Aliens, Pyramids, Carving and Ancient Technology

[Tom Booth]

I didn't see the last few posts but was enjoying the discussion. 

So, who built the pyramids? And how?

[Al_Fel]

14 minutes ago, Tom Booth said:

I didn't see the last few posts but was enjoying the discussion. 

So, who built the pyramids? And how?

No one actually knows and that's a fact.

[Tom Booth]

That is indeed a fact, post up some of the evidence/videos though dude, genuinely did find them interesting.

[Al_Fel]

30 minutes ago, Tom Booth said:

That is indeed a fact, post up some of the evidence/videos though dude, genuinely did find them interesting.

These are pretty impressive. I don't agree with everything they say but they make some good points. There's clearly a huge difference in skill between whoever made the box and whoever wrote on it.

I'd like to know how they got the lids on in such a tight working space. You're either lifting a 30 ton lid in a tight space or pushing a 100 ton box into that same space.

[monkeyseemonkeydo]

For the pyramids my guess would be that we are too quick to underestimate 1) the number of people involved, 2) the potential power of ropes and pulleys and 3) the ingenuity of the people of the time.

[Al_Fel]

10 hours ago, monkeyseemonkeydo said:

See, the problem with that is that if the Egyptians (or indeed any preceding civilisations) did have machines, engines, cranes, diamond tipped tungsten carbide tools etc. then there would be evidence of it somewhere. Stuff like that would've outlasted the tools etc. we have found. I completely agree that there are fairly major gaps in our understanding of exactly how these things came about but the only evidence that exists points to the current thinking of a lot of slaves working until they died with some very clever lateral thinking on the part of the architects/engineers of the time.

The hypothesis that really has my attention is that human civilisation is a lot older than we think and there was a global catastrophe about 12,800 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesis) This would have devastated the planet and wiped out virtually all of civilisation basically sending everyone back to the stone age. Any ancient global civilisation would have had to escape the danger and basically start again. Some of the knowledge gets saved and passed on and saved and we end up with stories of these events like whats in certain holy books etc.

Due to the hostility of the planet and solar system its very unlikely that man has a straight line timeline from the stone age till now. So I think it is all very possible.

Imagine a planet that was once thriving you'd expect to see similar kinds of building work and there are a lot of pyramids all over the planet. There's a lot of megalithic structures in ruin with poor inferior repair work. These cultures that we know of could very well have taken over these sites and made them their home after a global reset. Any evidence would have been contaminated by them.

I'm not saying the lost ancient technology is anything like what we have today. I think it would be alien to us because we've ended up on a different path technology wise. Thing's could have already been found and we just don't know how to use them like this for example http://s8int.com/phile/page52.html

There's more questions than answers. I keep seeing more and more things that confirm my argument to me.

10 hours ago, monkeyseemonkeydo said:

For the pyramids my guess would be that we are too quick to underestimate 1) the number of people involved, 2) the potential power of ropes and pulleys and 3) the ingenuity of the people of the time.

I think ancient people are well underestimated. They were a lot smarter than historians give them credit for.

[Mark W]

Tangentially related to this, was listening to a podcast last night and they happened to mention accounts from Anglo Saxons who first moved down from further North in the UK into areas that the Romans had left, and essentially inherited all the buildings and infrastructure they'd put in place.  The designs and materials (specifically the concrete) that the Romans used was so far advanced compared to the techniques the Anglo Saxons were using they couldn't work out how it was possible, and some people at the time put forward ideas about the buildings having been made by giants and stuff like that.

Related to that: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/07/why-modern-mortar-crumbles-roman-concrete-lasts-millennia

Again, not throwing judgement one way or the other, just seemed like a relevant example of how perspectives can change on things.

[Al_Fel]

16 minutes ago, Mark W said:

Tangentially related to this, was listening to a podcast last night and they happened to mention accounts from Anglo Saxons who first moved down from further North in the UK into areas that the Romans had left, and essentially inherited all the buildings and infrastructure they'd put in place.  The designs and materials (specifically the concrete) that the Romans used was so far advanced compared to the techniques the Anglo Saxons were using they couldn't work out how it was possible, and some people at the time put forward ideas about the buildings having been made by giants and stuff like that.

Related to that: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/07/why-modern-mortar-crumbles-roman-concrete-lasts-millennia

Again, not throwing judgement one way or the other, just seemed like a relevant example of how perspectives can change on things.

I've heard of Roman concrete before. It's very interesting. How did they work out the formula and understand that it gets stronger over time? Was it just a case of trial and error? Was it found by mistake as so many discoveries are?

Like you say its all about perspective.

On a side note an interesting thought I had before was about all these conspiracy theories about secrets being kept from the public by some kind of organisation. The fact that a lot of the mysteries of ancient megaliths involve stone work it would be funny if that's the reason we have the "Freemasons and Masons" I'm not making any claims here I'm just expressing my thoughts.

