the "internal ramp" theory (there's at least one video on YouTube).
BTW I'm not claiming these ideas match what the pyramid builders actually did, but they're realistic and interesting.

Here's another video from Wallington. It shows horizontal "block rolling" at 19:40.
Some of the other techniques are equally clever.

 

[Cyber]

BTW I'm not claiming these ideas match what the pyramid builders actually did, but they're realistic and interesting.

Here's another video from Wallington. It shows horizontal "block rolling" at 19:40.
Some of the other techniques are equally clever.

Are those rollers? looks like 2025 projection with a measure of hindsight. Problem with this idea is if ancient Egyptians were smart to understand rollers can function for both load bearing and transport then why is it the only frescos from the old kingdom show Egyptians dragging huge blocks using wet sand?

 

[Hypnalis]

Not rollers. It's just a cleverly shaped surface. It's the same trick as the video showing the square-wheeled bicycle on its special track..

Reminder: I'm not claiming they used this technique - only that (a) it works, and (b) it's low-tech an easy to build.
:
:
In the video, the surface the block rolls on is curved so as to make the contact point between the block and the "road" a constant distance from the center of the block.

A constant distance from the center of the object to the supporting surface is the actual condition for rolling.
We don't have to consider it normally because a flat surface and a round wheel or a cylinder do it naturally.

It's clever, but the Ancient Egyptians were just as clever as modern humans.

Once someone got the idea, they could figure out the curves quickly by experimenting.
:
:
One way to get the idea would be to try "rolling" a single smallish block over a single wooden cylinder.
They must have used rollers for some parts of moving large objects, so they'd have been experienced with wooden cylinders. The idea of using one as a fulcrum would have come up soon enough.
:
Another possibility for stumbling on Wallington's technique could have com from building "roads" by laying wooden cylinders on sand. That would work ok for dragging sleds (way better than sand).

I've seen walkways made in swampy terrain that way IRL. It works well in (some parts of) a swamp to make tracks for people, but not for anything heavy.
On sand I could see it working well for "single-digit" multi-tonne loads. A bit maintenance-heavy I suppose, but cheap to build.

 

[Outdated]

Reminder: I'm not claiming they used this technique - only that (a) it works, and (b) it's low-tech an easy to build.

Great ideas but a lack of native timber makes it unlikely. What trees they had were scrubby and stunted by climate and they imported timber for boat building. So although they had access to timber it wasn't a cheap and readily available commodity.

That doesn't discount the theories but it's unlikely timber was used very much except where absolutely necessary.

 

[Jonn]

AI?

Who really knows, these days?
A.I. has destroyed the internet, imo, hence the importance of developing critical thinking skills.

But as Hypnalis suggested, the underlying message may be sound.

 

[Outdated]

A.I. has destroyed the internet, imo, hence the importance of developing critical thinking skills.

More and more people are agreeing with that statement, me included.

How would your social feed look if you controlled what you saw?

 

[Cyber]

One way to get the idea would be to try "rolling" a single smallish block over a single wooden cylinder.
They must have used rollers for some parts of moving large objects, so they'd have been experienced with wooden cylinders. The idea of using one as a fulcrum would have come up soon enough.
:
Another possibility for stumbling on Wallington's technique could have com from building "roads" by laying wooden cylinders on sand. That would work ok for dragging sleds (way better than sand).

I've seen walkways made in swampy terrain that way IRL. It works well in (some parts of) a swamp to make tracks for people, but not for anything heavy.
On sand I could see it working well for "single-digit" multi-tonne loads. A bit maintenance-heavy I suppose, but cheap to build.

My problem is the Egyptians themselves only document one method over several thousand years, a wooden sled, rope and manpower to drag megaliths up to 1000 tonnes, One estimate is the great pyramid took 40 years non-stop day and night with thousands of workers. Such an enterprise would have absorbed the entire Nile valley. Yet, no records, drawings or monuments or tools were left about these gargantuan building projects? worse the most prominent figure in entire Egypt is the sphinx has a a out of scale head too small for the lion's body. A people obsessed perfect symmetry using perfectly cut granite and rose quartz could produce something as clumsy as the sphinxes head screams cultural appropriation from a later dynasty (perhaps Khafre himself).

