Interesting how the pyramids have been around for 4500 years and we still don't know all about their structure...
Fun fact: there's a Neolithic site in Ireland, Newgrange, that's actually older than the pyramids. Fascinating and worth a visit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newgrange
Fun fact: Cleopatra and Mark Antony etc. lived closer in time to the invention of mobile phones than to the construction of the Great Pyramids. Egyptian history is deep.
Funner fact: the Great Pyramids were built closer in time to the invention of mobile phones than to the construction of Göbekli Tepe. Human history is way deep.
Funnest fact: if we don't fuck it up, we're still only at the dawn of history, not at the end of it.
It took ~60,000 years to go from nearly extinct (possibly 40 "breeding pairs" of humans[1] left alive) to Göbekli Tepe, and we barely know anything about that time.
Me too. If this is a worry of yours, though, may I suggest, in no way rhetorically, going into the "not fucking it up" business? The pay is generally terrible, but nothing beats making your own hope.
I could really go for some hope and would very much like to do something of that nature, but it's hard to figure out where my skills are best allocated.
As for the pay I am very difficult to motivate with money beyond what makes for housing and food security.
> it's hard to figure out where my skills are best allocated
Better is the enemy of good enough -- just do something, and if that doesn't work, do something else.
There are so many issues facing the world: climate change, population growth (/collapse, depending on where you are), food security, energy security, biodiversity, civil society, socioeconomics in the face of automation, supervolcanos, etc. etc. etc.
There are diverse solutions to all these problems. If energy security is your thing, then everything from better residential insulation, to business process optimisation for solar panel installation, to R&D for fusion reactors is potentially part of the solution. Pick whichever one interests you the most. You don't need to be the Elon Musk of whatever it is that you've chosen: if someone else is already doing it, they'll need everything from web developers to janitors. Work for them, and you'll be part of the solution. And if in a few years you see something that'll make you even more hopeful, do that instead.
Personally, I chose "better urban design" as my personal route to saving the world. If we could make much better cities, this would seriously mitigate issues with energy consumption, climate change, land use, and civil society. But how best to do this?
First I tried being an architect. But the impact I could make was limited by the property developers I worked for, who were limited by the urban planners they worked around, who were limited by the urban infrastructure technologies they worked with. So I changed careers, taking aim at transport technology innovation. Went back to school, got an MBA, and joined a company developing a new class of transport technology (the Heathrow Pod, if you're curious). After a few years I realised that my influence was constrained by working for the technology vendor; I actually needed to work for governments instead. So I switched careers again and became a transport-planning consultant doing advisory work in 14 countries. After a few years I realised that my advisory services were producing cool feasibility studies but no actual results, because the actual implementations were too constrained by antiquated, innovation-inhibiting communications processes and planning/design tools. This was a software problem. So I switched careers again and started a company developing collaborative urban planning software (https://www.podaris.com), and now spend most of every week fighting with Javascript. This can be a tough slog, but it's Javascript that will hopefully change the way that cities are designed, thereby doing my bit to save the world. I feel good about it.
The above story isn't meant to be illustrative of what you or anyone else should do. WHAT you do will be different for everyone, and is very nearly irrelevant, provided you've put some thought into it. THAT you do is the important part -- and you are absolutely capable of doing it.
You should check out 80000hours.org! It‘s a yc company focused on helping bright people find the best job to make a positive impact in this world. I highly recommend it :)
I would like to find a "hacker news" for the "not fucking it up" business, please. Especially for the part where we try to keep the military and police from being automated.
For me personally, endless fights with Javascript. I'm the founder of www.podaris.com. If we're successful, it'll change the way that cities are designed, and getting cities right is a really critical part of not fucking up the world.
and I'm sure on a few occasions (Ice Age - not recorded but anyway), black death, and various other cataclysms they may have thought they were right. Lets hope we're not among those.
The style of the animal carvings is really interesting - they look somewhat symbolic as letters in a "visual language" instead of artistic... "artistic" drawings/sculptures seek either to be skeurmorphic, aka imitate nature, or intentionally simplistic but following some "universally aesthetically pleasing" style, relative as it may be. These have things like the number of legs correct, but nothing about the angles.
These look like neither... and that's damn weird! Almost like what a blind carver would make from listening to a description of a thing he never saw and carving it.
Probably the oldest cave paintings are like this, but those are like "simplest thing one can do" while these imply effort, but... somehow "skillfully retarted", like there was something "messed up" with the minds of the designers, or simply very different from our own.
Imagine if they find an opened chamber, and that it contains artefacts that can be carbon-dated, and they turn out to be thousands of years older than conventional Egyptology expects.
(I expect there will be artefacts, and I expect their dates will coincide with what we already expect, but I’m always holding out for ”new science” that needs to be explained.)
There are thousands of sumerian cuneiform tablets left to translate, if you're bored ;-) Many of these predate the pyramids by a thousand years or so. Most translated ones contain mundane enough stuff, so its likely that the rest are similar, but if you're looking for something ancient to discover something in, I can't think of a better place to look given their age and that they're already found (ie available to read).
