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Why do we still not know what's inside the pyramids?
- n0us 11y agoI wonder why they cannot use ultrasound or something similar where they "ping" in different locations, then pick up the result by various microphones attached to locations all over the pyramid. I don't know a whole lot about this type of engineering so if someone has an answer I would very much appreciate. On another note, if they open it up and find out it's been filled with grain this whole time I might have to consider voting for Ben Carson.
- aaronbrethorst 11y agoFTA: “Archaeologists have in fact found grain silos in Egypt, they’re well known to us and they look nothing like pyramids,” she says. Egyptian officials have also chimed in recently to refute Carson’s ideas.
- n0us 11y agoyes but that part of the comment was sarcastic. My jaw would hit the floor though if someone told me it was true.
- superuser 11y agoThey have found grain in the pyramids, but small amounts buried along with the other treasures as part of the burial ritual. Since grain was "stored" there then they were technically used to "store" grain.
- qubex 11y agoI might be wrong but I don't think any kind of treasure has ever been located within a pyramid.
- nightspirit 11y ago... in modern times :)
- thaumasiotes 11y agoThe whole Valley of the Kings system (formal pyramid without grave goods; secret tomb with grave goods) started because they were tired of public tombs getting plundered.
- lisper 11y agoThat's technically true, but irrelevant, at least in the context of what Carson said. Carson's comment was that the pyramids were built by Joseph to store grain. This is significant because Joseph prophesied seven years of famine and urged the Egyptians to store grain against it (Ge41). So anything built "by Joseph to store grain" would have to hold a lot of grain.
- nightspirit 11y agoWas he being serious or just trying to score some sympathy of Jews and Christians? Nobody has ever found any evidence of Exodus and it isn't like people aren't trying. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exodus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exodus
- lisper 11y agoCarson is a Seventh-day Adventist, and hence a young-earth creationist. (Yes, I know. It's mind-boggling, isn't it?) And he's stood by the remark. So almost certainly he was being (and continues to be) serious.
- nightspirit 11y agoI'm not sure if this shows he is really serious or exactly the opposite. In Poland there is a guy, Janusz Palikot, who in 2005 owned a "Christian", anti-(many things including LGBT) newspaper but later sold it and founded a pro-LGBT, anti-religion political party.
- protomyth 11y agoAll Seventh-day Adventist are NOT young-earth creationists.
- lisper 11y agoThat may be, but it is official church doctrine: http://www.adventist.org/en/beliefs/humanity/creation/ http://www.adventist.org/en/beliefs/humanity/creation/ "God has revealed in Scripture the authentic and historical account of His creative activity. He created the universe, and in a recent six-day creation the Lord made “the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them” and rested on the seventh day."
- andreyf 11y agoJust because they found grain silos which were not pyramids doesn't mean that they pyramids weren't also grain silos. Duuuuh.
- Qantourisc 11y agoThere is also just different sound frequencies, x-ray and radio waves. And I suppose one could also empower a really powerful laser to make a tiny hole trough the pyramid :) but this would cost quite some time and energy. Might be better to use a expandable drill then.
- vlehto 11y agoThat's actually used in geological imaging. They might use small explosions or shoot the ground with a shotgun or drive over it with series of overloaded trucks. You can't destroy the surface of the pyramid with TNT, so it might be tricky. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismic_tomography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismic_tomography Other possibilities are ground radar. With big bunch of different problems. Mainly there is anything conductive in the surface layers, ground radar can't get past that. Typically it's only used to few meters depth, the deeper you go, the less you get data out of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-penetrating_radar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-penetrating_radar And radiographic means. These typically give best image. Dalke explained that some form of these was used elsewhere in this thread. These are possible as you can have receiver at the opposing side. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_radiography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_radiography
- shiftpgdn 11y agoElectromagnetic imaging is actually used at depths up to 10km (and more). Many oil/exploration companies use it along side traditional imaging to get a better idea of what is in the earth.
- vlehto 11y agoYes. The most interesting applications I have head of is exploring ice caps. To depths of several kilometers. http://earthzine.org/2008/09/26/a-brief-history-of-radio-echo-sounding-of-ice/ http://earthzine.org/2008/09/26/a-brief-history-of-radio-ech... But they had huge advantage of no surrounding civilization. Power line above you can easily "echo" in the picture that should come below you. I've used one myself to see some plumbing. But the resolution gets poor quickly as you go deeper. Most common applications seem to be inspecting rebars from reinforced concrete and inspecting roads for subsurface problems. Both in range of just few meters.
- jedberg 11y agoOnce we have nanobot cameras we can send them in through the cracks. All the more reason to invent nanobot cameras. Well, that and the amazing medical imaging they could be used for.
- ajmurmann 11y agoAlso spying on everyone.
