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Comment by superposeur | Hacker News Reader

I love to imagine this kind of thing dug up by an alien civilization. That it displays the moons of Jupiter will be a fun puzzle and a source of wonder. “Obviously”, they will say, “these people must have worshipped Jupiter as a god and used the position of its moons to keep time.” But the pieces of the puzzle will never quite fit.

Who knows, maybe the Antikythera mechanism or the pyramids were a similarly ludicrous prank?

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"Some people (X'Grn'k et al) say it was a device used for humorous purposes. However, we consider that the presence of sacred etched silicon devices rules this hypothethis out. While crudely worked in that time, and despite the abundance of raw material on the planet, such silicon was in short supply and was central to the nascent Guptian Church movement. In addition, records suggest that the "geo"politics of the time, somewhere between 1980 and 2050, had silicon artisanry in constant high military demand (see the F'llr'wq Metaversity analysis on use of Phonic Screen Devices in Central-West Asian planet-surface warfare between 1945 and 2045), and if not inducted into the Guptian priesthood, a silicon carver could expect a so-called 99-6 life, a 105-Earth-hour cycle with 99 hours in a warfab and 6 hours to rest (J'Hrar et al). Furthermore, per a recent discovery of a transaction record thought likely to be payment for living volume at the Western-American coastal enclave, the artisan class appears to have little in the way of disposable resourcing. Thus, we consider it unlikely that an artisan of that period could have spared or even been allowed the resources or time for such levity."

I am now adding "Silicon Carver" to my resume.

Alien researcher: In fact, the dull-gray color is an artifact of aging. Ancient hoomans decorated their ritualistic jewelry with shiny black, and metallic reds and blues.

Here is a reconstruction of how it would have looked in their prime: shows colorful C90 watch render, fist risen up to the sky, other hoomans kneeling around the Cray high priest

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