You are missing my point (which I inadvertently mangled by writing ”opened chamber” in lieu of ”unopened chamber"): the whole Great Pyramid is entirely structural and there have never been artefacts found within it that can be said to have been present at the time of building and that could be definitively carbon-dated. A single sigil of dubious origin on ancient plaster repair-work in the load-baring spaces above the King’s Chamber are the only reference to Kufu in the whole structure. This recently changed when builders’ inscriptions were found behind the sealed door drilled through by the robot in the Queen’s Chamber shaft, but the paint in question has not been carbon-dated yet, because somehow you’d need to engineer a device to scrape a sample off and retrieve it.
So if this hypothetical chamber were found to be intact and unopened, and to contain artefacts made not of stone but of wood or fibre, then finally it would be possible to definitively date the structure and corroborate (or refute) the timeline currently taken for granted.
Ah, ok, so your point was that we really don't know for sure that the pyramids (or, at least, the Kufu one) is as old as we believe, because the dating that has been done is somewhat dubious, and you are hoping it is much older?
My point doesn't really go against this, just that it may be more practical to look at what we already have access to, but is largely not translated.
Also, since we have dated many other Egyptian artefacts, we can assume that the civilisation is that old (but of course, the pyramids could have pre-dated them). If they did find any artefacts with writing in the chamber and it is much older than when we believe the pyramids were built, I wouldn't be surprised if the artefacts contained Akkadian or Sumerian cuneiform anyway ;-)
My point is subtle. We definitely know when the ancient Egyptian civilisation existed, and that has been definitely dated by many coherent methods: carbon dating of artefacts at other sites, historical record, and archeological layers. The issue (which I am perfectly aware merely articulating makes me sound like a kook, but hear me out and know beforehand that I am very skeptical about the likelihood of what I am stating might actually be true) is that we have not got definitive links between the pyramids and the Ancient Egyptian civilisation as we construe it. In most ancient Egyptian texts the pyramids are referred to as being already ancient but claimed to be of their own origin, but in other civilisations (e.g., the ancient Chinese and their claim of the “Yellow Emperor” et al) we have found that civilisations’ own accounts about their origins and claims to being the artificers of grand monuments is not always reliable. What if the pyramids actually predated the ancient Egyptians by millennia, and the ancient Egyptians merely arose later around them, in the same area, and claimed them as their own? There is much pseudoscience in this regard, but certain highly controversial geological observations about the weathering of the Sphinx in particular are particularly telling (in my opinion): it would seem that the prevailing opinion of geologists is that the weathering exhibited on the body of the Sphinx is the product of tens of millennia of water erosion, which is at odds with archeologists’ prevailing opinion is that the erosion “must be” the result of mere millennia of sand erosion, because “we already know” that the Sphinx was built “by the Ancient Egyptians, mere thousands of years before C.E.”. The reasoning is inherently circular, and enrages me. I would very much like to have original artefacts demonstrably linked with the epoch of construction from inside the Pyramids definitely carbon-dated so that this circularity can be once and for all escaped-from. In the end, I fully expect that such independent verification would lead to confirmation that the Pyramids and the Sphinx do indeed date from the early period of the Old Kingdom... but proof would be delightful, and besides, we do other kinds of science (such as running the LHC) in hopes of seeing disagreement with prevailing theories... wouldn't it be amazingly exciting if it turned out that this were not the case? No extraterrestrials... just much deeper human history than we have hitherto fathomed.
I agree, it would be good to prove scientifically instead of relying on fallacious circular reasoning and assumptions, and it would certainly be exciting if it proved that there was more to the story.
My main point was simply that given that the oldest written texts we have are Sumerian cuneiform, it would seem likely that if there were written texts hidden in the pyramids which predates Ancient Egyptian civilisation, it would likely be cuneiform too, although it would be incredible if even older texts were found (and decipherable)! Early-human history is very interesting.
(I am aware that there is older proto-writing than cuneiform, but not complete written texts)
I’d never really entertained the notion that there might be earlier forms of writing, and if they existed, what form they might be expected to take. This is a really fascinating issue. Maybe we’ll find scribbles that resemble Linear-A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A) all over the inside of this hidden space. Wouldn’t that be exciting, even if we couldn’t read it?!
Suprised they're not largely machine readable given the geometric nature of cuneiform. You might have to aggressively guess some combinations as the components of hte symbols aren't always well separated but it seems easier than reading current alphabets/characters.
I did get in to cuneiform at one point in the past but the dictionary to translate was, IIRC, over £1k.
Any good links you can suggest for corpus of works that are likely to yield interesting output, and sources to aid in that?
What software is good for aiding such translation work?
Perhaps it’s just that nobody has tried? I can’t imagine it’s as difficult as, say, Google Street View’s street number recognition.
Unfortunately I don’t have any answers to your question. I’m a rather casual observer with an interest but little experience. I only recently got interested enough to buy some books in the topic (and Sumerian history/mythology in general). It seems that the best source of untranslated cuneiform would be to physically visit the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum (not sure if anybody can make an appointment for the cuneiform study rooms or what though...)
If you or anybody else were to find a collection/library of digitized cuneiform tablets, I would be very much interested myself, more so if there are any notes or commentary.
It looks like they've got images of tablets from about 30 institutions, organized by time period. I've found a few with transliterations, but information seems fragmentary. There are also a fair number of entries without images.
While we are imagining unlikely thing, I'm going to imagine there are instructions from aliens (yes, the same ones that actually built the pyramids, don't ya know) on how to build a faster than light drive.
But those instructions actually involve the assembly of an AI which develops nano technology, disassembles our world and solar system in order to build and dispatch pyramid assembling drones throughout the galaxy.