 

[Hypnalis]

Great ideas but a lack of native timber makes it unlikely. What trees they had were scrubby and stunted by climate and they imported timber for boat building. So although they had access to timber it wasn't a cheap and readily available commodity.

That doesn't discount the theories but it's unlikely timber was used very much except where absolutely necessary.

A quick search didn't turn up any data in the climate and environment 4500 years ago, so I can't make any guesstimates. But they certainly had access to reasonable quantities of wood: AFAIK there's no other way to lift or move heavy objects at that tech level than wooden construction.

They were a local superpower at the time, so if trading medium/large objects like heavy timber was possible, they were doing it. And there were big forests within trading distance (most gone now OFC).

There's no data to suggest Wallington's technique was used OFC.

But that's not the point. Any discussion of Pyramid construction has a "human ingenuity vs magic" element because of the scale. The pro-magic side says "too big".
Everyone else says: they had the manpower and the tech, and they were crazy enough to use over 10 000 people for 25 years (part-time IIRC). They used enough manpower to build a small city (by our standards - by theirs it would be a metropolis.
I'm on the side of "human ingenuity and craziness" OFC (and I suspect you are too

Certainly with that level of extravagance, and that many people, I'm not prepared to write off anything that was definitely possible, such as importing wood on a fairly large scale, or building waterways to move heavy stuff.

BTW - you can lift quite heavy objects with water. Not to the top of the pyramids, but the blocks at the top are relatively small: (500 kg nearer to the top, so small enough to be handled by a moderately well organized gang of 10 people with low tech tools.

There are blocks weighing 25 000 kg lower down which can't have been handled that way.

But if it was me (personal theory of a lazy person I'd lift the big bocks with water, using something like a series of locks, lifting the water itself with e.g. "Archimedes' screws" (if they had them **) or just a lot of people with buckets. Slow but steady, and the limits for lifting are way higher than times hoists and ramps. Step-wise vertical lifting of a few tens of meters in total would be possible (though not in one step - the hydraulic pressure would be a real issue).

But the whole thing is only 150 meters, so they could have used this approach for perhaps the first 50 meters of vertical height. You'd also go up a bit extra to the blocks could be slid downwards towards their final position.

You'd need moderately large-scale stone construction, but they were good at that, and it would be much smaller than a huge ramp - those blocks are heavy, but not that big compared to e.g. a (UK) narrowboat.

BTW I've never seen this elsewhere, but there's no way I'm the only person to have considered it. There are probably 10+ books written by pyramidiots on the subject.

(**)
If they had Archimedes screws in 2600 BC, he didn't invent them (lived 2500 years later). But moving 25-tonne objects can't have been easy for them by other means. And there are other ways to move water - even using buckets (manually, bucket line, slider system) might have been simpler.

 

[Outdated]

But moving 25-tonne objects can't have been easy for them by other means. And there are other ways to move water - even using buckets (manually, bucket line, slider system) might have been simpler.

There's so many different ways to move heavy objects it's not funny.

Egyptians didn't have the tools for this but it's an interesting concept, I once helped move a 3.5 ton printing machine in to a print shop. The ceiling was too low to allow us to put any sort of wheels under the machine so we had to move it by hand, it took 6 of us with crow bars working in unison less than a few minutes to walk that machine 30 metres.

Wedge the bent end of the crow bar under a part of the machine, press down on the crow bar to lift the machine a fraction, then move the crow bar sideways to make the machine step forward. It took us the first few steps to get organised but after that it was almost effortless and the motion was fairly smooth. To us on the crow bars the motion was very similar to rowing a boat and a slow walking pace was easily maintained. Accurate positioning of the machine this way was also very easy.