[aener]

55 minutes ago, Mark W said:

The designs and materials (specifically the concrete) that the Romans used was so far advanced compared to the techniques the Anglo Saxons were using they couldn't work out how it was possible, and some people at the time put forward ideas about the buildings having been made by giants and stuff like that.

Love this whole setup, and how on-f**king-point Clarke's First Law is. ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Show someone from the medieval ages a smartphone... In fact, ask the average person of today how one works ).
It's getting pretty meta now, given that no human on the planet fully understands or knows the physical layout of transistors in of bleeding edge CPU chips. They're all computer-designed, so we made the things that made them, but we have and use this technology that we don't fully understand. (Ok, it's not nearly the same thing as this topic, but an interesting modernisation of the concept of not-necessarily-lost-but-perhaps-"missing"-technology, and I appreciate that we don't necessarily NEED to understand what goes where and why so long as we do know exactly and predictably the output of a given input when using it, but still - I'm a fan of the arcane.) 

 

29 minutes ago, Al_Fel said:

On a side note an interesting thought I had before was about all these conspiracy theories about secrets being kept from the public by some kind of organisation. The fact that a lot of the mysteries of ancient megaliths involve stone work it would be funny if that's the reason we have the "Freemasons and Masons" I'm not making any claims here I'm just expressing my thoughts.

That would be fun, but I'm pretty sure it would boil down to coincidence.
Stone was just the material of choice because of its endurance. I'd love the Steinlords to roll in and smite us with their granite-wrath, but I think they're unrelated.
It's hard to keep the span of time in check in our measly mortal minds - there was around three THOUSAND years between Stonehenge being in active use and the Romans invading Britain. That's 1.5x longer gap than the gap between the Romans invading Britain and today, and a huge chunk of it can't really be accounted for because those bloody Celts couldn't be arsed writing anything down
I'm not saying it's impossible, but if you put "something dodgy is going on with current world politics" as a 1 and "the Queen's a lizard" as a 10 on the conspiracy scale, I personally would put a single organisation not only enduring but remaining in global power for five millennia at about an 8.6. (That's putting aside the 10-20,000+ year old masonry claims just for now.) 

Edited July 18, 2019 by aener

[Mark W]

44 minutes ago, aener said:

Love this whole setup, and how on-f**king-point Clarke's First Law is. ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Show someone from the medieval ages a smartphone... In fact, ask the average person of today how one works ).
It's getting pretty meta now, given that no human on the planet fully understands or knows the physical layout of transistors in of bleeding edge CPU chips. They're all computer-designed, so we made the things that made them, but we have and use this technology that we don't fully understand.

Yeah, that's always fairly mind blowing.  It's even down to the same way that (from my understanding of it) there's no one universally accepted theory for why the shape of wings produces lift for planes.  I assumed that was all done and dusted, but seemingly not.

Related to the transistors thing though, from that article I linked to:
"When they analyzed it, they found that the seawater had dissolved components of the volcanic ash, allowing new binding minerals to grow. Within a decade, a very rare hydrothermal mineral called aluminum tobermorite (Al-tobermorite) had formed in the concrete."

It's extremely unlikely the Romans would have known that was the specific process, but it worked and they went with it.  

[Al_Fel]

I'm not suggesting the Masons have been an organisation longer than is documented. My thought was maybe their founders were the ones that found all this ancient tech and kept it for themselves then built this club on that foundation. I'm just letting my imagination run wild a bit here. Bob Lazar mentioned something about there being 9 "alien" Crafts in S4 and at least one of them was from an archaeological dig. Again this is all just my imagination running wild.

It doesn't take long for people to not understand how something might work. 

 

[aener]

6 minutes ago, Al_Fel said:

My thought was maybe their founders were the ones that found all this ancient tech and kept it for themselves then built this club on that foundation.

 

Ah - that's very different from what I thought you meant. Haha.

[Al_Fel]

2 minutes ago, aener said:

Ah - that's very different from what I thought you meant. Haha.

I'm terrible at expressing what I mean though text. I've always been awful at English.

[aener]

1 minute ago, Al_Fel said:

I'm terrible at expressing what I mean though text. I've always been awful at English.

It's in the hands of the reader almost as much as the writer.
A good writer reduces ambiguity, but it's never going to be completely their fault.

There will always be better, but you're by no means bad at writing. You seem to understand the uses and placement of apostrophes so you're better than 75% of other English writers by default  

[Al_Fel]

4 minutes ago, aener said:

It's in the hands of the reader almost as much as the writer.
A good writer reduces ambiguity, but it's never going to be completely their fault.

There will always be better, but you're by no means bad at writing. You seem to understand the uses and placement of apostrophes so you're better than 75% of other English writers by default  

It's something I'm always working on.