Why is it unlikely? I’m certainly not suggesting aliens. Just the idea that if there is a chamber and it is unopened and contains non-stone artefacts (wood, food, fibres, bone) we could finally carbon-date the structure and corroborate or refute the prevailing wisdom on the timeline.
It seems that peoples through the ages have respected the pyramids enough to leave them mostly intact and undisturbed, giving us the unique heritage that we have today. I can't help but contrast this with the British explorers who just started blowing through it with explosives and pulling stuff out wholesale.
Not at all. Most of the pyramids, and many many other burials were ransacked by graverobbers and scavengers in antiquity - in a lot of cases, even while there were still pharaohs. It's assumed that a lot of them were robbed immediately, by the same workers who built them - in fact, even as early as the Middle Kingdom, there was a thriving trade in robbed grave goods for the explicit purpose of reuse in another burial, so it's far from uncommon to find people interred with spells on papyri that are centuries older than them, but have had the original owner's name scratched out and the new one inserted. If anything, the respect shown for the Giza complex in the last hundred years or so is the exception in its history. Heck, one of the two smaller pyramids has a huge hole in the side from where a 16th or 17th century caliph tried to demolish it.
Or, humans have always had to focus on their own self-preservation and only recently have we had the luxury to care for the past at the expense of the present.
If I remember my old books correctly, they were not slaves, they were peasants who were paying tax as labour instead of money or produce. Like conscription, but for civilian work.
So there is still compulsion here, and the workers would often have had similar emotions and incentives as slaves. The fact that the workers had more freedom probably gave them more ability to act on that than if they had been proper slaves.
The Pyramids were originally cased in a layer of white limestone. Almost all of that is gone, since, if I recall, they were small enough that they could be carted away, unlike the granite that remains.
Monumental buildings almost always end up being wholesale building supply once they aren't revered and maintained.
Almost every pyramid was looted nearly immediately, and the limestone covers on the pyramids were stolen long ago. Most of the reason the pyramids remain as they are is because they are made of very large blocks which are inordinately difficult to move and impractical to use for other purposes.
I'm aware that they were subjected to grave robbing. That seems like more low-level thieving than actual organized pillaging though, which required destroying structure to pull off, as evidenced by the fact that the most important artifacts, including the riches of the burial chamber and the sarcophagus itself, were still there until modern times.
We have written confessions of systematic grave robbing from the time of the Pharoahs, and successive generations of Pharoahs came up with ever-more-elaborate schemes to make tombs more difficult to break into, none of which succeeded.
Finding Tutenkhamen's tomb that hadn't been systematically cleared of all its contents was unprecedented but owed nothing to being protected by any elaborate superstructure that needed destroying, and everything to do with it being concealed by mudslides and workers' huts rather than the sort of superstructure graverobbers were used to partially dismantling to find a way in.
At Giza? No, the burials were long since disrupted by the middle ages. I don't think there's even much solid agreement that there ever even was a burial in the Great Pyramid.
I think you'll find the sarcophagus is there because it is too large to be stolen. As I recall, we've never even found human remains in the pyramids themselves.
Also the giant monolith/megalith structures in Russia are out of this world.
Personally I think some of the footage and pictures of them are more impressive than the pyramids. The size of the blocks compared to a human is just incredible.
In Sardinia, Italy, there are also hundreds of neolithic sites called Domus de Janas (House of the Fairies) dating back to 3000 BC. Some of them are quite impressive: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domus_de_Janas
The diagram only shows the shaft intersecting the void because it is a 2D projection of overlapping 3D volumes. In reality the shafts pass next to, but do not intersect with, the purported void.
A) proper digging shouldn’t destroy the monument. B) removal of parts of the structure is how we know what’s in it at all. The same is true for any othe other monuments that are structures. We had to dig through the valley of the kings to find the tombs. If we don’t breech the obstruction, we won’t understand the thing.
There are new techniques for discovering things. Once we know there is a void, at present, no number of muons will help us see details. Perhaps we’ll learn how they built the thing. There are a great many marvels from Egypt that defy our current understanding of their tech.
Except 'grave robbing' implies a malice and questionable morality. There is great value in doing this and well documented/controlled excavation can minimize destruction to the very minimum.
This entire planet is one mass grave. We only respect the dead for a limited period of time. (No one who died over 20k years ago has much in the way of cultural defenders...) At the 3k+ range, I think we can get a pass...
I was also there in april, and I am surprised the tourists and kids are left unattended, taking selfies, touching everything. It's an accident waiting to happen. Most tourists (ashamed to admit, but this includes me) don't actually appreciate or care about ancient art, it's more like been there, done that.
I'd encourage people to chide tourists that touch historic objects in museums. People should know better and while I suspect they dont care (from when I've done this many a time), it's worth trying!
Art is restored all the time. The places these labels were put are not where the valuable details rest. I grew up around antique collectors all my life. You are overreacting.
Indeed, plenty of famous art pieces have been 'fixed' and if you really wanted to revert a statue back to it's original form removing the number plate would be an easy job and do wouldn't take away from the real artistic parts of it. As they were placed on the flat base of the pedestal, not touching the primary artwork which is the statue itself.
Sure they could find far better solutions, and very likely would today. But I don't think this is a particularly big deal that it was done in the past.
I don't think that a 12 inch hole drilled big enough for a drone in a section of the pyramid that is protected from the weather and not visible to the public is "Destroying a monument".
