As a Stonemason, this shit always bothers me. Recent example was an article on stone henge. “Scientists still mystified as to how the stones were stood so that to caps were level!”
Mfr! Give me a straight piece of wood, a length of string and a rock, I will make you a basic level. Don’t want to lift the stone in and out multiple times to adjust the level? Get logs and cut them to the same length as the upright stones. It’s not fucking rocket surgery!
Trying to picture how you do this with those. Brain is stuck on hanging rock from wood with string which feels like I’m going the wrong way
I swallowed my rock, can I be excused?
Drafting* class taught me that you can build any structure with just a T-square, a compass, a pencil, and some basic math.
*As in the precursor to Computer-Aided Drafting. My school was cheap and didn’t let us use AutoCAD till the 2nd semester.
But anyway, place the straight piece of wood across a gap. One end of the string goes around the middle of the wood, the other end hangs down where you tie the rock. You can visually tell with decent enough accuracy if the rock is hanging closer to one side (not level) or just straight down (level). If you can’t tell, get a longer string.
some basic math.
The pyramids at gizeh predate most of that. They predate algebra by some 800 years.
Of course, despite Pythagoras not being born for some 2000 years, they DID have Rope stretchers to create square angles. They also had square levels and plumb bobs for making straight blocks and level surfaces.
You don’t even need maths, just rope and gravity.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mathematics
“From 3000 BC the Mesopotamian states of Sumer, Akkad and Assyria, followed closely by Ancient Egypt and the Levantine state of Ebla began using arithmetic, algebra and geometry for purposes of taxation, commerce, trade and also in the patterns in nature, the field of astronomy and to record time and formulate calendars.”
The first “true” pyramids were not built until ~2613. Prior to that it was all step pyramids, which are much less complex - just put a bunch of consecutively smaller squares in a stack. Even then, Djoser was started in ~2670, several hundred years after the “introduction” of basic math. Just because we don’t have extant physical mathematical texts surviving from that time doesn’t mean they didn’t know how to do math.
Only idiots listen to Joe rogan
Ok he’s finally triggered me. As an engineer, no. We absolutely can build pyramids. At least technologically. Financing it isn’t happening. But we can build pyramids on the size of the great pyramid without modern technology even. It’s impressive sure, but it’s not like people of the past were idiots, they just had less tools at their disposal, and better tools are great for inventing even better tools.
Meanwhile on YouTube some dude in nowhere America has a set of videos showing how he can lift, rotate, leverage and pivot massive stone blocks and an entire house using stone-age technology… ropes and wooden levers… by himself!
Rogan appeals to people who want to hear that the world revolves around them. They believe and want to confirm that if they haven’t figured it out no one else has. They are literal morons, but too stupid to know it. They are extremely satisfied when Rogan panders to their narcissism.
Got a link? That sounds extremely interesting!
Pyramids are the easiest structure to build. You stack rocks. Want them to look nice, cut the rocks into bricks.
fr where does he get the idea that a simple triangle can’t be built with today’s technology
It’s like sending people to the moon. Can we do it? Yes. Do we have a reason to? No.
Technically we can’t send people to the moon anymore but that’s not really relevant to whether or not we can build a pyramid because one of them requires special technology and the other requires a general purpose crane
We could send people to the moon, we haven’t lost the knowledge or resources needed. It’s just that it’s no longer a priority. It was incredibly expensive the first time. Although it would be less expensive the second time, this is a case where there’s absolutely no justification for not working from home (i.e. using robots).
we haven’t lost the knowledge or resources needed
Yeah its not that simple. Knowledge is pretty much lost in terms that there is not any easy or practical way to reconstruct for example the computer that navigated the Apollo and assume that this will provide a flawless trip. This hardware is also outdated so it would had been dumb to attempt to reconstruct something so many decades old. Also the code that run there was coded for this specific hardware which makes it unsuitable for modern hardware. So yeah, the knowledge exists in archives but is not really usable as is
I don’t know why you’re talking about Apollo hardware and software. The programmers and engineers who wrote that stuff did it from well known scientific and engineering principles. They didn’t have to start with a previous moon mission. The scientific and engineering principles are even better known today, and we have much more experience for space flight.
The only advantage you’d have with Apollo era stuff is that it has been tested and the bugs are well known. But, so what? Any modern mission to the moon would start from first principles again, not by trying to extend the Apollo stuff.
