Metal Monolith in Utah Gone | Hacker News Reader

Metal Monolith in Utah Gone

nytimes.com

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https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Utah_Monolith.jpg

- Monolith taken by Patrick A. Mackie.

- Date and time of data generation: 08:05, 15 May 2016

- 4,000 × 6,000

OpenStreetMap status:

- https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/8162265901

- removed:tourism=artwork

- removed:artwork_type=sculpture

To all who misread the "Taken by":

It means "Photograph of the monolith taken by Patrick A. Mackie" and not literally taken.

> I bought the camera used recently and didn’t update the exif date in the camera. I uploaded it on Wikipedia and I’m cool with it without copyright. The image is for the people. Patrickamackie2 (talk) 05:39, 28 November 2020 (UTC)patrickamackie

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Utah_monolit...?

This was definitely dated back. Maybe by changing the EXIF information?

Note how there are many fingerprints on the monolith that only appeared after many people visited it. They cannot be seen on the early photos from right after the discovery.

Fingerprints are hardly permanent, especially out here in the desert. Although it does not rain often, when it does wind comes with it and tends to wipe everything clean and then dirty it up again in whole new ways. If someone had a time lapse of the 4 years it was out there, I am confident you'd see markings come and go from its surface throughout its entire time in the desert.

If you really want to do digital archaeology, you should be looking at the buildup of dirt in corners, and erosion of the rock surfaces at its base, not the amount of dirt on a flat surface.

From some of the images I see it has rivets holding the panels on. Any glimmer of hope that this time it is aliens has been dashed. https://www.instagram.com/p/CIBf7YuALr3/

It would be silly to transport a solid chunk of metal through interplanetary space when some sheet metal would do the job.

And it would be silly to assume a species capable of interplanetary space travel would not use rivets.

It would actually be pretty funny if the extraterrestrial technology we like to imagine taking the form of some geometrically-perfect prism of exotic nano-materials did indeed exist, but had to be enclosed, for entirely practical reasons, in plain old riveted stainless steel.

It wouldn't even be that far off from what our species does anyway, putting our advanced nano-materials (integrated circuits) inside cases made of much lower-tech materials.

All that said, I don't think aliens would have left the lid behind.

Eh, if they're that capable, they probably have a lot of room to optimize for whatever they want. Maybe they consider rivets ugly—or consider making such a thing without rivets to be a demonstration of their skill (which it would be). I'd agree you can't assume for certain they wouldn't use rivets, but I'd say it seems likely they wouldn't.

(Of course, the chance they'd choose to make rivets in an exact shape and size and style that is presumably mass-produced somewhere on Earth is very unlikely unless they wanted to make something to blend in.)

Or this is just a container box that was dropped in Earth accidentally. So it's some sort of mass produced cost-cut product.

Maybe the aliens ARE the rivets! And we've been looking at the wrong thing all along. We've got to think outside the prismatic box.

The spokesman for the Utah Department of Public Safety specifically mentioned that the monolith was put together "with human-made rivets".

How he knows the difference between human-made rivets and other types of rivets was not explained.

Presumably, rivets whose sizes correspond to those standard on Earth. Be a big coincidence if they happened to use 3/16" rivets on Vulcan

But it would be silly to assume a species capable of interplanetary space travel couldn't imitate human made rivets

I don't understand how someone can look at a metal box held together with standard rivets and think "the aliens did it".

perhaps it’s easier if you interpret it as “the aliens could have done it”

Mythical creatures are very capable.

Their only limit is your imagination.

I think it would. Any species we encounter is likely to be old and extraordinarily advanced. The idea that they stitch pieces of material together is absurd. Matter will be like software to them, the process of construction so advanced that objects will be constructed as they appear internally in the world of thoughts. Perfect geometric curves, down to the atomic level. No seams. They may even have a programmable matter and that for sure wont have seams.... and rivets! lol

Unless they got stuck here and were trying to build an escape craft. Perhaps the monolith is all that remains...

Independent invention is a thing...

Also, they could have built it after they got here!

First they came for software monoliths and now even metal monoliths are gone.

A mesh of micro-monoliths would have been much more resilient to this sort of thing. Just saying.

Beware of the Decentralized Denial of Monoliths

Then the aliens started using Javascript for everything. Replacing aeons of stable, time-proven technology. And that's the last time we detected a signal from the mysterious celestial body known as Alpha Node 4.1.13.

Or was that 6.3.21? No wait...it's definitely 13.3.0. Huh!? 15.x already! I can't keep up.

In the 4 hours since you’ve posted your comment it’s been completely deprecated.

> the art world quickly speculated that it was the work of John McCracken, a sculptor fond of science fiction. He died in 2011.

This is a weird assumption given the Monolith first appeared years after his death according to satellite photos last I saw.

Certainly could be his last work and deployed by someone else as instructed post death.

Yeah it could be but it was 4-5 years after his death that it showed up which is a while and the connection is otherwise pretty generic to me.

Shame that I can't view аny of the pictures or videos on Instagram without an account.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CIBf7YuALr3/ works fine in firefox focus for me.

Try bibliogram.art or other istances

bibliogram is not working. There is some critical bug.

The gallery-dl program will let you do that:

https://github.com/mikf/gallery-dl

How much could someone get for a hunk of stainless steel? It seemed like it was hollow (ribbets).

I'm just wondering what would be the incentive to steal something like that, considering the efforts to reach the location.

Maybe there's a market to sell "alien devices" to enthusiasts?

Current market price for stainless is $0.35/lb so overestimating the weight of the monolith at 100 lbs would put it's scrap value at $35.

This smells like marketing promo start to finish. My guess is Musk.

My guess is "art".