Do you think that the DNA test of King Tut was also destruction?
Given the wholesale robbery that early Egyptologists got up to (mummy-unwrapping parties were a popular social event in 19th-century England), one can perhaps excuse the Egyptian authorities for being a bit overprotective.
100% agree. Let's wait, been waiting for millennia already. Otherwise, next year another team has another curiosity that requires just a small hole...and 2000 years later the thing is crumbling.
Um, no. The diagram is 2D, pyramid is 3D; by losing one dimension, disjoint objects seem connected. Even in the image, shaft passes behind the void, not through it.
How can you be so certain? The picture alone provides no clue. It would be unheard of for a tree to grow out of someone's head, but strictly speaking not categorically impossible. In fact, for the sake of argument the only reason you're able to make that statement at all is due to your previous experience. There's nothing at all in the picture that tells you she doesn't have a tree growing out of her head.
Not sure how highly I would rate crystalinks.com as a source, given that they also talk about how viewing repeated digits 'activates' your DNA... http://www.crystalinks.com/11.11.html
That last link of yours is worth reading through carefully. It puts forward the theory that the pyramid of Giza is a power plant. Pretty cool conspiracy theory!
This shaft is 4500 years old. I wonder how many people have been down it.
It seems arrogant to call the "big void" a discovery, being that someone actually built the big void.
I would expect this "discovery" has been discovered a few dozen times, considering the age of the pyramids, but previous discoveries were lost to history.
"discovery" in the sense that the modern world previously had no understanding that it existed. It is the same logic that Columbus discovered America-- obviously it existed but the discovery was revealing it to the rest of the world.
Amazing this stuff still yields secrets after thousands of years. Meanwhile the 3.5" floppy disks in my parents attic on which I've kept all my teenage Turbo Pascal source code have long lost all their data.
This is something I think about a lot. How do we build a "data pyramid" that can be interpreted by future generations. I feel like much of our culture will be lost to bit rot.
Wikipedia could be encoded into DNA and them spliced into species that are very long lived, geologically speaking, such as horseshoe crabs. Absent any negative selection against "wiki DNA", they could remain readable in millions of years time.
You will need a very strong error correction scheme. It is not necessary to have a negative selection against "wiki DNA", if there is not positive selection the error will accumulate quickly.
With a quick googling, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_rate#Variation_in_mut... I think that a mutation rate of 10^-5 per base per generation is a good estimation for humans. Let's assume 10^-6 per base per year. So after a million year, with no selection pressure, probably more than a half of the bases will be overwritten with garbage.
Losing only 50% of the data after a million years doesn't sound that bad. The bigger problem is keeping knowledge that the data is there and how to get it to survive even a tenth of that length.
Probably there would be "signal decay", but one can still make sense of a text when many of the letters are missing. So the decay would have to be more than 50% for the message to be completely useless.
Also, a million years is quite a long time, I doubt there are many media one could use that one could expect to still be at least half readable in one million years time.
I guess my issue with this line of thought is - how do you include the "playback device" along with the media?
So many assumptions must be made about the theoretical future inhabitants that would "discover" our culture would be capable of technologically.
How do we send the VHS tape, along with the player, instructions for how to setup the player, play the tape, output to a sensing device of some sort, and only _then_ you can possibly read only part of the data if you get that far?
I don't think I will even have photos of my kids or anything from about the last 10 years or so by the time I am in my mid fifties (not as far away as I would wish).
One line of thought I was going down recently was information encoded by printing very specific and precise three-dimensional "monoliths" that display information based on postion of the nearest star (which I assume would still be Sol, and would still be around in this distant future).
Nice idea for short term (galacticly) but as far as I know the orbits of the solar system (even the 'stable' ones[1]) are unpredictable (chaotic) to a certain degree over long timescales. Assuming sol doesn't screw us over and the output behaves as we expect.
True. I suppose my point is that I belive that a _physical_ artifact is the only chance at this working. What if the culture that discovers it is in a "dark age" and doesn't even have the electricity to power these supposed future proof digital archives.
Way off topic, but have you actually tried to read them? I was able to get data off some ~25 year old 5.25" C64 diskettes a few months ago, encouraged by success with data recovery from some 3.5" diskettes a few months before that.
Yes, most of them didn't last more than a few years before the bits started falling off. This may partially have been because most of them were SD (720kb) that I'd drilled the HD (1440kb) marker hole into to save money. Worked fine at the time, but probably didn't help boost their longevity.
Wasn't our understanding of how the pyramids were built, particularly the great pyramid, still very much up for debate until modern times? Let alone 1893? Plenty of older theories have been debunked.
It's an interesting subject no doubt but a more modern source would likely be a better use of time.
Yes, this work is clearly based on the cosmic ray muon detector approach that Nobel prize winner Luis Alvarez developed in the 1970’s, and looks to be a significant effort that would need considerable international support to accomplish, so somebody obviously thinks there is reason to believe Luie’s team missed something.
In addition to the results, I’m very interested to understand what led them to think there might have been something missed in the analysis of the great pyramid of Khufu/Cheops.
Key takeaways that might answer why the original team missed the clues... note the Simulation results from the Japanese team. Throughout the video it's clear they're chasing the scent of information through data analaysis and visualisation.
I think the Hololens stuff at the end is a little fluffy but it speaks to the tools scientists and engineers have available today versus the 70's
On the contrary, it is no coincidence that it this has been found by a team comprised of (also) French academics. This is very much compatible and inspired by his work.
