Moderator: Alyrium Denryle
...adam_grif wrote:
Ok that out of the way, are there any good resources debunking this nonsense? Either specialized ones or just general skeptic sites that do a page on it. Specifically the claim (that I can't find backed up by anything reputable, but source criticism is never good enough for the Tin Foil Hat types) that the Pyramids were built at "the exact centre of the Earth's landmass".
I am an artist, metaphorical mind-fucks are my medium.CaptainChewbacca wrote:Dude...
Way to overwork a metaphor Shadow. I feel really creeped out now.
Easy - just consider the Earth's surface as two dimensional, as it is represented in every map ever. The "center of the landmass" is the point at which the rest of the earth can be divided into 4 even parts and would have the same land area in each one.ShadowDragon8685 wrote: How in the holy hell were pyramids supposed to have been build at the 'exact center of the Earth's landmass'. The Earth is a sphere! (Well, close enough.)
The only 'center' it has is in the middle of the molten core.
Like I said, "prove it" never works on these types. They just drag out some dodgy picture from somewhere and say 'HAH SEE PROOF'. Being able to demonstrate that it is NOT the center would be highly useful.Prove that Gaza in Egypt is the exact centre of Earth's landmass.
Darth Wong wrote:Case Study: The Egyptian Pyramids
The pyramids are often used as "proof" that you don't need a lot of technology to make a really big building. However, nothing could be further from the truth. They represent a fascinating study in ancient ingenuity and precision stone-cutting techniques, but that's all they represent.
The Great Pyramid at Giza is the largest and most famous of the Egyptian pyramids. Its sides are sloped at roughly 52° and it stands roughly 140 metres tall. Its mass is estimated to be around 5.25 million metric tons. That may sound impressive (so much so that pseudoscience types spout the usual "alien visitation" theories about its origin, often buttressing their argument by exaggerating the precision and difficulty of its construction), but remember that their builders had to make three huge compromises:
The pyramid shape, which was not a purely aesthetic choice. It was a concession to their poor building materials. A building of that size, constructed primarily out of soft limestone with a decorative granite shell, would never have survived if not for the pyramidal shape. It was also the only shape they could build on that scale with their limited construction technology.
The paucity of internal spaces. This was also a concession to their limited technology; the vast pyramids had only a handful of internal chambers and tunnels, quite unlike the airy interiors of modern office buildings or even the interior of a typical Egyptian home dwelling of that era.
Time and money. It took an estimated 30 years for 20,000 labourers to build the Great Pyramid. If we convert this to modern terms, assuming a 5-day work week and a paltry $10/hr rate of pay, the labour costs alone would exceed ten billion dollars, to say nothing of the material costs.
Why a pyramid? The pyramid shape provides a large load-bearing area where it's needed the most: at the bottom. Pyramids have some interesting characteristics:
87.5% of the mass is in the lower half. That's the geometry of pyramids; the volume of any pyramid is proportional to h³ (in this case, it would be roughly 0.81h³), so the upper half is only 1/8 of the total volume.
The base area for a pyramid with 52° sloped walls is roughly 2.44h², or 48,000 m² in the case of the Great Pyramid. This means that its 5.25 million ton mass is distributed so that the average ground pressure is less than 1.1 MPa. By way of comparison, modern structural steel yields at ~260 MPa.
If you were to take the pyramid and reshape it into a 75 metre wide square building, it would be 400 metres tall (almost as tall as the Sears Tower in Chicago). Its base would take 8½ times more stress than the pyramid, but the compressive strength of limestone is actually high enough to withstand this. The problem is that they couldn't build it, and it wouldn't hold together if they did. They used ramps to slide the blocks up to the top levels of their pyramids, but how would they lift these blocks to the top of a square building? And while a pyramid is an easy loading scenario, how would a 400 metre tall limestone rectangle survive high winds? Wind creates a complex shear, tensile, and compressive loading scenario on a tall skyscraper, and limestone doesn't handle the first two types of load very well at all.
Pyramids and cones are the easiest, most natural shapes to project out of the ground. If you want to test this claim, simply go to the beach and try to build a huge pyramid, followed by a skyscraper of equal size. Which one is more durable, and easier to build? If you're working with soft materials, a pyramid is the only way to go.