[Al_Fel]

Anyway back to the topic.

Here's my way of thinking when it comes to lost ancient technology.

1. We can all agree that 1000's of years ago (no specific time) a method of construction was quarrying, shaping and stacking giant blocks of natural stone. Agreed?

2. This method wasn't specific to a particular group in a single area and it was in fact global.

3. For some reason it stopped and people started using smaller bricks and mortar again globally.

4. These very same methods are still used to this day.

5. You could say a lot of the basic principles of workmanship have been developed but are basically the same to this day. For example bricks and mortar, clay pots, basic tools such as hammers chisels, saws etc.

6. The methods used to move these huge blocks stopped getting used (whatever method that might have been).

My question is why did these methods (megalithic buildings) by far the most impressive ones stop getting used when virtually every other method of bronze age man seem to stick around?

I know I'm making a leap to this narrative that there was a global catastrophe and mankind got reset but there is evidence of something huge happening 12,800 years ago.

[aener]

One thing to bear in mind is that for smaller, more mundane structures like houses etc. it was just so much easier and more efficient to make wooden buildings - wattle and daub being a go-to. Or mud-bricks.
There's a strong argument for only doing the really big stuff in stone because then it's worth the effort.
Smaller stones will have been taken and recycled into other stuff too which we see all the time at sites like Avebury - some of the original standing stones having been found as filler (!) between two layers of wall in the church.
There was likely a lot more small stone structures that have been dismantled and reused.

In Scandinavia with traditional wooden churches (medieval era) it wasn't uncommon for the entire thing to be dismantled just so that it could be rebuilt somewhere else. Bonkers effort.

 

I personally find it particularly interesting that the tipping point of going from small to large scale civilisation didn't coincide with the development of writing (~3500BC for a genuine writing system, with many places later).
If anything was going to give a sudden boost in progression, that should have been it by my guess.

[marg26]

Any of you signed up to storm Area 51 on 20th September?

[Al_Fel]

This place is interesting

The parallel lines look like the were done with some kind of rake rather than a single chisel. I'm not saying any of what was done here needs any kind of crazy technology to do it but its an interesting and impressive site.

I'm currently watching this

It definitely challenges all my claims but some things just don't quite cut it for me. (I'm not saying it was ancient aliens and that's not what I think. I'm using it as way of challenging my claims of lost ancient technology)

I've backed myself into a corner of a particular way of thinking and I'm taking the claims of these lost ancient technology proponents as gospel when in reality I need to do more research. Apologies for coming across like an arse. I've took a step back and I'm looking at it all with a bit more of an open mind. I honestly do think there's a lot more to it than we know but I need to go about it all a different way.

[Al_Fel]

Again this shows the scale of what was done all around the world. These Giant cut rocks don't seem to be very rare and reserved for kings etc. To me it looks like megalithic buildings were done with relative ease.

[Al_Fel]

A "1500" ton stone moved by the Russians in the 17th century... Moved and carved with supposedly more advanced tools and equipment.

[Al_Fel]

I know no one is going to watch all these videos and I'm bombarding people with this stuff but seriously? What the hell were they thinking? Whoever squared up and started cutting that out had some insane ambition!

[aener]

The NLP attempts in those videos is so blatant it seems impossible it could ever take root.
Then again, there's empirical evidence that placebos still work even if the taker knows they're taking a placebo.

 

It bothers me that they repeatedly state that these things were done "effortlessly".
Even if they had the insane tech these videos imply, it still wouldn't be "effortless", else the feats wouldn't have been held in such esteem.
If it was effortless - they would be literally everywhere, not major monuments. They did it somehow, and of course it could be with less effort than the history books say, but it was obviously still a big deal.

(That's a major aside from the point, but a little gripe I have.)

Edited July 19, 2019 by aener

[Al_Fel]

3 minutes ago, aener said:

The NLP attempts in those videos is so blatant it seems impossible it could ever take root.
Then again, there's empirical evidence that placebos still work even if the taker knows they're taking a placebo.

 

It bothers me that they repeatedly state that these things were done "effortlessly".
Even if they had the insane tech these videos imply, it still wouldn't be "effortless", else the feats wouldn't have been held in such esteem.
If it was effortless - they would be literally everywhere, not major monuments.

(That's a major aside from the point, but a little gripe I have.)

I totally get that. None of what's been done is effortless but I do believe there was a substantial less amount of effort to make these things than current theories. That's just an opinion. Earth is a big old place and there are quite a lot of these megalithic structures about.

[aener]

39 minutes ago, Al_Fel said:

I totally get that. None of what's been done is effortless but I do believe there was a substantial less amount of effort to make these things than current theories. That's just an opinion. Earth is a big old place and there are quite a lot of these megalithic structures about.

Damn you for snaking my pre-edit post!
For everyone else - I added that extra bit about history books before his reply was there