Yes, and that’s exactly why we’re so cynical about acoustic levitation. Why would they have done it in an exceptionally hard way, when there are so many easy ways they could have done it, instead?
By submerging the stone, the buoyancy of the stone itself supplements the buoyancy of the barge. To carry a 10-ton stone above water, the barge needs to displace 10 tons of water plus whatever is needed to support the weight of the barge itself. To carry a 10-ton stone submerged, the barge only needs to displace ~7 tons of water, because the stone itself displaces ~3 tons.
p.s. Floating a stone up a shaft means opening a door at the bottom of an empty shaft, carrying the stone (with floats attached) into the shaft, then closing the door and filling up the shaft with water. Then drain the water to prepare for the next stone.
Even ignoring the engineering challenges, just the energy (manpower) needed to carry the water to fill up the shaft is greater than the energy needed to drag the stone up an incline.
It’s not all that much more energy, if you have some way of extracting energy when you drain the column again. And it might be easier to lift the water, in conveniently-sized containers and the appropriate number of trips, than to lift the rock directly. My biggest concern would be how the heck you make that door at the bottom that can withstand that much pressure.
You might as well hypothesize that the builders wore blindfolds and tied a hand behind their back while working if we’re going to try to come up with the most inefficient ways to build things.
My response to this is the the same as it is to other crackpot ideas (melting stones, etc), if they had had that technology they would have used it for millions of other things.
The people on Easter Island said the same thing, the giant statues were floated.
Yes–it is possible to used acoustics to float something the size of a mouse or frog. I have seen it myself.
However, these blocks were several tons. This had to be heavy manual labor in the heat of the desert. The average block in the great Pyramid weighs about 2.5 tons of 5,000 USA pounds. How many men would it take to lift 5,000 pounds? People were smaller back then. If the average man could lift or pull 100 pounds, you would need 50 of them to move 5,000 pounds, and some of the blocks are much heavier.
You can say they used a system of pulley’s, rollers and levers to slowly move the stones upward, but not your fighting gravity.
I’m not exactly sure how they did it. It is possible as crazy as it may sound that the ancient humans living 1,000’s of year ago had some help, possibly from a past breakaway civilization they either left the earth and returned or visited it from a distant star.
Stories of the Bible in terms of geography and buildings have proven to be accurate in many cases. FOundations are found. Satellite imagery shows where dried up rivers were located. Are their stories of what they say as the divine, misinterpreted beings with greater technologies? That is what the ancient alien theory says.
There’s a guy in Michigan who’s single-handedly building a replica of Stonehenge in his backyard, using only technology which would have been available to the ancients. Using his techniques, it’d take a crew of 1000 workers 30 years to build the Great Pyramid. Which is perfectly plausible: The pharaohs had workforces large enough, and they had enough time. Do we know exactly how they did it? No, but that’s just because there are multiple methods which would work, and we just don’t know precisely which one (or ones) they used. It’s an unknown, not a mystery.
If they had help from aliens or time travelers or gods or whatever, why did they just use that hyperadvanced technology to make piles of rock that they could have made without it? Why not make, say, half-mile tall steel skyscrapers with nuclear-powered lighting, water processing, and climate control? That’s something that we can make right now, and would be trivially easy for any creatures that could fly between stars.
One of the funniest crank stories about ancient aliens and the pyramids was some guy who claimed that some numeric ratio found in some aspect of the construction was exactly equal to the mass of the proton, to several significant figures. That would be the mass of the proton in S.I. units.
It might take a whole 50 people :eek: …ergo aliens did it? :dubious:
You do realize that it is not particularly beyond belief that you might get a group of 50 dudes together to push on something? If you find that implausible, then did aliens also help to propel ancient triremes?
Maybe that’s why they worshiped cats.
??? Are you saying that pulleys, rollers, and inclined planes don’t work if gravity is involved? Because that’s wrong. Mechanical advantage is mechanical advantage even if using it against gravity. If your system has a 2x mechanical advantage, then you only need 25 men for a 5,000 pound block. A 5x mechanical advantage would drop it to 10 men.