So could the Egyptians scale up a small structure into a big one? Most certainly not ... their small strucrtures had a wide variety of shapes and designs, most of which were not pyramidal. But when they tried to make a large structure, they were forced into the pyramidal shape. In short, the design of the pyramids was driven entirely by their scale.
Even if we ignore the limitations of Egyptian construction techniques, we can easily determine that their construction materials would never support a modern skyscraper. Modern skyscrapers subject their structures to far more stress than the pyramid structure had to handle, because they support their weight on relatively small load-bearing supports rather than huge solid regions. Furthermore, that stress will be a combination of tension, shear, and compression as the building resists gravity and wind. Limestone, on the other hand, has middling compressive strength but it suffers from poor shear strength and almost no tensile strength (a common failing of ceramics), because it isn't anisotropic (insensitive to direction of load) like structural steel.
Contrary to the beliefs of some superstitious mystics, the pyramids don't represent unthinkable engineering skills on the part of the Egyptians or their imaginary alien benefactors. In fact, the pyramids show us their limitations in stark detail because those limitations drove the design, both in the area of construction technology and materials science. They're not examples of huge, ancient buildings; they barely qualify as "buildings" at all. A building is normally expected to be largely hollow, consisting mostly of habitable spaces. Houses qualify. Skyscrapers qualify. Even military bunkers qualify. But the pyramids do not. They're giant glorified rock piles, not "buildings" in the traditional sense.
You won't be able to do that. Map projections are entirely arbitrary and I'm sure Egypt would be near the "centre" for some definitions of "centre". At the very least, based on that projection, there should be another "centre" on longitude 150° W.adam_grif wrote:Like I said, "prove it" never works on these types. They just drag out some dodgy picture from somewhere and say 'HAH SEE PROOF'. Being able to demonstrate that it is NOT the center would be highly useful.
Through any point, one can draw two perpendicular geodesics (great circles on Earth's surface, or ellipses, really). Each one divides the surface into two hemispheres, and both into four equal parts. Those parts do not have to have the same amount of landmass, although the points that do are not completely unique either, e.g., the antipode would trivially have the same property.Sela wrote:I'm not sure I understand the way that you've presented their claim for what constitutes the center of landmass.
Not true. It's always possible to draw a geodesic through any point in such a way that exactly half of the landmass is in the resulting hemispheres, but with further criteria (e.g., one line of longtitude, or with more than two parts), this is not possible.Sela wrote:Why not use a map which has its 'center' on Japan instead of Africa/Europe? All of a sudden Japan is the center of landmass.
That's an equal-area projection (of what quality, though, is unclear... and why is there no Antarctica?), but really you don't need a projection in the first place if you were doing so geometrically rather than according to the peculiarities of the standard coordinates we use.Dooey Jo wrote:You won't be able to do that. Map projections are entirely arbitrary and I'm sure Egypt would be near the "centre" for some definitions of "centre".
But don't you see: how did Eratosthenes really figure out a proof that the Earth was spherical and hence propose said system of longtitude and latitude? And he did it while in Egypt, too!Dooey Jo wrote:The thing they need to explain is why it is significant. Where is the evidence that aliens care deeply about a certain way to calculate a centre of the surface of the Earth, and is it really so strong that it can be used to infer that aliens must have built pyramids at that location?
Well, the notion that the pyramids were built primarily with slave labor has been discredited some time ago. Although some slave labor was certainly involved, most of the builders were free laborers working off the farming season.Patrick Degan wrote: On a related note, a retired construction worker from Flint, MI, Wally Wallingford, is busy demonstrating that structures like Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids hardly required aliens or gangs of hundreds of thousands of slaves out of a Cecil B. DeMille religious epic to construct —just a clever usage of leverage and physics.
Because the pyramids are so massive and mysterious that some people refuse to believe ancient humans could have done anything so impressive.lord Martiya wrote:I don't understand. Why claiming pyramids were maid by aliens?
