7 ms·
Researchers Made 25-Ton Boulders They Can Move by Hand
- jfoutz 8y agoCEMEX has been doing very clever things for a long time. I love the random distribution of cement trucks they maintained in the 90's do deal with the complexity of delivering cement. https://www.wired.com/1997/07/cemex-2/ https://www.wired.com/1997/07/cemex-2/
- exabrial 8y agoCheck out who funded the project ;)
- rounce 8y agoPerhaps, you could just tell us?
- wavefunction 8y agoCemex funded/contributed to this MIT project which you would have learned from reading the article we're supposedly commenting on
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- xfitm3 8y agoYour comment isn’t helpful - can you provide details or a citation?
- selimthegrim 8y agoThere’s a famous paper in chaos theory by two Czech researchers studying the distribution of bus waiting times in Guadalajara. I never made the connection until now.
- tboughen 8y agoThe shape of the boulders reminds me of these: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacsayhuamán https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacsayhuamán
- cmroanirgo 8y agoI think their design was such that it was supposed to. However there is the fundamental difference in that there are no curved edges in the Sacsahuayman blocks, which are straight edged.
- drchewbacca 8y agoThis guy seems to be way ahead of MIT on this one. He moved a barn (which wasn't a specially 3D printed shape) 300 ft on his own. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K7q20VzwVs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K7q20VzwVs
- negamax 8y agoIncredible. Thanks for sharing
- close04 8y agoThe ingenuity is indeed incredible especially since it relies on such simple principles. But I have to wonder how useful is that transportation technique when carrying the stones over dirt paths instead of a very solid, perfectly flat concrete one.
- Cogito 8y agoIn the video they show him moving a large shed over a dirt path. He used a pivot sitting on top of wooden shoring boards, I can imagine the process for any weight would be similar.
- scarejunba 8y agoThis man is a legend. He should publish, damn. I wonder what knowledge only exists in the minds of people who just thought to solve their own problems.
- gpm 8y agoDon't you see that youtube video, he did publish.
- scarejunba 8y agoRight, I hear your point, but we have a interdisciplinary discovery problem. No one studying the history of the Moai saw it.
- ThinkBeat 8y agoWell I them rock the boulders and they balance. As ar as I can see they never actually move the boulders. For this to have any relevance the bolders would need to be dragged / pushed / towed into place
- trevyn 8y agoThere is a video of them moving; it’s a rock, rotate 180, rock, rotate 180, etc. sequence.
- aaron695 8y ago> Researchers Made 25-Ton Boulders No, they are hundreds of kg. That's still impressive. http://www.matterdesignstudio.com/#/walking-assembly/ http://www.matterdesignstudio.com/#/walking-assembly/ Year: 2019 Size: 6.3m x 3m Mass: 5,970kg Material: Concrete Cemex seem very cool - https://www.facebook.com/CEMEXGRD/ https://www.facebook.com/CEMEXGRD/
- tinus_hn 8y agoJust in time for Easter!
- esotericn 8y agoSomething doesn't add up to me. The structures here basically exploit moments in order to move them. But there's nothing giving them stability once they are 'static'. Surely the end piece of the bridge could just fall over if you stood on the edge of it?
- popopje 8y agoThey're using locking blocks at the ends to stabilise things
- exabrial 8y agoOk but how did they get the smaller "keystones" in? Can't tell from the video
- Someone 8y agoI think that isn’t a smaller stone, but a similarly sized one with a notch that fits the hole that must be filled to make the structure rigid.
- lazyjones 8y agoNone of the boulders in the video are even close to 25 tons...
- Filligree 8y agoI can see this working on a perfectly flat surface, but the real world isn't flat. There's still some explanation left to do.
- dsfyu404ed 8y agoAs someone who's spent plenty of time moving machines with pry bars and rollers I content it's not the shape of the boulders but the flat and level floor that really enables this feat. In order to move something of a given weight against earth's gravity you need to expend a certain amount of energy to do that work. There is no way of getting around that because physics. While few people could theoretically move a boulder up a hill it would be very, very challenging to do without additional sources of energy.
- foxhop 8y agoYup. Now look at the rock walls of New England which snake up hillsides and mountains. A crazy amount of energy was needed.
- dmckeon 8y agohttps://www.thespectrum.com/story/life/family/2015/04/05/stone-walls-pervasive-northeast/25328109/ https://www.thespectrum.com/story/life/family/2015/04/05/sto... > In 1871 the U.S. Department of Agriculture published a “Statistics of Fences In the United States.” At that time, it noted that in New England and New York State alone, there were 252,539 miles of stone walls, enough to circle the globe ten times, and to build all the pyramids of Egypt times one hundred. It has been calculated that such an effort would have required an army of 15,000 workers 243 years to accomplish. When you are trying to harvest crops on a series of glacial moraines, stones dropped by glaciers and brought to the surface by each winter's freeze/thaw cycles are the most reliable annual crop. :-) In spring, after thaw, but before the ground is dry enough to till and plant, some levers, a ground level sledge or "stone boat", and draft animal(s) to pull it will get the stones to the edge of the field. Making a more tidy "dry" or unmortared stone wall from them is optional.
- matt_morgan 8y agoPrecisely varied density in building materials feels like it would not have been available to ancient builders.
- sbhn 8y agoOK pseudoscience like this needs to stop. This is why dumbasses think Aliens have visited us, and angels are real.
- lstroud 8y agoHow do they account for uneven ground and a softer surface? I would think that weight would sink in the soil slightly and be too heavy to push out of the depression.
- zxcvbn4038 8y agoThere is no denying that this is cool and there are definitely modern day applications. However there is also no evidence that ancient people did this. There are plenty of ancient structures constructed of massive stones without beveled edges. Ten years ago there were a couple of guys who figured out how to use giant kites to move large blocks of stone, said that was one way the Egyptians could have built the pyramids. Great, but only problem with that is there are no records of the Egyptians building giant kites, so again kinda cool and probably a great source of fail videos, but probably not what ancient people did.
- mattnewport 8y agoYeah, this is neat but not a good explanation for how ancient stones were moved, many of which do not have shapes particularly conducive to rolling, including the moai of Easter Island. The article also talks about using varying densities of concrete to control the center of gravity which wouldn't really have been an option when carving from rock. It's hard to see how this technique would apply to the very rectangular 800 tonne trilithons at Baalbek or the 1000 tonne statue at the Ramesseum, or even the 70 tonne underground sarcophagi at Saqqara.
- kaffeemitsahne 8y ago> How were giant ancient structures like Stonehenge, or the towering Moai heads on Easter Island, assembled at a time when cranes and trucks were still hundreds of years away? Prehistoric people had ropes and they also had poles. I'm always baffled by this reluctance to admit that they simply used cranes, levers, and similar technology.
- empath75 8y agoNot all prehistoric groups had all basic technology. There was no use of the wheel in the America’s for example.
- c3534l 8y agoFinally, a way to move all these boulders I have up to my 5 storey walk-up.
- palisade 8y agoThe ancient Egyptians dug canals from the Nile all the way up to the base of the pyramids they were in the process of building. Then they built rafts that they ferried the stones from the quarries all the way to the build sites. Just in case anyone was wondering. Happy Easter!
- Stratoscope 8y agoThe original site has more photos and details: http://www.matterdesignstudio.com/#/walking-assembly/ http://www.matterdesignstudio.com/#/walking-assembly/