Engineer: Egyptians built pyramids by piling rubble and attaching bricks later
mirror.co.uk
mirror.co.uk
At the end he describes lowering blocks into place by incrementally removing bladders. This does not work. As soon as you are fully submerged and displacing with bladders you are unstable. As your depth increases, pressure increases, and your displacement goes down making you sink even faster. The good news is if you get neutrally buoyant you could poke the blocks down into place and they wouldn't weight much so you could move them around then remove the bladders.
Also not covered was how the water gets to the top. Each lock load of blocks and bladders requires at minimum the same mass of water to be lowered (to fill the lower lock chamber). In practice it will be at least several times this in order to keep the blocks from jamming in the chamber. So each ton of block effortlessly floated to the top will take several to many tons of water laboriously hauled to the top. Hauling water is probably lower friction than stone, compared to the volume multiplier, I can't say who wins.
The inner lower lock door is also a problem. It has to contain water at something like 10 atmospheres and be loose enough to move. Plus, if shaped like the video, it needs to weigh 150lbs/in^2 to keep from being blown out when raised. That makes it about 120 feet tall if made from limestone.
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The entering tunnel is gently sloped but doesn't have to reach the top of the pyramid.
I guess it would be easier to build since the the walls of the channels are kept in place by the weight of the whole structure.
I don't know about the bladders though.
Point is, I'm skeptical too but the fellow has made some more videos that go into more detail. They even directly answer some of your questions.
Don't immediately write something off without doing some due diligence first. The more I'm learning about this, the more practical it seems.
In the end, lets all at least agree that it was human innovation and not alien technology that built the pyramids.
2. We don't know how they built the pyramids.
Either aliens built the pyramids, or we're dumber than the ancients.
All it really takes is one genius with influence in the right ears to achieve something remarkable.
When it comes to engineering, domain knowledge is often far more important than any kind of inherent "smartness," and ancient Egyptians had thousands of years of block-stacking domain knowledge that we don't. While modern society has billions of tricks up our sleeve that would completely befuddle ancient Egyptians, I'm sure they had a handful of tricks that would catch us by surprise. Knowledge isn't strictly ordered.
Also, just because we aren't sure precisely which strategy they used doesn't mean that we didn't think of it, it just means that we can't find evidence to overwhelmingly support a single one of our hypotheses.
I spent a bit of time over the past few years really old text (some 2000 years+). Nothing in those writings suggest we are smarter than those people.
Or even take today's technology. We are in many ways coasting on the accomplishments of prior generations and very likely some of these would be difficult to recreate from scratch. I recall some rhetorical question: say we wanted to do it tomorrow, how much would it cost us in R&D to once again figure out how to get to the moon? Or, since most of us know tech, I can put it this way: how many folks on HN talking about js or ruby know how to write a kernel, or design a CPU, from scratch?
The density of water is 1,000 kg/m³.
The density limestone is around 2,500 kg/m³ (it can actually go down to around 2,100 kb/m³).
This means that you'd need to displace more than 2 to 2.5 times the volume of water in order to float a limestone block. Keep in mind that volume goes up (roughly) as a cube of the increase in linear dimension, so the difference won't be quite as dramatic as it first seems, but that's still a lot of flotation required. Certainly much larger than the floats shown in the video.
The animal-skin bladder theory is particularly problematic, because the volumetric efficiency of spheroid animal-skin bladder floats isn't particularly good. Water would fill in the space between bladders, requiring much larger float assemblies than if they were able to construct larger, single-chamber bladders. The video depicts float assemblies that aren't even as large as the blocks they were transporting. I found that rather disappointing for an engineering-driven theory.
Note that Egypt was a lot wetter when the pyramids were built (circa 2500 BCE). http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/ancient/climate-change-may...
>Heck, imagine the PSI of water at the bottom of the pyramid columns when they were reaching a hundred feet high?
A column of water 100 feet high exerts 43 psi at its base.
If the mechanics of using the stonework to hold the water were well worked out I would think clay would work well to seal small cracks (and for the scale we are talking about, the 'plumber' could just crawl on in). Or pitch or other sticky stuff.
Tied together, a 1m³ block of limestone and a volume of 1.5m³ of floats displace 2.5m³ of water. Assuming the mass of the floats themselves isn't much then already that would lift 2.5 tons off from the bottom of the water pool.
This idea replaces that quarter mile ramp by a waterway with a difference in water level of 150+ meter and thus with 150+ meter high watertight walls that can withstand the pressure. Where are the signs that that waterway was there?
Also, how do you get the water up in that lock? Ships can move up through locks, but water only flows down.
I think it is more likely to claim there was an oil well there.
Edit: it wasn't a desert at the time they built the pyramids, but blocking a natural spring never was a good idea over there.
I'd say whatever the most simple explanation is the answer I could see either rubble or ramps.
Did the Egyptian know about water weels at that time?
The part where they float the blocks up the side seems dubious to me.
Romans used water for mining too.
Why do effort when nature does it for you?
Two problems people raise:
Water pressure from 150m+ water column is too much. In the video they talk about dividing the hight slope channel into sections This way leaks will be also smaller.
Putting water inside. This probably is the weaker point of all.
But overall it makes sense. It will be great for a kickstarter to try to replicate it at a small scale.
Other sources: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2526467/Were-...
I'm no Egyptologist, but I think I'm right in saying that this guy is arguing against something (the whole long-ramp thing) that's been at least thought unlikely, if not wholly disproven, for some decades now.
Or are you saying we should just dismiss all of the content because you don't like the organization that published it?
I question your belief that you can evaluate information based on the organization that provides it. Or at least that some popular or well-respected organization can be trusted to provide good information. In fact, oftentimes the most widely trusted organizations have the most invested in maintaining the status quo, which makes facts subservient to that core need to sustain the venerable order of things.
Discounting stories in the Mirror and Mail is a totally reasonable tactic.
UK papers do not have fact checkers like US publications. UK papers very carefully report what someone says, even if most people agree that person is a wingnut and talking nonsense.
Looking at the UK tabloid newspapers we see some deeply nasty methods where blatant lies are told and nonsense peddled.
If the Daily Mail told me that grass is green I'd have to go out and check.
Centralized, authority-driven worldviews are very destructive and outdated.