To be fair, lines of latitude are a useful navigational system on any planet that rotates; they're artificial but not entirely arbitrary. Aliens might very well use them to map an unknown planet.Kuroneko wrote:Or, at least, that's what adam_grif described. The provided maps do something different, for they do not divide the Earth "into 4 even parts". Lines of longtidude are always geodesics, but lines of latitude are not, except for the equator. Since tha maps picks out a line of latitude, apparently the aliens don't even care about any geometrical center of landmass either, but rather a center according to the particular system of navigation invented almost two millenia after the pyramids were bult. How curious.
What I'd like to see is proof that the ass who drew that map actually did so. I'm not seeing it. Also, those dotted arrows look like random curves to me.Not true. It's always possible to draw a geodesic through any point in such a way that exactly half of the landmass is in the resulting hemispheres, but with further criteria (e.g., one line of longtitude, or with more than two parts), this is not possible.Sela wrote:Why not use a map which has its 'center' on Japan instead of Africa/Europe? All of a sudden Japan is the center of landmass.
Gil Hamilton wrote:If I were aliens trying to build large piles of rocks, I wouldn't have chosen Egypt at the time for its geographic location, but rather because it had a large, easy to organize labor pool which is governed by the authority of a lone individual. Very easy to manipulate from the top down, thus get my giant stone piles built.
Though you still wind up with massive labor gangs; the difference is mostly in the number of whip-wielding overseers required to make it work.Marcus Aurelius wrote:Well, the notion that the pyramids were built primarily with slave labor has been discredited some time ago. Although some slave labor was certainly involved, most of the builders were free laborers working off the farming season.
Although frequently unspoken, there's an element of racism in the claims of aliens building ancient pyramids, as in "those darkies couldn't possibly have been smart enough to build this without extra-terrestrial assistance." Some of this undoubtedly stems from an inferiority complex, after all, Europeans are the smartest, most civilized people on the planet (never mind that Dutch sailors imported Chinese plows in the 17th Century because they were far superior to European plows... those must have been invented by aliens too!).PeZook wrote:Frankly, if the pyramids were built by aliens, does it mean all the massive cathedrals scattered around Europe were, too? Some of them are actually taller, they're vastly more architecturally advanced and there are dozens of them. While the tools available in medieval Europe were of significantly better quality than those the egyptians could use, I posit the difference was not significant enough, and therefore the cathedrals could not possibly have been built by humans without alien assistance. I mean, you're trying to tell me that giant dome on St. Paul's Cathedral in London was built by hand? Sure it was, buddy!
The point of an undertone is that it is implied, not outright stated.Sela wrote:@Sanchez:
Sorry, but I think that that's a load of BS. The earliest Egyptian pyramids predate European civilization by more than 2000 YEARS. It's not a matter of race; it's a matter of technological prowess and progress through the ages. Of course feel free to prove me wrong. Show me two conspiracy-theory-alien sites that make ANY reference whatsoever to the idea that it was beyond the ancient Egyptians AND ONLY the ancient Egyptians. Not the ancient babylonians, assyrians, akkadians, etc. Seems to me if this racist undertone exists it should be easy enough to find reference to.
Look at it this way... what ancient sites have been the overwhelming subject of the hundreds of books, magazine articles, and television programs made about them? Roman technology, the Coliseum, the Colossus of Rhodes, Stonehenge? 99% of the ancient alien theories argue that the Egyptian pyramids, Mesoamerican pyramids, the Nazca lines, etc., were created by aliens. No one seriously argues that any ancient European construction was built by aliens, but moderately credible authors regularly argue that the Maya, Inca, Nazca, or Egyptians couldn't possibly have had the technology to build pyramids or draw lines in the dirt 2000, 3000, or 4000 years ago. Thus, the undertone.Sela wrote:@Sanchez:
Sorry, but I think that that's a load of BS. The earliest Egyptian pyramids predate European civilization by more than 2000 YEARS. It's not a matter of race; it's a matter of technological prowess and progress through the ages. Of course feel free to prove me wrong. Show me two conspiracy-theory-alien sites that make ANY reference whatsoever to the idea that it was beyond the ancient Egyptians AND ONLY the ancient Egyptians. Not the ancient babylonians, assyrians, akkadians, etc. Seems to me if this racist undertone exists it should be easy enough to find reference to.
