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A 26,000-Year Astronomical Monument Hidden in Plain Sight
- 1024core 8y agoAuthor mentions "axial precession" repeatedly without explaining it. 2/3 of the way down comes this gem: > it is worth explaining what exactly axial precession is. This kind of writing just irritates me.
- tectonic 8y agoPerhaps that should have been defined earlier, but I enjoyed the article.
- ngcc_hk 8y agoI think it is ok. It is a kind of suspense.
- labster 8y agoThose of us who have known about axial precession for decades don't need to see it redefined in every article. ELI5 gets old after a while.
- timbit42 8y agoRight, but if the author thinks it needs to be explained, based on the audience, then it should be explained before it is referred to.
- lugg 8y agoAfter learning more about how to write well for your audience I've become more forgiving for this kind of thing. Writing well involves a lot of tradeoffs. The article is more of a story and explaining axial precession distracts from that story. It is better suited explained later in amongst the rest of the diagrams and illustrations. The problem then is how do you tell your story and include axial precession? For readers like me who already know the term and sort of grok the concept we don't need early explaining. What I did need is the later graphic / explaining once the author started to link the concept in with other concepts not discussed until later. So either follow the rigid explain first rule or have it clustered where it is relevant and useful. Im not particularly going to judge either way there.
- laumars 8y agoIt’s mental some of the complaints people make on HN. Someone took time to research and share a personal passion if there’s and some armchair critics complain that a sentence should - in their opinion - have appeared in a different paragraph. Talk about missing the point of the article.
- HillaryBriss 8y agoi'm bothered a bit by the fact that in the cartoon animation the earth appears to rotate only two or three times during an entire 25,000+ year axial precession cycle.
- noisy_boy 8y agoI didn't know about axial precession and that visualization was what made it clear for me. Literally a picture that is worth hundreds, if not thousands, of words.
- projektfu 8y agoIt’s a bit like a camera capturing the wheel of a fast moving car such that it appears to be rotating very slowly.
- tectonic 8y agoI always find articles interesting that are about how the sky would have looked at different points in time. For example, how the current constellations looked 10,000 years ago, or will look in the future. https://www.wired.com/2015/03/gifs-show-constellations-transforming-150000-years https://www.wired.com/2015/03/gifs-show-constellations-trans...
- TravHatesMe 8y agoInteresting indeed! I suppose this is a sound argument against astrology -- a few thousand years ago you'd be looking at a different sky, how can you have a well-defined set of astrological symbols when their respective skies are changing, albeit slowly.
- tzs 8y agoThey could believe that the meaning of the different signs changes as the corresponding constellations change. For an entertaining science fiction look at that possibility, see season 2 episode 5 of "The Orville". Briefly, they encounter a civilization that believes strongly in astrology, to the point of using it as the basis of a very rigid caste system that pretty much determines at birth what jobs are open to you and what your place will be in society. I don't want to give any spoilers, but I will say that the question of what happens when a constellation changes is an important one in this episode.
- kens 8y agoAstrology does take the Earth's precession into account; as the vernal equinox precesses from one zodiac constellation to another every 2150 years, it becomes a different age. You might know the 60's song "Age of Aquarius"; that's what the song is referencing. (I'm not saying there's any validity to astrology, just pointing out an interesting connection.)
- DoreenMichele 8y agothis is a sound argument against astrology TLDR: I'm guessing you don't actually know a heck of a lot about astrology. Your assertion looks baseless to me. Long form: Not really. Astrology is basically observed associations from the point of view of the Earth. For example, it will mark planets as "retrograde," which means they appear to be moving backwards from our view here on Earth, though no planet ever actually turns around and moves backwards. I've studied astrology some. I think there are some serious issues with traditional western astrology, such as the fact that most meanings, rulerships, etc, were assigned at a time when humans observed the night sky with the naked eye. We have only relatively recently discovered additional planets (thanks to telescopes) and kind of shoe-horned those in (to traditional astrology), mostly without research, from what I gather. One somewhat famous astrologer once proposed in one of her books that we should include the Earth in all astrological charts "because if we ever colonize Mars, we will need to include the Earth in those charts." Mathematically speaking, the Earth is already included, implicitly, in the House System, though it could stand to be assigned rulership etc and included more explicitly in other ways. Yeah, no one here has any clue what the hell I'm going on about. I'll shut up now.