His theory involves the Grand Gallery being a purely functional structure required to accodate a trolley that helped serve as a counterweight to heave the massive stones that relieve the weight acting upon the roof of the King’s Chamber. Implicit in this theory is the idea that there are other ”ceremonial routes” from the outside to the King’s Chamber. It is very possible that this is actually the unopened anteroom that contains the provisions for the Pharos’ afterlife (or other artefacts that could be carbon-dated).
That’s the idea: an anteroom containing the accoutrements to accompany the Pharaoh on his voyage into the afterlife. According to Houdain’s theory of how they were constructed, the ”Grand Gallery” was basically a machine spade that served no ceremonial purpose whatsoever and was sealed off from the main ceremonial passageways as a bit of an embarrassment. That, in turn, is why we have been oblivious about these other spaces for so long: quite by coincidence, when breaking into the pyramid, the service tunnels were the ones the profaners quite accidentally blundered into. According to Houdain we’ve been crawling around inside the ductwork of the Waldorf Astoria for centuries.
It looks like it disproves it. The theory speculates on the presence of peremiter ascending pathways behind the exterior walls - if they do exist I’m guessing they would have shown in the scans.
The scans focused on a particular area. The technology works by placing 'plates' in desired location and collecting the particles that hit those plates. They could only place plates inside the pyramid where they had access, and collect from particular (sic) paths. They aimed for a best-guess area previously unknown but speculated upon. I assume they will repeat the experiment wherever possible to gather more data in the future.
That's what I'm saying - if the scans have caught the large void (by being placed in the grand gallery) and the small void (by being placed likely in the entrance hallway leading to the gallery) then they are at the proper location to capture any pathways above them. But since no pathways were detected - then the theory is likely incorrect. But perhaps the location/shape of the void isn't as accurate as depicted.
Does HN have any domain experts that can comment on how reliable this research is?
I got super excited about the Queen Nefertiti / King Tut secret chamber theory a year or two back (which used similar methods, it seemed), and was really disappointed when it turned out to be all wrong...
This is not the same method at all and this is much more reliable. For King Tut, they used ground penetration radar, which is very hard to interpret. Here: (1) this is confirmed by 3 independent teams using 3 different detection technologies, (2) we used the same statistical criteria as for discoveries in particle physics (deviation 5 sigma from the model).
In addition, we clearly see the new void on Nagoya's data (Fig.2).
Unfortunately, cosmic-ray muons cannot be used in King Tut tomb because we can only see "above us" (the muons come from the sky).
I'm definitely looking forward to where this research takes us. I'm curious if there have been any efforts to create a muon-like transmitter that would add more flexibility to the sensor system. Is there something about muons that prohibits this?
The ScanPyramids team is being very careful not to describe the cavity as a "chamber".
He says the muon science is sound but he is not yet convinced the discovery has significance.
"It could be a kind of space that the builders left to protect the very narrow roof of the grand gallery from the weight of the pyramid," he told the BBC's Science In Action programme.
"Right now it's just a big difference; it's an anomaly. But we need more of a focus on it especially in a day and age when we can no longer go blasting our way through the pyramid with gunpowder as [British] Egyptologist Howard Vyse did in the early 1800s."
One of the team leaders, Hany Helal from Cairo University, believes the void is too big to have a pressure-relieving purpose, but concedes the experts will debate this.
No wild claims have been made, we are in the realms of safe science with nobody being taken for a ride. There is no promise of some Hollywood grade new fantasy pyramid feature, just a mystery void.
Voids have had precedents in Egyptology. My favourite being the mess the Mormons got into with the Book of Abraham. Their visionary founder guy buys some Egyptian 'scrolls' from someone who was doing the rounds taking some mummies on tour. So this was magically interpreted as the Bible Part 3, the New, new testament, a.k.a. The Book of Abraham. There were those that had seen the scrolls so they were known to actually exist however there was some big fire in Chicago and the scrolls were apparently lost.
Many decades later someone finds the scrolls in New York, they checked out to be the real deal as the illustrations were the same, including the missing bits. By now people knew a thing about how to read these things properly and the 'scrolls' that had inspired the Book of Abraham turned out to be standard funeral documents, a death certificate of sorts.
The bits that were missing from the 'scrolls' included the heads of Horus et al, therefore our Mormon friends were drawing in the heads of 'Abraham' et al. It was beyond their imagination that Egyptian figures on papyrus documents would have heads of other animals, dogs etc. So the Mormons got it completely wrong, they filled the void in with expected content - human heads - but that was an assumption too far.
So yes, this is just science, nobody is trying to found a new religion here.
Now watch as it never gets excavated. I've yet to see them break open the hidden door they found during some thermal scans recently. Isn't there also known void under the sphinx that was mapped with ground penetrating radar? They just seem to sit on these finds and do nothing.
Doesnt seem like a tiny hole is enough to cause loss of structural integrity or for even anyone to notice. Preservation is important but thinking that it extends to ever centimeter of every weathered brick is quite silly.
From what I understand, the problem is more political than archaeological. I'm sure the researchers are going all they can as fast as they can within the political, legal, and resource constraints there.
Interestingly the original search for these empty secret chambers in the pyramid helped an architect come up with one of the best theories on how it was built: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d83mn1yxCHc
Using a combination of an external ramp, up until the point of the King's chamber, then from there it used an internal ramp system that snaked around the edges.