That guy can't go to the corner store without calling someone a pedophile on Twitter, I'm pretty sure it's not him. Although the polycount on this thing is about where he seems to like it, so I can see where you get mixed up.

Why do people steal paintings?

I think it's more likely the authorities removed it.

FYI: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivet

the horror ... sorry :-( and thx :-)

It would be interesting to see “after” photos of the site now that it’s been removed.

There's a few here: https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/11/28/utahs-desert-obelisk-...

> The Salt Lake Tribune's web site, sltrib.com, is unavailable in the European Union.

Looks like it's difficult to remove trackers for some companies.

If The Salt Lake Tribune sells subscriptions on their website, I think they're actually violating EU law again, geoblocking is illegal...

I doubt it, given they are not targeting the European market. As a Utah firm clearly without an EU nexus, why would they need to care about EU law (or any other country besides their own?)

They clearly do, otherwise the site wouldn't be blocked.

And traffic is traffic. It's not that unusual for Rest of World to want to look at an obscure US site.

Of course the same does not apply in reverse, if you run afoul of the DMCA you’ll just be extradited into the US jurisdiction.

That's not true, geoblocking of digital goods is only illegal in the EU if you differentiate between different member states. Blocking all of the EU is fine.

If you want to read the whole regulation, it's here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv:...

News flash! The EU has no jurisdiction in SLC.

Your assertion only makes sense if you assume the only people accessing the site live in SLC.

No. If my company, my employees, my offices, and my web server are in SLC, I can let you access it from anywhere in the world without worrying about the laws anywhere else. I didn't follow the EU directive? So? What are they going to do, send assassins? Sue me in EU court? What levers of power over me do they have that have any relevance whatsoever?

FWIW, The Salt Lake Tribune is a non-profit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21446317

I dislike tracking on the web as much as the next HN reader, but I can also understand how a small/cash-strapped local newspaper would be hard pressed to spend literally any time or resources making sure that they are compliant with regulations in countries on the other side of the planet.

Fair enough. Though, they spent the time and money to implement the geo blocking and to consult lawyers.

Pretty sure that geoblocking is what you do when you don't have the cash to hire lawyers to make sure you did your compliance right.

Implementing geoblocking is trivial.

Removing the trackers too.

But what if those trackers is what make them financially viable?

Thanks to the geo blocking, we know that they do not rely on this source of income from European visitors.

So you want them to maintain two versions of their sites + testing + different cache settings, CDNs etc... because of legal requitements from countries an ocean away and people who are unlikely to visit the site anyway?

Is it too much to ask?

Yes. Why would they put any those resources in when it will not increase revenue?

Geoblocking takes less than a day to implement and shields them from legal issues, what you are asking is several weeks of work initially + continuous maintenance work.

Looks like it is difficult for some Europeans to acknowledge that not everyone on earth lives under the rule of unelected EU technocrats.

You haven't heard of the European elections?

As opposed to being ruled by technocrats elected by someone else(Americans)?

> Looks like it is difficult for some Europeans to acknowledge that not everyone on earth lives under the rule of unelected EU technocrats.

Your comment reads as a textbook example of the expression "cut off the nose to spite the face".

Do you honestly believe that abusive tracking is in anyway in your best interests?

https://web.archive.org/web/20201129061555/https://www.sltri...

(sltrib.com blocks visitors from Europe)

A few weeks earlier, I saw this PBS Doc on "Desert X" which has a lot of interesting (if not metallic) artwork set in the deserts of Southern California: https://www.pbs.org/video/desert-x-kqzqhx/

Curious if this might be an extension for their DESERT X 2021 launch, if not related to one of their artists, past or present: https://www.desertx.org

http://hailthemonolith.com/

Strikes me as performance art if it was removed by the installer. Or, as mentioned in this thread, an asshole took it or the aliens retrieved their DNA/Mana collection device. If it's the last option, check that those that found it are still here.

We were not deemed worthy.

Fun, but it's somebody's art project. There's also statues of Jason Voorhees at the bottom of various lakes.

There is a lack / something is missing.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Do we have any reason to think it wasn't the artist or someone related to the artist who took it?

A now deleted post in the HN thread (for the Utah BLM posting) indicated it was placed by a local outdoor group in memory of someone who died. They were purportedly freaked out it had been found & were trying to get the BLM post deleted - not understanding it had gone viral.

ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25202573

I checked the poster's rep and he seemed like an ordinary HN geek. I'm this side of even odds, that he was being straight up with us.

edit: I see now that he seems to disavow the whole thing, toward the bottom of the thread.

The poster in that thread also followed up later saying that this turned out to be a misidentification of the location of a different memorial.

Which opens the quest for that "different memorial".

He's the author of the Caddy web server.

Whoever installed it should have poured concrete in it if they wanted to make removal or theft difficult. BLM could have removed even then, albeit with a crane or front loader and a heavy truck.

wasn't this in the middle of nowhere? seems unlikely they'd have heavy equipment out there. Seems more likely some jerks decided to take it for themselves for bragging rights.

Bragging rights towards who?

What person doesn't hear "Yeah, hear about that supposed alien monolith recently? Me and my mate Geoff stole it" and immadiately think "Wow, what a dickhead"?

But then why is there a market for stolen art? There is, isn't there?

I think that paying $10m for a stolen painting valued at $20m, I (as an affluent criminal) would brag that I own a painting worth $20m, not that I paid $10m for it.

It got the DNA sample it came for

But what about the 5G radiation patterns?

Blocked by the chemtrails.

Dropped the virus it carried. Returned to the Oumuamua mothership.

Well there's a surprise...

My guess would be some sort of Tesla CyberTruck or SpaceX StarShip stainless steel promo.

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