- SiempreViernes 8y agoIt wasn't well described, but do people really not get the idea that it's about astronomy somehow? I'm was dissapointed that the statues seem to play no role at all, no nifty alignment of shadows seems like a wasted oportunity if you are making an astronomy monument.
- ourmandave 8y agoThey have an Ozymandias from The Watchmen aesthetic to them.
- AngryData 8y agoWebsite could use some like half inch borders or something. That is painful to read and view.
- ajkjk 8y agoLooks fine to me.
- rblion 8y agoWow. I love the Art Deco style. My absolute favorite aesthetic right now, maybe ever. I haven't found anything I like more to be honest except Classical.
- jpatokal 8y agoI was at the Hoover Dam recently, and I was struck by how Socialist Realist (read: Soviet) much of the original art looks: https://photos.app.goo.gl/GTQxcVtVKhgTURsG9 https://photos.app.goo.gl/GTQxcVtVKhgTURsG9 My favorite structure is probably the improbably Star Wars/Tatooine flavored parking garage though!
- pathseeker 8y agoThat's how a lot of stuff from that era looked in the US. The roaring 20s and the bummer-30s had lots of stuff like that. Maybe you just have an incorrect mental 1:1 mapping between stuff popular 100 years ago everywhere and the Soviets?
- russfink 8y agoWell, me, too. Apparently the Soviets adopted the blocky, "science is the progress of mankind toward a brighter future for you!" theme from us and used it so well, that I attribute such design elements to the Soviets exclusively.
- jrochkind1 8y agoOr maybe it was a global design language, that the Soviets just kept using longer and/or used more because they were building a _lot_ of things during the period of it's heyday.
- emptybits 8y agoIn the very first sentence, I appreciate what I think is an intentional use of five digit year formatting. The Long Now Foundation isn’t getting caught with its pants down in an amateur Y10K bug! “YYYYY” FTW
- hannasanarion 8y agoDisappointing that they would go for a 5 digit year, and not use the HE calendar, in which the current year is 12019
- cmroanirgo 8y agoFrom Wikipedia: "The Holocene calendar, also known as the Holocene Era or Human Era (HE), is a year numbering system that adds exactly 10,000 years to the currently dominant (AD/BC or CE/BCE) numbering scheme" [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar To me, it seems a little redundant to add a fixed 10,000 even if t0 is "near the beginning of the Holocene geological epoch and the Neolithic Revolution". So, so me using 02019 is just as arbitrarily as good.
- MorganVR 8y agoThe reason for the 10000 years is to make explicit the real magnitud of our history, you would be surprised to learn the number of people that believe it all really started just 2000 years ago.
- ataturk 8y agoFunny, I was just talking to my son about this as we were reading a book about ancient Egypt and he kept coming back to all the "1200 BC" times as he could not understand the negative years, or the counting down to 0 and the more I think about it, it is kind of weird how we use some arbitrary point in time backwards and forwards. It's almost like we're not really any good at keeping track of time at all. And then to start counting years based on "Jesus" when 90% of the world has never been Christian and never will be, it just seems to presume a whole lot that isn't even there.
- interfixus 8y agoFunny - or sad, actually - how even The Long Now can't be bothered to run a website which will function without third party calls. Bootstrap, Fontawesome, Cloudfront, and Google are not necessarily expected to stay in business for the next 10.000 years.
- planktonite 8y agoWhen is Jeff Bezos going to finish the 10k clock?
