How do you know that the point of them annexing us into their galgatic empire isn’t so they can put down sweatshops to force us to work in, so they can make cheap products for their consumers at home? I’m not sure where it follows that a spacefaring race nessacary has to be benevolent or “enlightened” rather then simply intelligent and maybe a little creative.
Radio Signals have the problem of degrading pretty fast though, unless directed(and even if directed, probably won’t last too long). So unless aliens were broadcasting powerful radio signals directly at us, it’s unlikely we’d actually be able to tell that it was anything out of the ordinary.
Of course, we’d also have to be listening at the right patch of sky at the same time the signals were arriving, or we’d miss it.
It means I’m a newbie, searching old dead threads because I don’t know any better. How do I know their dead? They don’t smell or anything…
Likely because the structure is cohered (to last a very long time) because of the weight of the blocks. You can’t build a house (or even a pyramid) out of just bricks.
Abe’s post was indeed excellent.
Then how do you explain the way that Playdough and Silly Putty just suddenly “appeared” after Edgar Cayce started talking about Atlantis? (Actually, I think Atlantis did exist, just not the airships- a monumental blast that ended a highly advanced civilization (and most widespread Meditteranean literacy) in a matter of days, survivors who made it to points south and north, and a tale of a place with great beauty and knowledge that survived through oral legends until it was assigned moral and theological repercussions and, in this century, tales of crystals that controlled air traffic and could do intercontinental calls for $.03 per minute.)
My worst fear about contact with alien life has never been that they’ll be malevolent or view us as so many amoebas but the fear that they’ll be really boring. Imagine an entire galaxy populated by creatures who look like conch fish (only with blue hair and feathery eyes) but who have the personality of James Lipton. After a few days we as a species would all be going “Well, this interplanetary discourse and intercultural sharing has been great, but we’ve really got to get going and… [oh crap, we’re home… speed up the manufacture of interstellar vehicles please, if this thing tells me the story of how his kid on Aldeberan XII won the tri-galaxy spelling bee again I’m gonna blow starchunks…”)
Well said, Sampiro; I’ve been to Thera, and it certainly seems to fit the legend of Atlantis like a glove.
Havng said that, your rant against boring aliens is unjustified. They have to be accustomed to boredom if they can sit in a spaceship for hundreds of years watching the stars move past imperceptibly.
Not even close! But I’ve had an interest in the pyramids since I was a very young boy. I visited the pyramid of Saqqara when I was a kid – my father bribed a few people and I was granted access to a deep shaft near the pyramid at the bottom of which I saw some incredible rooms covered with dusty hieroglyphs. I actually wandered in those underground chambers before most archaeologists even knew of their existence. At one point the hastily rigged lights snaked along the floor failed, and the weight of millennia and thousands of tons of rock descended on me, causing me to nearly freak out for a good fifteen minutes until I felt my way back to the well shaft by touch. Let’s just say the event made a lasting impression.
See Pedro’s response, right on the money. Consider that no ancient or modern structure is utterly immobile: there is always a degree of movement required, since a perfectly rigid structure is likely to snap from stress (whether induced by temperature changes or shifts in the structure itself, etc.). Modern buildings, especially skyscrapers, are actually built to sway in order to dissipate the kinetic energy that would otherwise fracture a rigid structure. Indeed, earthquake-resistant skyscrapers are being designed to sway even more than normal to conduct energy from the shockwaves travelling to the structure from the ground in the event of tremors.
Of course, modern technology allows us to employ comparatively smaller bricks to build fairly structures, but to consider what the Egyptians had to deal with try this experiment: try to build a miniature pyramid four feet high out of, say, sugar cubes, and then try building one with proper sized bricks – which is easier? If you have a lot of little bricks like the sugar cubes, you have that much more movement and friction in the structure and the most likely result is an unstable erection that will collapse fairly quickly. If you have significantly larger blocks though, especially if you distribute as much stress as possible to a broad and sturdy base, you end up with far superior stability. So the choice to quarry huge blocks for the pyramids may seem like extravagance, but is in fact an architecturally sound approach in the long run – and the pyramids were definitely built for the long run.
I addressed this far-out hypothesis in a previous message. The pyramids are built of quarried sandstone and we even know where they quarried all that stone from. No magical concrete was involved. Indeed, the hypothetical postulation that the pyramids are built of some myesterious concrete that set like stone is unnecessary, inelegant, and unscientific. Most respectable scientists wouldn’t waste their time with unnecessary work like that when real (and more promising) ground awaits to be covered. Said that, I believe the hypothesis has been debunked (and resurrected) a number of times.
regarding Atlantis: there are literally thousands of archaeological sites all over the world that involve catastrophic events that forced the evacuation (or death) of their populations while leaving behind remarkable evidence of their existence. If your primary criteria for identifying Atlantis are A) communication with the ancient Greeks and B) catastrophe, then Thera and many other sites fit the bill. But what’s the point? Atlantis is a modern misconception derived from a work that is clearly invented. You might as well seek Pellucidar, Lemuria, or Shangri-La in the ruins of civilizations that died thousands of years ago.