alt Hacker NewsA 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)
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I have once created a pendant to my friends’ wedding following a similar idea. A silver disk engraved one one side with the position of the planets and major moons at the moment of the ceremony. Fun thing is that the Galilean moons orbit fast enough that you can even read the intended minute. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIpFTPOIP60/
More:
> Due to the precession of the equinoxes (as well as the stars' proper motions), the role of North Star has passed from one star to another in the remote past, and will pass in the remote future. In 3000 BC, the faint star Thuban in the constellation Draco was the North Star, aligning within 0.1° distance from the celestial pole, the closest of any of the visible pole stars.[8][9] However, at magnitude 3.67 (fourth magnitude) it is only one-fifth as bright as Polaris, and today it is invisible in light-polluted urban skies.
> During the 1st millennium BC, Beta Ursae Minoris (Kochab) was the bright star closest to the celestial pole, but it was never close enough to be taken as marking the pole, and the Greek navigator Pytheas in ca. 320 BC described the celestial pole as devoid of stars.[6][10] In the Roman era, the celestial pole was about equally distant between Polaris and Kochab.
I somehow doubt there is any future version of me that regrets joining The Long Now Foundation, and work like this is the main reason why.
If you're in SF you should pay them a visit and buy a coffee at The Interval; I think you'll find it worth the trip.
This is the kind of stuff I love about ancient architecture. It seems they were full of such clever things (or maybe only the few constructions which survived until today).
Its nice to see that some people still care about creating such thoughtful art for modern constructions. It seems that most building of our time are just optimized for fast and efficient construction.
I hope there are many more out there, so that Earth's Graham Hancock of the year 16000 has something to explore on his/her ayahuasca trip.
The precession circle is 144 arc degrees sin 23.5. In an 80 year lifespan precession would move the rotation pole about .44 arc degrees or the diameter of the full moon. Any long lived astronomical observatory in ancient times would have noticed this.
My wife has bought a few of these for significant dates as gifts:
Many Hindus celebrated Malay Sankranti a week ago. It was originally meant to coincide with winter solstice but because the Hindu dates are based on the position of the Sun against the background stars (as viewed from the Earth), precession over the last ~1700 years has driven it out of sync with the tropical calendar.
And to think we're all here building b2b SaaS
> There is an angle for doubt, for sorrow, for hate, for joy, for contemplation, and for devotion.
I’m so intrigued - what was going on inside Hansen's brain?
For a hypothesis concerning the precession of the equinoxes and religious pantheons, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38761574
> Marking in the terrazzo floor of Monument Plaza showing the location of Vega, which will be our North Star in roughly 12,000 years. (Photo by Alexander Rose)
I wonder if some content creator 12K years from now will transport to Earth and stream the North Star from this position for likes/views. If that's even a thing then...
I first heard about this in a Graham Hancock book. Found it a fascinating example of an attempt to encode a date that far distant future generations might understand (provided it survives).
That was an excellent rabbit hole to go down while eating lunch :)
3.82
plein d’impressement: a series of cordialities
Haha, I clicked without reading the URL. Then I read the "01931" in the text, immediately looked at the URL and of course it was longnow.org. Brought a smile to my face.
> Having this one fixed point in the sky is the foundation of all celestial navigation.
Only in the northern hemisphere.
I loved this. I wish I had the ability to do the same innocuous deep dive into a easter egg in code - but I fear it would never be discovered at this rate of which AI is generating similar stuff. But much like this article maybe there's a time and place.
Thanks for this, at one point I tried to google this monument and didn't find much.
>It is likely that at least major portions of the Hoover Dam will still be in place hundreds of thousands of years from now.
Kinda sus of this.
In the extremely interesting book about water, cadillac desert, there is a great discussion with a scholar of some kind, I think an archeologist, about the large western US dams and the future. The gist is that the reservoirs will eventually silt up and disappear, but the dams will remain for thousands of years. The silted lakes will preserve clear evidence of their construction in the geologic record of these regions.
We will quite plausibly be known as the dam builder civilization, as these artifacts could very easily outlast the memory of what we call ourselves. It is fitting to embellish them in this way.
During DEF CON XX, I got bored/overwhelmed (it was not my first year attending) — so I decided to rent a car and visit Hoover Dam (this was before the bypass bridge was completed). I drove through the desert 100mph+, in my own little HST jaunt, searching for nothing but concrete's high water mark.
The statues in OP's article are absolutely beautiful examples of Art Deco / 1930s Americana (my local post office was built then, too, and has eaglettes of similar [but smaller] design). I had no idea they were out there until stumbling upon them, and they definitely leave a lasting impression of our forefather's imposing presence. America, fuck yeah!
Wish I had then-known about this "clock," which is definitely hidden in plain sight. Wish we had similarly-lavish federal budgets, today. But worth visiting, both article, statues & dam.
> construction of the dam began in 01931
Person in far future:
Was that in the original 01931 as in 1931? Or is that the usual truncation of 101931, since most relevant dates are in this decamillennium?
Leading zeros don't do what you think they do; you need look no further than how people say 03 when they mean 2003. A leading zero does not unambiguously say "there are no implied nonzero digits to the left of this zero".
Just, stop.
Or find some other convention, like, say, =1931. The = means, this is an exact value and not some value truncated modulo a power of ten.
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Sounds like it's about the precession of the equinoxes and the new "Age of Aquarius".
But is the star map there? This article seems to imply that it got demolished in 2022: https://www.oskarjwhansen.org/news/save-the-star-map
If so that is somewhat ironic. A message intended to communicate a date to thousands of years into the future got demolished a mere 86 years after its creation due to a drainage issue and a contract dispute.