Egypt's main pyramid sites in Giza are accessible to the general public every day, all year long. Although you can go inside the Great Pyramid of Khufu when you visit, one of the smaller two pyramids usually is closed for restoration work. To further complicate your tourist plans, at the time of publication, only 300 tickets are sold per pyramid, per day. You must arrive early to secure your visit inside
I've also read that given the economic instability in Cairo, it's just a royal PITA to visit. Tourists get aggressively hassled to buy stuff, camel rides, tours, etc.
I've been to New Grange and Stonehenge. While it's pretty neat to go there, it's just a structure. The real value and interest for me is reading up on what the researchers have found out. Let the plinths for Stonehendge were quarried 150 miles away in what is now Wales.
After I met a well educated Nigerian fellow earlier this year who described how he studied in Cairo and was raped by a gang of Egyptians who pulled a knife on him before entering the subway, I concluded it probably wasn't worth it to visit.
Full disclosure because interesting: He claimed to have returned a couple of days later, preparing by filling his backpack full of stones as a defense mechanism, and killed one of them when they attempted to attack him again. I didn't doubt the story, because he really had no reason to impress anyone, didn't seem the type, seemed genuinely shaken by the memory, and the subject of Egypt came up tangentially.
Hire a driver/guide. He'll navigate around any hassle -- you'll be left in peace -- and he'll sort all the tickets for you. It's probably a one in a lifetime visit, after all.
We lucked out. Our driver turned out to be a Coptic Christian, and he had much to say about (what was then) the recent Arab Spring from a different angle.
One hundred times this. Most taxi drivers will be happy to "adopt" you for a few days, and arrange for you tickets, hostel, restaurants, and anything else that you need. He'll pay the local price and get a kickback, and you'll still come out far ahead. Plus you will get to see real Cairo, not tourist Cairo, if you ask him.
Yeah... I've been there shortly after arab spring when there was next to one there. Camel ride people tried to steal from me, had to tell them I was going straight to the tourist police over there before they gave me back the extra money they took straight from my hands...
I doubt that the current political situation in Egypt is to blame for the hassles the Egyptians give tourists. I was last in Cairo in 1999, and even then I was routinely aggressively hassled to buy stuff, camel rides, tours, etc.
You haven't been in front of it, right? Not being there once, needing to spend your time and energy, standing there and thinking how old it is, seeing how big it is, makes easier to say something like that.
Slightly off-topic but perhaps someone has an answer:
After finishing "Dark Forest" / "Death’s End" I somehow ended up with the questions if our way of doing archaeology is actually a good idea.
Currently we i) remove a lot of things from the ground / graves / ruins, ii) analyze them, iii) put them in a museum and iv) write books about them.
This means that all the knowledge about those artifacts and our history is stored in volatile documents and fragile minds. During the next WW3 or WW4 those museums might burn down and all archaeologist might be killed in an anti-intellectual purge.
This means that a future generation will neither have the real artifacts in the ground nor our current documentation and all that knowledge about humanities history will be lost forever.
Is there any project which strives to preserve our current knowledge about humanity in some sort of long-term storage so that also people in 500 or 2000 years will be able to reconstruct even without having access to 'real' artifacts? Is this actually a problem which current archaeologist think about?
> During the next WW3 or WW4 those museums might burn down and all archaeologist might be killed in an anti-intellectual purge.
And during no particular war at all, the local government may decide to demolish artifacts and sites for political reasons. For example, China and Tibetan statues and temples. I'm not sure the original locations are very safe either.
Edit: I was actually incorrectly remembering Chinese mining destruction in Afghanistan.[1] I'm not aware of a direct attack on Tibetan artifacts by China beyond their actions to repress the religion in general.
regarding Tibetan artifacts and buildings. any pointers? I can't believe that statement in general. (if you would have mentioned the Taliban in Afghanistan on the other hand ...)
I was actually thinking of Chinese mining in Afghanistan[1], but couldn't remember all the context. In searching before posting to make sure I wasn't incorrect, I did run across reports of China destroying Tibetan monasteries.[2][3] That said, from looking a bit closer at the articles now, it looks more like China's continued attack on the religion, and not the artifacts themselves, since it's targeting homes next to a monastery (which happen to house people who work at the monastery, if the reporting is to be interpreted correctly, which isn't easy on this topic because it appears reporters are trying to strongly imply something without saying it, which is a red flag).
Current archeologists only excavate sites 'at risk' e.g. new building development or looting. In all other cases, they strive to do non-intrusive exploration e.g. ground penetrating radar and lidar.
> Is this actually a problem which current archaeologist think about?
That's not really an archaeologist problem. But there are a few projects to do things like print off wikipedia on low acid paper and store it in vaults.
Also the memory of mankind project is storing ceramic tablets in a salt mine.
The Internet Archive has that goal (archive.org), it’s paid for by Brewster Kahle personally.