You’d want to use more men than that, though, because you don’t want workers using anything remotely close to their maximum lifting capacity. You want them working all day without anyone suddenly collapsing due to over-exertion and endangering the lift.
If it sounds crazy, it is crazy when a simple non-crazy explanation holds. People can move large objects using Stone Age tech. Get used to it. It’s been amply demonstrated in modern recreations.
The Bible is full of junk. Just look at some of the problems in Acts, one of the later writings. Nevermind the Flood stuff, the Earth being flat, the Exodus story, the fiction of Ester, etc.
And they also don’t mention the pyramids or any unusual construction methods at all! The Hebrews during their captivity in Egypt didn’t have any alien help building for the Pharaoh.
The aqueducts lost water. They had an advantage: they had a source of water at the top end. So losing some of the water at the source wasn’t a killer.
The pyramids did not have a source at the top. The water had to be moved up to the top by hand driven mechanisms. A whole 'nother thing where losses would matter a great deal. In addition, the OP’s “floating” video shows locks. Watertight locks would not have been possible.
How many people would have to be needed to move that water uphill? Far more than the number needed to just sledge and wedge the blocks up.
Plus, look at the size of those blocks in the video. Esp. the lock gates.
A. How do those massive blocks get moved up into postion before the “canal” got there.
B. How do you raise and lower these giant blocks?
Well, good old-fashioned human muscle power. If you can build and operate these gates without water, you can build a pyramid without water.
The idea is complete absurd and more importantly …
Not acoustic levitation!
Also no using geysers to lift the blocks. Can I find that old thread? Do I want to?
OK - here it is. The fun starts at about post 110. The geysers are slipped in at post 403. They turn to cold water geysers a bit after that.
I’ve noticed this as a repeating theme in crackpot theories about how the pyramids were built - they often seem to assume that the pyramids were already there as they were being built - e.g. the rocks were lifted to the top by a system of pulleys slung over the apex and/or powered by counterweights which were water tanks, filled with water flowing out of the apex of the pyramid…
Except the top of the pyramid isn’t there until you build the pyramid.
Obviously they built the top part first.
I think the funny part is what Chronos mentioned. Every advanced civilization aspires to build interstellar spacecraft to go on five-year missions to explore strange new worlds, to discover new life and new civilizations… and will violate the Prime Directive only to teach them how to pile big rocks on top of one another to make triangles.
I can’t find the article now, but I seem to recall a Nat Geo article–this would be in the past five years–which detailed the discovery of a canal network around the pyramids; however, I believe this was to facilitate delivery of supplies to the workers, not the stone blocks. Anyone with better recall or Google skills than mine?
The Egyptians dug out some material to make docks and such nearby. Note that all this was at river level. No locks, no moving water uphill.
There was some later canal work done in Ancient Egypt. E.g., one was built around a cataract on the Nile. Then there was one from the Nile to the Red Sea. (The history of which is quite cloudy.) But in all cases there was ample water at the high end. Surprisingly at the Red Sea end in the case of the later canal.
Well, the green ones or the blue ones ? You can’t trust the blue ones.
"The builders were skilled, well-fed Egyptian workers who lived in a nearby temporary city. Archaeological digs on the fascinating site have revealed a highly organized community, rich with resources, that must have been backed by strong central authority.
It’s likely that communities across Egypt contributed workers, as well as food and other essentials, for what became in some ways a national project to display the wealth and control of the ancient pharaohs.
Such revelations have led Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities and a National Geographic explorer-in-residence, to note that in one sense it was the Pyramids that built Egypt—rather than the other way around."
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/archaeology-and-history/archaeology/giza-pyramids/
A time ago I was a strong believer in aliens influencing this culture.
And then I ran across The Ancient Engineers - Wikipedia
You should be able to find a copy in your local library. While dated it is an excellent introduction to a story far more fascinating than flying saucers and pseudo physics.