alt Hacker NewsNotes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids
Comments
"I personally can't conceive of how one might built this, and I must be a million times smarter than people 4500 years ago, ergo people didn't build this." is how the Ancient Aliens theory always sounds to me.
> People dramatically underestimate what thousands of organized humans can accomplish when they are adequately fed, aggressively supervised, and denied alternative career paths.
Somehow I feel personally attacked.
McSweeney's uses AI to write now?
I was extremely suspicious, and pasted the text into Pangram, said 100% AI generated (and yes, I trust Pangram as they have extremely low rates of false positives).
Reminds me of my career explaining how to build simple webpages without using large abstraction libraries/frameworks for JavaScript.
If aliens built the pyramids they did a pretty shit job. You can see the evolution where they started building a pyramid and realized it would be too high so they changed the angle half-way up. If they had computers and geometry they probably would have gotten it right from the start.
Saying that aliens built them is as likely as claiming magic built them.
Related: Masonry Techniques of the Inca’s Master Builders
https://www.earthasweknowit.com/pages/inca_construction
This article was a fantastic read, and thoroughly debunks a lot of ancient alien style stuff.
I think the more likely explanation is racism. If the pyramids were in Europe, nobody would challenge their human origin but pyramids are in Africa Surely aliens are involved.
one piece of "evidence" some conspiracy believers cite to prove aliens is, roughly: a bunch of places around the world independently all built similar pyramid-like structures (egypt, machu picchu, etc.). so it must be aliens.
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.
Given that Giza pyramid took about 30 years, the internet and AI together took the same amount of time. So then AI is definitely a work of aliens from the far away galaxy.
Egyptians were clever. They had rivers, water and advanced water-management technology.
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.
I think people fall into two distinct camps here: the wildly exploratory, who chase everything from lost civilizations to aliens, and the hyper-rationalists, who refuse to budge from safe, conventional explanations. When it comes to Giza, It may be disingenuous to write all the banter off as either conspiracy or bona fide science. While we understand the general progression of pyramid-building in Egypt, the sheer scale and precision of Giza creates blind spots.
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.
They used kite-sails with rollers, according to Caltech
It would be interesting to know who by Country or Language who believes ETs built the pyramids.
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 wild thing about this is that _we have contemporaneous records of how they were built_. They know the names of architects and managers. There's no mystery to it at all.
I feel like people believe whatever they want and the narrative changes to “can you 105% guarantee aliens didn’t build them?”
I mean even if you could people would still believe whatever they want… must be tiring for sure.
“People dramatically underestimate what thousands of organized humans can accomplish when they are adequately fed, aggressively supervised, and denied alternative career paths.“
> This feels deeply insulting considering humans also created taxation, organized warfare, and raisins.
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 think a lack of curiosity and capacity also play a role in some believing the conspiracies. The information is there. More accessible than ever, yet most out of reach for our brains addicted to instant gratification of doom scrolls and outrageous headlines that we’re blasted with by multibillion dollar attention optimization machines.
Hopefully he gets replaced by AI and is relieved of his torment.
We are literally about to build the next civilization and some still wonder if we can build the Pyramids while it's actually basic for today's technology, people are not on phase, it's scary to see that gap.
I can sympathise and understand why people don't believe this is within human capabilities.
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.
The classic Mcsweeney's for the HN crowd is "E-mail Addresses That Would Be Really Annoying to Give Out Over the Phone"
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/e-mail-addresses-that-wo...