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Metal Monolith in Utah Gone
- JKCalhoun 6y agoThis is why we can't have nice things.
- grahamburger 6y agoDo we have any reason to think it wasn't the artist or someone related to the artist who took it?
- WarOnPrivacy 6y agoA now deleted post in the HN thread (for the Utah BLM posting) indicated it was placed by a local outdoor group in memory of someone who died. They were purportedly freaked out it had been found & were trying to get the BLM post deleted - not understanding it had gone viral. ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25202573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25202573 I checked the poster's rep and he seemed like an ordinary HN geek. I'm this side of even odds, that he was being straight up with us. edit: I see now that he seems to disavow the whole thing, toward the bottom of the thread.
- petre 6y agoWhoever installed it should have poured concrete in it if they wanted to make removal or theft difficult. BLM could have removed even then, albeit with a crane or front loader and a heavy truck.
- stjohnswarts 6y agowasn't this in the middle of nowhere? seems unlikely they'd have heavy equipment out there. Seems more likely some jerks decided to take it for themselves for bragging rights.
- ThePadawan 6y agoBragging rights towards who? What person doesn't hear "Yeah, hear about that supposed alien monolith recently? Me and my mate Geoff stole it" and immadiately think "Wow, what a dickhead"?
- sverhagen 6y agoBut then why is there a market for stolen art? There is, isn't there?
- ThePadawan 6y agoI think that paying $10m for a stolen painting valued at $20m, I (as an affluent criminal) would brag that I own a painting worth $20m, not that I paid $10m for it.
- rtkwe 6y ago> the art world quickly speculated that it was the work of John McCracken, a sculptor fond of science fiction. He died in 2011. This is a weird assumption given the Monolith first appeared years after his death according to satellite photos last I saw.
- adventured 6y agoCertainly could be his last work and deployed by someone else as instructed post death.
- rtkwe 6y agoYeah it could be but it was 4-5 years after his death that it showed up which is a while and the connection is otherwise pretty generic to me.
- pbourke 6y agoIt would be interesting to see “after” photos of the site now that it’s been removed.
- grahamburger 6y agoThere's a few here: https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/11/28/utahs-desert-obelisk-has/ https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/11/28/utahs-desert-obelisk-...
- speedgoose 6y ago> The Salt Lake Tribune's web site, sltrib.com, is unavailable in the European Union. Looks like it's difficult to remove trackers for some companies.
- RedShift1 6y agoIf The Salt Lake Tribune sells subscriptions on their website, I think they're actually violating EU law again, geoblocking is illegal...
- andylynch 6y agoI doubt it, given they are not targeting the European market. As a Utah firm clearly without an EU nexus, why would they need to care about EU law (or any other country besides their own?)
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoThey clearly do, otherwise the site wouldn't be blocked. And traffic is traffic. It's not that unusual for Rest of World to want to look at an obscure US site.
- tinus_hn 6y agoOf course the same does not apply in reverse, if you run afoul of the DMCA you’ll just be extradited into the US jurisdiction.
- plutonorm 6y agoFrom some of the images I see it has rivets holding the panels on. Any glimmer of hope that this time it is aliens has been dashed. https://www.instagram.com/p/CIBf7YuALr3/ https://www.instagram.com/p/CIBf7YuALr3/
- sp332 6y agoIt would be silly to transport a solid chunk of metal through interplanetary space when some sheet metal would do the job.
- skoskie 6y agoAnd it would be silly to assume a species capable of interplanetary space travel would not use rivets.
- mortenjorck 6y agoIt would actually be pretty funny if the extraterrestrial technology we like to imagine taking the form of some geometrically-perfect prism of exotic nano-materials did indeed exist, but had to be enclosed, for entirely practical reasons, in plain old riveted stainless steel. It wouldn't even be that far off from what our species does anyway, putting our advanced nano-materials (integrated circuits) inside cases made of much lower-tech materials. All that said, I don't think aliens would have left the lid behind.
- waterhouse 6y agoEh, if they're that capable, they probably have a lot of room to optimize for whatever they want. Maybe they consider rivets ugly—or consider making such a thing without rivets to be a demonstration of their skill (which it would be). I'd agree you can't assume for certain they wouldn't use rivets, but I'd say it seems likely they wouldn't. (Of course, the chance they'd choose to make rivets in an exact shape and size and style that is presumably mass-produced somewhere on Earth is very unlikely unless they wanted to make something to blend in.)
- 6y ago
- geodel 6y agoFirst they came for software monoliths and now even metal monoliths are gone.
- garyrichardson 6y agoA mesh of micro-monoliths would have been much more resilient to this sort of thing. Just saying.