> Is there any project which strives to preserve our current knowledge about humanity in some sort of long-term storage so that also people in 500 or 2000 years will be able to reconstruct
I hope they're recording all of the data on stone tablets in cuneiform, instead of in some digital format for which reading hardware will be obsolete in a few years... ;-)
They have 15 petabytes of data, and they keep distributed backups. They also accept donations and volunteers, so if you have better suggestions I'm sure you can go yourself and help
> the Archive attempts to create copies of (parts of) the collection at more distant locations, currently including the Bibliotheca Alexandrina[10] in Egypt and a facility in Amsterdam.[11] The Archive is a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium[12] and was officially designated as a library by the State of California in 2007.[13]
I remember reading about this a while back (probably on HN). They're storing a bunch of data along with the OSs and devices to read it in a bunker in Switzerland, so if we do leave a bunch of digital data, future generations can actually access it. Tried to find a decent article, but this was about the best I could do: https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2363904,00.asp
"They" in that case aren't the "Internet Archive" but the European research projects about the digital preservation.
The Internet Archive collects the donations now for the Canada site:
"this year, we have set a new goal: to create a copy of Internet Archive’s digital collections in another country. We are building the Internet Archive of Canada because lots of copies keeps stuff safe. We estimate this will cost $5 million. With your support, we are more than halfway there."
How long does a turned off device stay operational? (main circuitry itself, screen, battery, storage -- whatever the devices they're using have) Also, we were able to decipher cuneiform because there were a lot of clay tablets available to study, but will people in, say, 2k to 4k years from now be able to decipher how to work the devices, its OS and access the library of data? Even my iPhone requires a surprisingly large amount of knowledge to access my various bits of data, if it were 4,000 years in the future and nobody understands English anymore, I can imagine it would be difficult to decipher. Perhaps we should be leaving a load of stone carvings somehow explaining how to operate the devices (and to read english, or whatever language)
From the linked article:
> "If we can nail the next 100 years, we figure we will be able to nail the next 100 years as well," Farquhar said.
Except.. if there is a massive disaster event of sorts (WW3 was mentioned in the comments here), it may be longer than 100 years before somebody is in a position to access this archive. It may then be too late. Or the country is in crisis and the facility gets decommissioned or abandoned.
I'm not saying they're not doing a great thing -- they are! I'm just concerned that it relies on a bit of luck.
Sounds like it's a safer option, but requires that you have the technology and energy sources to communicate with that satellite - which is not really 100% reliable if you are about to experience a planet-wide catastrophe of such magnitude that it would require storing data outside of the Earth surface in a first place.
You could put in an orbit that would have a predefined reentry in the future. Design the satellite to survive reentry and somehow safely land in a way that relies on a mechanical system that wouldn't degrade like electronics in space would.
> You could put in an orbit that would have a predefined reentry in the future.
it isn't clear what you mean by this, but there's no picking where something will reenter hundreds of years in the future. if you just want to ensure that it will reenter, sooner or later, that's easily done.
> Design the satellite to survive reentry and somehow safely land in a way that relies on a mechanical system that wouldn't degrade like electronics in space would.
chunks of satellites are far more likely to survive reentry already than you might expect. i expect it would be feasible now to produce an insert sphere filled with information etched on nickel-superalloy plates that would survive uncontrolled reentry and impact with the earth's surface.
i'd suggest storing the information in something covered with retro-reflectors, and dropping it onto the moon's surface, though. need more delta-V to get it there and retrieve it, but it'd be a simpler object to construct, and then later deconstruct.
You can calculate an estimate of reentry from atmospheric drag. It's not going to be exact but anything you throw up into LEO is going to come down someday and as long as the atmosphere doesn't change too much, it should be fairly close.
>it isn't clear what you mean by this, but there's no picking where something will reenter hundreds of years in the future. if you just want to ensure that it will reenter, sooner or later, that's easily done.
Well, you could schedule a deorbit burn, assuming the hardware is still in working order far into the future.
You can't do this on a long term scale with something that's below geostationary orbit, because random solar flares and solar phenomena cause expansion and contraction of the earth's atmosphere at unpredictable times. If you have a satellite in an orbit that is low enough to gradually degrade through atmospheric drag (even if it's a very high-LEO orbit or molniya orbit that won't reenter for an estimated 300 years), the exact time that it will re-enter can't be predicted with any confidence. At least not if you are talking about a very long time scale. Short-term (3, 5 or 7 year time scale) orbit degradation of things in LEO is predictable based on orbital height and known atmospheric density at a given altitude, but beyond that any re-entry predictions become much more fuzzy.
If you want to put something in orbit that will stay in a predictable location, you don't want it to re-enter at all, you want to put it in an orbit that is high enough to not be affected by atmospheric drag on a geologic time scale. Something slightly beyond geostationary will still be there in 200,000 years.
Orbits decay, often at a plannable rate. Eventually it crashes back to earth and becomes an archeological relic for future explorers. I bet you could even design the sattelite to burn specatularly (in many colors) on the way down so it's more likely to be seen and sought after.
Orbits only really decay due to atmospheric drag. Other tiny bits of cosmic, rarified gas can slow the spacecraft on a long timescale, and solar radiation pressure can perturb an orbit (occasionally dramatically, if the Sun is unhappy), but the effect is far smaller than constant drag. If a small satellite is orbiting Earth at a high enough altitude which was calculated to consider the broader gravitational system (Earth's natural satellites, the Sun, and fainter perturbations from nearby celestial objects have to be factored in), orbit can be designed to be stable on a long, long timescale. Millions of years, or more.
The real fly in your plan's ointment would be exposure to space, which sucks a lot for electronics.
Those are called ballistic projectiles, and you cannot place one in a precise orbit. You need upper-stage guidance, admittedly just for the placement of the satellite, but you still need electronics. Though, that being said, I'm now curious how you intend to store large-scale data without any use of electronics.