- wrs 8y agoTitle fix: delete “old”. (The monument depicts a 26k-year cycle; it isn’t 26k years old.)
- andyjohnson0 8y agoThe article's title had 'old' in it at the time I posted, and I didn't notice. Looks like it's been edited since. Mods: can you edit the title, as I no-longer can.
- tempodox 8y agoThat monument is so wonderfully art déco. I love it.
- sfopdxnonstop 8y agoIt is a 26k-year monument not a 26k-year-old monument. I clicked guessing that was a typo in the headline and was disappointed to be right.
- sctb 8y agoThanks! We've fixed the headline.
- dalbasal 8y agoInteresting. I like it. The monument isn't 26000 years old, but the themes are incredibly old. The astronomical alignments, mysterious guardian sphinxes. This does seem like a 1930s contribution to artsy ideas going back through bronze age Egypt, Mesopotamia and lots of other places.
- buckminster 8y agoThis is wonderful. It's a brilliant way to mark the date, beautifully executed. > The view that you really want to have of the plaza is directly from above. You would need a crane to get this view of the real thing, This is what drones were invented for. I'd love to see a picture of the whole clock.
- anonu 8y agoGreat article - a bit wordy - but great sleuthing. I've been the Hoover dam and it is pretty amazing to behold. Always nice to see that certain people will dig a little deeper and question their surroundings a bit more.
- wyck 8y agoGreat article but I found this one easier to understand including quotes from the artist about how it works, https://www.quora.com/At-the-Hoover-Dam-what-is-the-meaning-of-this-memorial-inlay-with-the-word-Alcyone https://www.quora.com/At-the-Hoover-Dam-what-is-the-meaning-... For some reason the author doesn't even mention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcyone_(star) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcyone_(star) which is written into the map. What better place to preserve a star map than an indestructible cement dam in the desert.
- oska 8y ago> What better place to preserve a star map than an indestructible cement dam in the desert. I'd suggest away from the base of a substantial cliff face might improve your preservation odds.
- mnemotronic 8y agoNice article. Some people, like Hansen, think outside the box into which many of us have placed ourselves.
- itronitron 8y agopeople that like Hansen's work will probably be interested in James Turrell as well >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Turrell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Turrell
- DoreenMichele 8y agoI assumed this was some really old, maybe Egyptian or African, site that was finally understood to be an astronomical map or something. I'm stunned that this is some kind of secret American history. Makes we wish I could see Hoover Dam someday, a thing I have never had any desire to do before. But this is cool.
- oska 8y agoI appreciate that this monument is in the northern hemisphere and so the discussion of Polaris is entirely appropriate. But still some universal statements are made which are simply false when we remember there is one half of the world that looks to the other celestial centre in the night sky. One example: > The reason we have historically paid so much attention to this celestial center, or North Star, is because it is the star that stays put all through the course of the night. Having this one fixed point in the sky is the foundation of all celestial navigation. The Polynesian navigators, who achieved amazing feats of open water navigation, managed to sail deep into the southern hemisphere (as far south as New Zealand) where Polaris is simply not ever visible. But they still practiced celestial navigation without this 'foundation'. [1] The European explorers, who sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and through the Strait of Magellan and across the Southern Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, also likewise had to do without this 'foundation'. When you come from the southern hemisphere you notice this casual, unthinking "northern hemispherism" all the time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation#Navigation_by_the_stars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation#Navigati...
- jimmux 8y agoThe method to find south using constellations is quite easy and useful, once you know how. I imagine it's one reason why the Southern Cross is culturally significant in the southern hemisphere. http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2009/07/27/3169018.htm http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2009/07/27/3169018.ht...
- jessriedel 8y agoEmphasis on the Northern Hemisphere is not arbitrary. 90% of humans live there.
- oska 8y agoEmphasis is fine. What I am referring to is when people generalise things that are specific or local to the northern hemisphere onto the whole world.
- 8y ago