https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/e-mail-addresses-that-wo...
Oh let me tell you the fun of spelling that one over the phone. He's also not the most patient man in the world either :-)
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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, deal with high rent prices, and roman graffiti is littered with complaints about politicians, sports teams, and the rising cost of living.
With the pyramids, we have the Wadi al-Jarf papyri, a detailed logistics logbook documenting the teams moving the stones for the great pyramids, along side payroll records much like any other spreadsheet you'll find on someone's corporate computer today.
We are not so different from our ancient ancestors at all.
Never read up if that pet theory of mine has any merit, though.
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 space program. We landed on the moon more than 50 years ago, but in some ways we now have to relearn how to do it (because we forgot how). That does not mean we had better technology in the 1960s, and it certainly does not mean aliens were involved. It means knowledge, systems, expertise, and institutional capability can fade over time. And that doesn't mean aliens were involved (as the tvshow would make you believe).
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-shaped pottery.
Turns out we humans have been dealing with the same human problems for hundreds of thousands of years.
Somehow I feel personally attacked.
Like I get it, you’re depressed, but this doesn’t automatically make everyone everywhere that doesn’t believe some random facts “racist”.
[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-white-southerners...
And why is it bad that people feel wonder at places literally called "wonders" and build stories around them? That's universal, not sinister. Egypt is steeped in religion, myth, and all kinds of craziness; most Egyptians don't hold a strictly secular, "logical" view of the world either, and no one calls them "racist" for it. From my time living in Cairo, people attributed most things to Israel and god, lol.
I also don't get tying a whole continent (an arbitrary construct) to a single race. There's no such thing as "the African race."
Weird comment. Hammers and nails, imo.
https://www.earthasweknowit.com/pages/inca_construction
This article was a fantastic read, and thoroughly debunks a lot of ancient alien style stuff.
> 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.
Yeah that’s super reliable…
There are major gaps in all explanations provided and there are a huge array of interesting but unprovable theories. People fill those gaps with whatever is compelling, but really, none are good enough to prove anything definitively and that includes the academic explanations.
It's entirely possible that we may never have the definitive answer for how they were built or even exactly why, and will have to live with the mystery. But humans rarely will accept that conclusion and we would rather invent certainty than put up with open questions.
Personally I expect US would be the leader. The reason is because over the last 50 years there have been lots of shows describing how and why Space Aliens built the pyramids. Some of these shows were well produced.
In the US, it seems we are at the point if a show is based on fantasy, it is believed as fact.
the fact that the easiest way to pile up a bunch of big rocks without it crumbling down is to have a wide base and a narrow top is seemingly forgotten.
Which is an underappreciated part. They didn't only build pyramids, it's just pyramids had a much higher chance of actually surviving the millennia so it looks like early human civilizations were weirdly obsessed with pyramids. You never hear any theories about how aliens built the Colossus of Rhodes, but the pyramids get it because they're still around.
Far more impressive than a pyramid IMO.
The shaduf, which is a hand-operated lever with a bucket, to lift water from rivers and canals for irrigation.
The Nile River annually flooded which was monitored because it determined agricultural success.
As well, the Nile served as a transportation route. Huge stone blocks transported through and evidence suggests that canals and harbours were built near some pyramid complexes to help move materials closer to construction sites.
https://aeraweb.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/aeragram15_1-...
Clever people. Not as advanced as the Romans but they had technology and prospered for a long while.
Offtopic, but why do people hate raisins so much? No other dried fruit gets so much hate.
I would imagine it's something genetic like the reason why some people dislike coriander (which has been shown to be related to genetic sensitivity to aldehydes).
I mean even if you could people would still believe whatever they want… must be tiring for sure.
Well. Not really? Of course a lot of information is available but still there is a lot of open questions.
Just considering the Great Pyramid of Giza: was it built with an external or an internal ramp? What was the purpose of the so called “well shaft”? What was the purpose of the “grand gallery”? What about the “air shafts”? Is the restoration of the so called “great step” in the “grand gallery” historically accurate? What is going on with the “big void” and the “small void” seemingly indicated by the ScanPyramid data? How did those who dug the “robbers tunnel” know how deep the granite plugs are?
My point is that there are enough interesting questions even after one learns “all there is to know”. They are just not in the realm of “aliens?” but much more like “what order were the ramps removed?”
The glyphs of Peru had more to do with the off worlders. Such are how tribesmen “represented” their local identities to the sky peoples.
In ancient times, the Greys did in fact visit primitive tribes peoples. They introduced themselves, chatted for a bit.
The Hopi and other end of the world myths were instigated by these conversations. Without their intervention the world was to be consumed by nuclear fires before 2012.
Is that what we're calling it now?
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.
What exactly has led you to believe this...?
^ well, maybe some problems like any project, but they would overcome them.
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.