I'm struggling to think of a suitable "analog format," maybe help me out? Silicon tablets of runes? Analog is unscalable here, no matter how cheap launch systems are.
I was thinking in the case the civilization lost access to a lot of basic data. Then finding the magic satellite without magic radar, maybe without even knowing about the magic satellite amongst all the other satellites up there.
A deep cave structure on the moon, and large triangles formed into the lunarscape visible from telescope on earth pointing towards the entrance. Bonus: You'll probably spur space development technology faster than normal for any civilization that can see it.
Oh, no I love the idea of a time capsule in space. In fact, given how cheap some mylar (for detection) and silicon (for inscribing information) is, I think "we" (humanity) should put a bunch of it up there. Like they Voyager probes, but MUCH more data, and maybe in orbit around the sun. But it's not something to rely upon as backups - but very nice as a message into curious explorers of the future.
Depends on your definition of 'findable', I suppose.
Flight 370 wasn't found after "the most expensive search operation in aviation history[1]" performed by a multinational effort over almost three years. There are distinctions to quibble about, sure, and there are things that could be done to make things not designed to shuttle meatbags around easier to find.
But the area comprising the middle of the not-stuff you reference is big.
That's an example of stuff in the middle of a whole bunch of other stuff, not in the middle of a bunch of non-stuff. I'm not sure that it's all that similar at all, beyond as a a very general "finding stuff can be hard" example.
Oh, I may have become confused as to which part of this thread I was responding to - I thought we were talking about finding a satellite after reentry.
Oh, I imagine unplanned and reentry would likely make it very hard to locate, if not destroy the contents in the process. Decaying orbits would mean it's likely to happen, too. But I think if a civilization has the capability to reach an orbit, it's likely they have the technology to find something in orbit, or will shortly.
A better plan might be to create a structure on the moon to house it, and create giant triangles in the landscape of the moon visible through telescope that point towards it. The moon is fairly stable to my knowledge (except for meteorites, but I think that can be somewhat mitigated depending on the time frame we are talking about), and people always like looking at the moon through telescopes...
And we should make it black and rectangular shape. I suggest we call it the monolith. We might want to put a few of them around the solar system just to be safe.
>Is there any project which strives to preserve our current knowledge about humanity in some sort of long-term storage so that also people in 500 or 2000 years will be able to reconstruct even without having access to 'real' artifacts? Is this actually a problem which current archaeologist think about?
That's an interesting project on it's own (and there are various types of "capsules" -- from knowledge to seeds) but it's not particularly relevant to archeology.
Archeological info to be retained is just an small subset of knowledge to be retained in general (e.g. scientific, technological, state records, cultural (music, literature, movies), software, historical, etc).
Human minds and physical artifacts are still the least fragile and volatile storage medium known. Software requires infrastructure, hardware, regular maintenance and domain knowledge, a brittle chain.
Consider that we still have cuneiform tablets from ancient Babylon, and we can decipher them due to physical and cultural artifacts persisting over generations. But... we have already lost the masters of the Apollo moon landings, and much of the knowledge of how the software written back then will die out when the engineers who worked on them do, because software knowledge isn't passed on generationally the way culture and language are.
It's likely that archaeologists from the year 4017 will be picking through our garbage, rather than our software, and that their ability to accomplish the latter will depend entirely on whether they find a "Rosetta Stone" in the former that lets them reconstruct everything from first principles.
> Consider that we still have cuneiform tablets from ancient Babylon, and we can decipher them due to physical and cultural artifacts persisting over generations.
I've been on a bit of a wikipedia binge recently: Its actually even older than that. Babylonia was the Akkadian country that used cuneiform, but Sumerian cuneiform clay tablets exist that are much older still!
"The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to develop a contemporary version of the historic Rosetta Stone to last from 2000 to 12,000 AD; it is run by the Long Now Foundation. Its goal is a meaningful survey and near permanent archive of 1,500 languages."
For the most part you want to remove access to these artifacts from "graverobbers" who could not care any less about historical or any other value than how much they can get --which is often peanuts compared to their historical value, or what is paid by collectors.
Er, not sure if your post is a joke, but if not, that site is a crazy smorgasbord of crackpot theories that is so nutty that I'm not sure that the site even takes itself seriously.
We're not here for religious battle, so we've banned this account which seems like it is. We're happy to unban accounts if you email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll post civilly and substantively in the future.
I’ve got $20 that says when they open it up it’s Giorgio Tsoukalos dressed up like Nefertiti and a bunch of Martians getting hammered to a Bangles cover band.
The more we learn about the Giza Pyramids, the more they look like some technological device. I highly doubt the common "understanding" that their designed use was a fancy mausoleum for dignitaries. I have no doubt they have been used for this purpose, but unlikely to be the original intent.
Why? There is no evidence for that, is there? Also, look at the great cathedrals of the middle ages - people built them during several lifetimes and at huge expense, and the only "practical" purpose was to have a space for religious services. That and maybe the hope for eternal life after death etc...
There's a cathedral in Catalonia that began construction in 1882. Its practical purpose is to attract tourists to Barcelona; maybe some day it'll be fully completed as a place of worship.
Fun fact: there's a Neolithic site in Ireland, Newgrange, that's actually older than the pyramids. Fascinating and worth a visit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newgrange