After the robot and the inflatable blimp die, future archeologists will be able to show that the Ancient Egyptians invented WiFi and discovered Helium, but not entirely able to explain how Horus used them to convey kings to the afterlife.
Is the soul carried in the blimp, or dragged by the robot?
I’m hoping archaeologists will finally find something that has undoubtedly been inside the Great Pyramid since it was built that they can carbon-date. There’s a surprisingly large amount of fairly circular thinking involved in dating some of the more impressive monuments in at the Giza Plateau, and though for sure the conspiracy theory/aliens built ‘em theories are bunk, I am really looking forward to breaking out of the loops with objective external validation.
It's precisely the “agreed-upon” part of “agreed-upon chronologies” that causes me such anxious exertion.
These buildings were pretty much the apparent apex of their purported builders’ architectural capability, and yet somehow sit right at the beginning of that civilisation's timeline. They're supposedly funerary but no bodies were ever found inside. Ancient Egyptians are renown for using decorating internal surfaces with hieroglyphs and yet the inside of the pyramids is almost devoid of them (save for, as far as I know, two counter-examples: one at the apex of the relieving chamber, with a possibility that it was a later addition, and one on the far side of the Queen's Chamber's shaft's door, which is definitely original to the time of construction). Meanwhile nearby the Sphinx has its oddly disproportionate human head (that might be a successive re-carving of a properly-proportioned lion head) and there's signs that at least some geologists reckon is water erosion, pushing the dates back significantly.
Of course, this is very much the domain of conspiracy theories and alternative histories, but I'd very much appreciate a definitive, non-self-referential answer to the question, something along the lines of “this piece of wood that has been trapped in here since the time this monument was built is N thousand years old” without any chance for debating the facts. The theories that do not accomodate for that demonstrable fact will finally be required to be revised or will fall by the wayside.
I’m always excited when something, particularly a prevalent opinion, can be put to a definitive test. I'm always excited by which new explanations might be required if the prevalent opinion is found wanting.
lots of building materials contain bits of organic material. Glues, dyes, wood, perhaps bits of people. A big enough chunk of wood can also sometimes be linked to a specific year via tree rings. Such a combination of carbon and non-carbon dating techniques is about as reliable as we can every hope.
I always wondered if we could create some type of neutrino scanning device.
Neutrinos passes through most matter like nothing. You need a super large underground water tank to detect it.
One side of the pyramid would have the emitter. The other side, would have the receptor. And you bombard the pyramid with trillions and trillions of neutrinos, and collect the statistics. Then from this, it might help you formulate an image, and allow you to see what is inside the pyramid.
The next question is: How do you create a neutrino?
According to this video, it seems you can make a neutrino beam from a particle accelerator.
The Sun is already bombarding everything with trillions and trillions of neutrinos.
> In the vicinity of the Earth, about 65 billion (6.5×10^10) solar neutrinos per second pass through every square centimeter perpendicular to the direction of the Sun.[1]
Given that each side of the base of the Great Pyramid of Giza is 230.4 meters long, that means it's 5,308,416 cm^2; if the Sun is directly overhead, that means something like:
5,308,416 x 6.5x10^10 / 10^12 = 345,047.04
345,047.04 trillion neutrinos would be passing through the pyramid every second.
The sun is a diffuse emitter. It blankets the entire pyramid in neutrinos.
What OP is proposing, I think, is a mobile point emitter and mobile detector. Move these around the pyramid and you can create an array of lines that determine the density through the pyramid on that axis. Rotate the entire setup around the pyramid to generate intersecting lines, and you could build up a map.
Of course, the pyramid is also moving around the sun, so you do have a distant point source of neutrinos, but not a very consistent or convenient one.
And, of course, the detectors are really difficult. Not exactly something you can hang from a quadcopter and fly around the pyramid... :)
This article is garbage by the third sentence. Only "evidence" Khufu built the pyramid is the forged cartouche in the "relieving chamber" of the "King's chamber." The entire history is predicated on its supposed authenticity.
When the inevitable day comes when we fully and thoroughly finish scanning every nook and cranny of the Pyramids, I wonder if they will be able to maintain their novelty? Will tourists eventually cast the place aside as "been there, seen it all" once technology has fully mapped the place?
Presumably a lot of people would still want to experience the sheer grandeur and atmosphere of being on the spot. I mean, plenty of people still regularly visit sites and monuments with little or no mystery. The excitement of standing before a millennia old structure can never go away. But yes, some of the current novelty will wear off.
Do people visit the pyramids to appreciate their unexplored parts? You can think about the mysteries of the pyramids from anywhere in the world; people visit just to see something impressive in person.
I think "VR tourism" could be a pretty cool thing if large scale 3D mapping of interesting places takes off. I imagine it to be a little like a more immersive "Street View" from Google Maps.
You could walk through all of the strange passages of the pyramids one minute and then be looking at Earth from the surface of the moon the next.
To be honest, Google Street Maps and Google Earth already do this for me. There are a lot of places that I've wanted to visit, but after seeing them on Google Earth I've found that my desire to visit such places is gone. I look at it as a cheap form of tourism without the risk of pick-pockets ;-)
However, I still want to travel and experience places that are not man-made. I love to hike and there are trails all over the world I'd like to explore.
Visiting is about the emotional experience, not the educational one. You could learn a lot more about the Mona Lisa by reading an article, but it's perhaps still worth visiting the Louvre.
Is the soul carried in the blimp, or dragged by the robot?