Luxor in Vegas is way more complicated than the egyptian pyramids were.
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.
- Luxor in Las Vegas: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Las_Vegas_Luxor_04.j...
- Bass Pro Shop Memphis Pyramid: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Memphis_Pyramid.JPG
- Sunway Pyramid Mall, Malaysia : https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sunway_Pyramid_front...
- Walter Pyramid, Cal State Long Beach: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Csulb-pyr1.jpg
- Muttart Conservatory, Edmonton: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Muttart_Conservatori...
- Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, Kazakhstan: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D0%9C._%D0%90%D1%81...
The Burj Khalifa.
Great pyramid: 5 or 6 million tons
So only around 500 times as much moving material around, feasible I guess. You might need a dedicated rail line built direct to the quarry.
Funny to mention cathedrals considering that they finished one in Spain just recently. There's also Guédelon Castle in France, still being slowly built.
I suppose the Burj Khalifa, the Sky Tree, the Sphere, and the Luxor don't count? Mount Rushmore? The only thing that's changed is that we've gotten more efficient at megaprojects and, I suppose, they've become so common you don't register them as interesting anymore.
If genuine, I'm puzzled. In the current world we have a tremendous amount of people who hold various superstitious beliefs as well as spend tremendous amount of time on their genealogy. And nepotism never went away. I agree those are "bad ideas", but don't see how they differentiate us from people 5k years ago?
I don't think we are meaningfully different at all. The same types and groups of people and social structures all still exist today. I suppose the big difference is those of us who are well adjusted know that racism is not good, and tarot cards are meaningless woo woo. But there were also such skeptics back then too.
So I object to this weird article of faith every time it comes up, we can't have been exactly as sensible and exactly as clever in the past as we are today, it doesn't make any sense to say that. But it's somehow become right-on to say that it's so, as if denying it is a prejudice like timeism or something. It obviously matters to some world view, equality maybe?
Basically I think we have to pick a lane on whether we are talking biology, vs culture, vs knowledge and accumulated data.
But, I'm not saying that humans haven't learned anything, but that cognitively we haven't changed. A roman citizen has the exact same brain capacity to reason and adapt as we do today. There is zero separation from ancient human vs. modern human in that aspect.
You are conflating collective knowledge with individual human intelligence. That roman looking at bird entrails to predict the future was using the exact same pattern-recognition ability we use today to look at data visualizations, or trend graphs.
You could go back in time, steal an ancient roman baby, and raise them in today's year and they would be no different from you or I.
Derek from SmarterEveryDay ran into this when trying to get a product manufactured in the US and shared his experience: https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY?t=1386
"some Apollo program last-minute production-floor manufacturing changes were not written down"
is from
"humans lost fundamental technology needed to land on the moon"?
The hard part of putting humans on the moon and bringing them back safely is not a problem if basic scientific knowlege, it is more an engineering challenge in an incredibly complex and bespoke domain. It is the know how that this component from this manufacturer has this kind of failure rate under these conditions, but when interacting with this other component under these conditions the failure rate is much higher, but that can be mitigated if we apply this kind of technique, but only if the temperature stays within X....
> Landing humans on the Moon by the end of 1969 required the most sudden burst of technological creativity, and the largest commitment of resources ($25 billion; $187 billion in 2024 US dollars)[24] ever made by any nation in peacetime. At its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities.[25]
A large chunk of those industries and supporting academia no longer exist in the US outside the defense sector.
Compared to Roman times, we've had pretty big advances in nutrition, healthcare, education, and widespread middle class wealth. It's not unreasonable to infer that these would have an impact on cognitive ability similar to the effect they've had on life expectancy.
That being said, there's definitely a present-ist bias, as the McSweeney's article does a good job mocking. I do believe their best thinkers were as good as our best thinkers.
And for cognitive ability: plenty of firsthand accounts from Enlightenment thinkers about thesuperior reasoning abilities of average members of hunter-gatherer/American Indian tribes compared to the typical European at the time, and they arguably already had better access to nutrition/education/healthcare.
Cognitive ability is for sure related to some extent to these factors, but actual practice of reasoning (through public debates, leisure time, storytelling) seems to have been much more influential on the actual realisation of cognitive potential, and I'm not sure there'd be a stark difference between a typical human today, or even a typical Westerner, vs a typical Roman citizen.
Life expectancy means at birth commonly. Life expectancy changed because infant and child mortality changed.
Maybe I need to spell this distinction out next time it comes up, which will be the next ancient history thread, probably. I guess the endless repetition of "they were just as smart as we were you know!" is in order to counteract an unstated idea that the ancients were some other species, like orangutans in bronze armor, I don't know. Maybe it's common to vaguely think that about them? But this gratuitous counter-point should be on a strictly genetic basis, or else you'd be accidentally denying that ideas improve.