- MartianSquirrel 6y agoBeware of the Decentralized Denial of Monoliths
- jspash 6y agoThen the aliens started using Javascript for everything. Replacing aeons of stable, time-proven technology. And that's the last time we detected a signal from the mysterious celestial body known as Alpha Node 4.1.13. Or was that 6.3.21? No wait...it's definitely 13.3.0. Huh!? 15.x already! I can't keep up.
- cghendrix 6y agoIn the 4 hours since you’ve posted your comment it’s been completely deprecated.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- harrydehal 6y agoA few weeks earlier, I saw this PBS Doc on "Desert X" which has a lot of interesting (if not metallic) artwork set in the deserts of Southern California: https://www.pbs.org/video/desert-x-kqzqhx/ https://www.pbs.org/video/desert-x-kqzqhx/ Curious if this might be an extension for their DESERT X 2021 launch, if not related to one of their artists, past or present: https://www.desertx.org https://www.desertx.org
- emmanueloga_ 6y agoHow much could someone get for a hunk of stainless steel? It seemed like it was hollow (ribbets). I'm just wondering what would be the incentive to steal something like that, considering the efforts to reach the location. Maybe there's a market to sell "alien devices" to enthusiasts?
- itronitron 6y agoCurrent market price for stainless is $0.35/lb so overestimating the weight of the monolith at 100 lbs would put it's scrap value at $35.
- dzhiurgis 6y agoThis smells like marketing promo start to finish. My guess is Musk.
- Thorrez 6y agoWhy do people steal paintings?
- oneeyedpigeon 6y agoI think it's more likely the authorities removed it.
- matt-attack 6y agoFYI: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivet
- pella 6y agohttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Utah_Monolith.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Utah_Monolith.jpg - Monolith taken by Patrick A. Mackie. - Date and time of data generation: 08:05, 15 May 2016 - 4,000 × 6,000 OpenStreetMap status: - https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/8162265901 https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/8162265901 - removed:tourism=artwork - removed:artwork_type=sculpture
- ce4 6y agoTo all who misread the "Taken by": It means "Photograph of the monolith taken by Patrick A. Mackie" and not literally taken.
- exrook 6y ago> I bought the camera used recently and didn’t update the exif date in the camera. I uploaded it on Wikipedia and I’m cool with it without copyright. The image is for the people. Patrickamackie2 (talk) 05:39, 28 November 2020 (UTC)patrickamackie https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Utah_monolith&oldid=991279375#Lack_of_transparency_on_image_sourcing https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Utah_monolit...?
- kken 6y agoThis was definitely dated back. Maybe by changing the EXIF information? Note how there are many fingerprints on the monolith that only appeared after many people visited it. They cannot be seen on the early photos from right after the discovery.
- codingdave 6y agoFingerprints are hardly permanent, especially out here in the desert. Although it does not rain often, when it does wind comes with it and tends to wipe everything clean and then dirty it up again in whole new ways. If someone had a time lapse of the 4 years it was out there, I am confident you'd see markings come and go from its surface throughout its entire time in the desert. If you really want to do digital archaeology, you should be looking at the buildup of dirt in corners, and erosion of the rock surfaces at its base, not the amount of dirt on a flat surface.
- brundolf 6y agoIt got the DNA sample it came for
- tinus_hn 6y agoBut what about the 5G radiation patterns?
- mikro2nd 6y agoBlocked by the chemtrails.
- tannhaeuser 6y agoDropped the virus it carried. Returned to the Oumuamua mothership.
- aorth 6y agoShame that I can't view аny of the pictures or videos on Instagram without an account.
- dimator 6y agohttps://www.instagram.com/p/CIBf7YuALr3/ https://www.instagram.com/p/CIBf7YuALr3/ works fine in firefox focus for me.
- tomcooks 6y agoTry bibliogram.art or other istances
- rand0mx1 6y agobibliogram is not working. There is some critical bug.
- pabs3 6y agoThe gallery-dl program will let you do that: https://github.com/mikf/gallery-dl https://github.com/mikf/gallery-dl
- binarycodedhex 6y agoWasn't the problem that someone found it in satellite maps and blabbed about the location?
- dzhiurgis 6y agoMy guess would be some sort of Tesla CyberTruck or SpaceX StarShip stainless steel promo.
- a4444f 6y agoThere is a lack / something is missing.
- globular-toast 6y agoWell there's a surprise...
- cabaalis 6y agoFun, but it's somebody's art project. There's also statues of Jason Voorhees at the bottom of various lakes.
- H8crilA 6y agohttp://hailthemonolith.com/ http://hailthemonolith.com/
- Fargren 6y agoWe were not deemed worthy.
- jleyank 6y agoStrikes me as performance art if it was removed by the installer. Or, as mentioned in this thread, an asshole took it or the aliens retrieved their DNA/Mana collection device. If it's the last option, check that those that found it are still here.