Someone already mentioned stuff in Egypt and the Pyramids. I am tired of this claim that we could not build a pile of stones like the Great pyramid. We could. It’s a 481 foot tall stacked up pile of rocks. The only thing that stops us is money and will. We’ve built far larger public projects than the Great Pyramid in shorter time. That’s a false analogy.
Boulder Dam alone is taller, longer, wider, and far heavier, and has more cubic volume than the great pyramid and was built in less time. It’s not even the largest dam in the world. That superlative goes to a dam in Pakistan that’s 50% larger than Boulder.
The US Southern Border Wall. . . will be far exceed the construction effort of the Great Pyramid’s volume by about 150 times in just concrete. My back of the envelope calculations for the 1,954 miles of border for concrete alone comes to 50 million tons, compared to the 6.5 million tons estimated weight of the Great Pyramid, before we look at the steel for the bollards. Money and will.
Let’s look at the list you linked to:
- Water works, aqueducts, etc.: This is BS, metmom. They did well, but it is a progression of development. The assertion they did better than what we build today is a load of horse hockey. They moved water over a few miles with heavy losses for small populations. We move water, treat it, and clean waste, and re-insert that water into the ecosystem cleaner than we took it out. None of the ancient water system could do any of that.
- Steel Damascus Steel swords cutting through other lesser metals was NOT hard to do, considering the poor quality of other iron weapons. Damascus steel was never lost. It’s a method of hammer forging and folding iron with carbonized wood and other alloys which resulted in a better alloy. The Japanese also produced very high quality steel doing the same thing, using different numbers of folds for different parts of the swords for different purposes, edges with hard multiple folds to take an edge, lesser numbers for the body, backs with more to give spring, etc. Look at my FreeRepublic handle. This is an area I know something about, metmom. It isn’t true. A modern steel could cut those “Damascus Steel Blades” without a problem. A modern metallurgist could run rings around a seat of the pants iron smith making his steel in a forge from the past, and do it far more consistently.
- Concrete: Another claim without reality. For ever single assertion about ancient concrete lasting 2000 years, there are examples of ancient concrete that failed. Romans did not transport salt water from the sea to make their concrete. When this article talks about concrete that lasts such a length of time, they are referring from the experience of observing that it is still there. But a lot isn’t. A lot of our concrete will be too. We can make concrete that is FAR stronger than Roman concrete. Testing of Roman concrete shows it is actually quite weak, where as we can make concrete that will withstand up to 12,000 pounds per square inch. Roman Concrete would likely fail at much more than 400.
- Road Building: ROTFLMAO! Really? They went there??? OK, lets examine that absurdity. The author of that article claims that the amazing Inca Civilization built their non-wheel using people built their road connecting their towns in a hundred years. WOW! I’m not impressed. Their alpacas and Llamas could walk on cobble stone paths! YAY! The Romans built roads with ruts separated by 4’ 8 ½” apart, the exact distance for their chariot wheels to fit in. That resulted in the distance between rails, the gauge, of our railroads today. Speaking of which, when we were building our Transcontinental Railroad in 1875, the record was TEN MILES A DAY, due to the capitalistic competition between the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific Railroad companies! In 1955, Eisenhower challenged our people to build the Interstate freeway system across the United States. It was started by act of Congress in 1956 and deemed completed by 1992 with 48,191 miles (77,556 km) completed.
The Golden Gate Bridge. . . Built from start of design to opening to first civilian traffic six years. Total weight of Bridge, anchorages, and approaches (1986)* is 887,000 tons. . . But the bridge is far larger, than the Great Pyramid. Money and will, metmom. - Stone Cutting: There I might cut some you some slack as we don’t know how they cut some of the deep rectangular pockets into the stones. We can do it, and we can actually do it better. The question is would we bother to do it when we have techniques for accomplishing the same thing more economically. Money and will, metmom.
- Agriculture: ROTFLMAO! Assumptions based on nose picking archaeology are not facts. There actually very little evidence what was claimed about the success of ancient agriculture over long terms in feeding their populations or even maintaining those populations. The fact is that ALL of these cultures devoted 90% of their populations to agricultural activities. We, on the other hand, feed our populations with only 1% of our people devoted to agriculture. That says it all. Nothing more needs to be said about who does it better.
- Walls: A few minor surviving walls is not proof of success or superiority or even better technique. This refers back to Stone Cutting. Again, we could, if we put our minds and resources to doing it, accomplish the same thing. We don’t wish to because we have other ways to do the same thing. Why put in the effort? A high-pressure abrasive water jet would do what we see there. But why do it? Money and will, metmom.
- City Planning: ROTFLMAO! The largest ancient city had, at most, 50,000 people. I live in what is considered a small town today and there are 110,000 people today. The author of this article has no clue about what City Planning involves. Those ancient cities lived on top of their own excrement and garbage. They are called Tells because they grow higher as newer buildings were built on the ruins and garbage of older ones, building a hill. Some have nine and ten layers of ruins below them. He’s clueless. Our planned cities of today are self-contained skyscrapers which are planned machines for living.
The Burj Khalifa building, the tallest in the world, took only 5 years to build, required 200% more volume of rock than the great pyramid before we start talking about steel, aluminum, and other materials, and its height is three times, foot print larger, and while I doubt it will last as long, is likely more useful. The entire building weighs 3,500 times more than the great pyramid. Money and will, metmom. - Astronomy: ROTFLMAO! I don’t denigrate their observations. But metmom, talk about a clueless claim. Yes, they did OK in making observations having to do with the movements of what they could see and noting how it corresponded to the seasons they knew, but to claim they could do better than we can today is the assertion of a complete lunatic.
- Weapons: Another BS assertion. Greek Fire, Archimedes Mirror are the things of myth. Physics and chemistry limit what can be done with the materials they had available to them in those eras. Bronze and brass do not have the ability to reflect the sun as described in sufficient power to ignite anything. Look at the reports. It’s someone second hand claiming they heard about it. While phosphorus was available to the Greeks and could possibly have ignited the ships, getting it projected TO the ships was the problem. They had limited range ballistas and large scale crossbows, but nothing more in the projectile category. There is no way they “do it better than modern people.”
In 1973, the Greek scientists Ioannis Sakkas set up 70 mirrors with a copper coating, which were pointed at a plywood model of a Roman warship at a distance of 50 meters. When the mirrors were focused accurately, the ship burst into flames within seconds.
While this was widely reported, no one ever has been able to replicate this using even glass mirrors which would be far more efficient reflectors. True science requires the ability to duplicate the experiment. Myth Busters tried it under ideal conditions and could not do it using far more real silvered mirrors which reflect far more energy. One has to be able to hold the focus on a point on the target long enough to raise its temperature high enough beyond its kindling point for it to start a self-sustaining fire. That’s not easy to do.
It can be done with computer coordinated mirrors, in fact birds are frequently incinerated by solar generation stations in the deserts of Arizona and Nevada, but there are thousands of focused mirrors at those stations. It is apparently FAKE science.
So, metmom, there really isn’t anything our ancestors could do that we can’t.