- odonnellryan 11y agoWhy do you even need cameras? You can just build a map of the physical properties. No need to see what's going on inside.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- dalke 11y agoWhy are people using infrared to look for new chambers and passages? Muon detectors, using cosmic rays for the source, were used in the 1960s to conclude: > We can say with confidence that no chambers with volumes similar to the four known chambers in Cheops's and Sneferu's pyramids exist in the mass of limestone investigated by cosmic-ray absorption. The volume of the pyramid probed in this manner is defined by a vertically oriented cone, of half-angle 35 degrees, with its point resting in the Belzoni Chamber. The explored volume is 19 percent of the pyramid's volume. We hope that with minor modifications to the apparatus the complete mass of limestone can be searched for chambers. - http://www2.lns.mit.edu/fisherp/AlvarezPyramids.pdf http://www2.lns.mit.edu/fisherp/AlvarezPyramids.pdf That's one of the reasons we know for certainty there is no large, unknown grain storage chamber in those pyramids.
- burkaman 11y agoI'm guessing a big part of it is "The explored volume is 19 percent of the pyramid's volume." Eliminating the possibility of huge chambers is cool, but it would also be cool to find out if there's anything in the other 80%. Do you know if they ever succeeded in searching the whole pyramid?
- dalke 11y agoLOL! It's going on right now! As part of this exact research project! The BBC article only mentioned infrared, but http://www.popsci.com/archaeologists-will-scan-egypts-pyramids-with-muons-drone-mounted-lasers-and-more http://www.popsci.com/archaeologists-will-scan-egypts-pyrami... says the researchers are "[a]rmed with thermal imaging, muon detectors, and drone-mounted laser scanners."
- talmand 11y agoClearly the aliens that built the pyramids had shielding put in place. Can't have cosmic rays altering the stored grain in strange ways.
- rurban 11y agoThis 1960 investigation only searched 19% of the Chefren pyramid's mass to find a second big chamber. The other 81% still needs to be investigated. It only looked for a Cheops or Sneferu-alike Kings chamber above the Chefren Belzoni chamber.
- corin_ 11y agoIt could be a coincidence, but I wonder if this piece (published 3 days ago) was inpsired by this 6-day old Reddit thread: "ELI5: Why don't we already know everything that's inside the pyramids?" https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3s7ljo/eli5_why_dont_we_already_know_everything_thats/ https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3s7ljo/e...
- JacobAldridge 11y agoI suspect both were inspired by US Presidential candidate Ben Carson's recent claims that (he believes) they were built by Joseph to store grain (as per the Book of Genesis).
- corin_ 11y agoThat would make sense, thanks (your reasoning, not Carson's reasoning.)
- tillinghast 11y agoFor clarity, Genesis recounts grain stores being built, but makes no claim that the Great Pyramids were those stores. The BBC article does reference grain storage directly: > But Stevenson also says that counter-theories about the pyramids actually being huge grain stores are not helpful. “Archaeologists have in fact found grain silos in Egypt, they’re well known to us and they look nothing like pyramids,” she says.
- coldcode 11y agoI think building a grain store in the shape of a giant pyramid wouldn't work anyway. The grains at the bottom would be pretty much unusable and likely you couldn't get them out except from the top because of the weight. I do wonder if someone could work out the math though :-)
- protomyth 11y agoI doubt they were grain stores, but elevators in the USA store grain and corn like that all the time in a pyramid shape and it doesn't hurt the grain / corn (other than moisture). There is a "ski Indiana" photoshop showing a skier on one of these grain hills. Here is a nice little pdf with a lot of ways we store product http://calculators.agstar.com/uploads/GrainStorageMethods0707.pdf http://calculators.agstar.com/uploads/GrainStorageMethods070... [edit: I agree they would have been a bad shape of an old style grain store, plus wrong era]
- givan 11y agoWhy do we still think that they were built with chisel and hammer when we know is impossible with these tools to cut the stones from king chamber to laser precision or cut stones to make a perfectly symmetric pharaoh statue?
- motoboi 11y agoDidn't Rafaello and Michelangelo use those tools to work with rock?
- green7ea 11y agoThere are two things to keep in mind. Rafaello and Michelangelo worked with stone that wasn't nearly as hard as granite (granite being one of the hardest stones). Secondly, we don't believe metals were nearly as developed during the period of dynastic Egypt and some Egyptologists theorise (but I think this is crazy) that stone tools were used to carve the blocks.
- rurban 11y agoGranite? Who crazy would come up with the idea to build pyramids with something as heavy and hard as granite. They were not even carved out of limestone blocks, they were casted by an early form of concrete created using a mixture of limestone, clay, lime, and water. Similar to how they would have been built nowadays. http://www.livescience.com/1554-surprising-truth-great-pyramids-built.html http://www.livescience.com/1554-surprising-truth-great-pyram...
- green7ea 11y agoThe walls of the king's chamber are pink granite. They also happen to be some of the more precise work in the pyramids.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mariuolo 11y ago
- yeukhon 11y ago> Either way, National Geographic reports that the Egyptian authorities are already interested in the idea of marketing tourist access to any chambers that might be found I am a big history nerd. I will literally say, I love this history shit. You can see how passionate I am about learning history. But I am concerned about this statement. Does a historical figure deserve to have his or her tomb to be further explored, displayed, and made for profit? Is there a balance between learning about ancient culture and respecting the dead?
- sageikosa 11y agoGet some big cranes, take it apart, record where everything goes, then put it all back together again when done. Carefully of course...
- atrilumen 11y agoObviously the illuminati can't have the slave class discovering their interdimensional portals. Duh.