lmao. There was some show I saw, I think it was on the History Channel. They were at some river in the South and they spent the entire episode with some guy who insisted that there was a giant 10-foot catfish in the river (maybe multiple giant catfish? I can’t remember), and that the catfish was responsible for the various pets and occasional people who went missing and were never found. They went off and talked with ichthyologists who talked about limits on catfish sizes, and I forget who else, exploring all the edge cases which might allow a giant ten foot catfish to live in the river. And at the end of the episode, they’re talking to the guy again, going over their findings that it’s possible, theoretically at least, that at a very very edge case, this giant catfish might exist, and the guy was like, “I knew it! Everyone around here keeps sayin’ it’s the alligators, but I jes’ knew it was th’ catfish!”
All an idiot needs is the teeniest tiniest iota of plausibility and all their preconceived notions are true and correct in their mind.
Confirmation bias, it’s the new drug.
Hardly new.
That is facebook’s entire algorithm, and the reason why so many look at White Nationalists and don’t see Nazis these days.
Of all the “crypto” type stories out there, the giant fish ones are the ones I’m most inclined to believe. Unlike a lot of other categories, there’s actually hard evidence for us pulling giant fish out of the water.
If the Detroit River can harbor sturgeon approaching 7ft long in this day and age, I’m not about to totally shoot down anyone’s fish story.
I think you mean cryptid fyi.
No, I’m uhm verifying my Bigfoot report integrity with blockchain.
The likelihood that Bigfoot exists and that block chain will ever be actually useful are about the same… So seems legit to me.
“Why do they say it’s a mystery how the pyramids were built when it’s obviously just big bricks in a triangle?” - Philomena Cunk
“Romans: Perfected or Invented? Anal Bleaching.”
I had just posted that Cunk did it better haha
Lemmy loves Cunk and I’m all about it
Wtf is Cunk
Philomena Cunk is a character portrayed by Diane Morgan who hosts absurd history shows
Absurd? Yes. Genius? Also yes.
The wheel part reminds me of something I learned from 3blue1brown:
“Pi seems to magically appear everywhere, until you realize that wherever it appears there is usually a circle hiding”
Usually. Sometimes it really does seem magical. Sometimes the circle is very well hidden. Maybe we just haven’t found it yet.
Honestly I’ve learned more math from that guy than any math teacher I ever had - one of the few YouTube channels I would absolutely recommend to anyone scientifically inclined at all. He’s an incredible explainer.
Blow your mind with the video where he calculates pi through the repeated elastic collision of a pair of blocks… One digit at a time. If that sounds bizarre - yeah, watch the video.
Pi in the normalizing factor of the normal distribution was a surprise to me
But it is in fact due to circles hiding very well.
Where is the circle in the wall bouncing one?
https://youtu.be/jsYwFizhncE?si=swB8l4IpY6j6AeN-&t=190
The equations for conservation of energy and momentum can be mapped onto a circle in “phase space”
Yuuuuuh I was often confused about Eigenvectors and then watched their video on it and the visualisation of scaling just made everything so simple, I felt stupid for not getting it before.
We want to think it’s aliens or some shit because we want to believe that we are super evolved and intelligent and every civilization before America was invented was composed of cavemen.
Ancient people were super intelligent. Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth with remarkable accuracy. Today’s most commonly used calendar in the western world, the Gregorian calendar, derives from the Julian calendar which in turn is derived from the ancient Egyptian calendar, which predates the Julius calendar by millennia and was impressively accurate as well (it loses only one day every four year), and that one has roots in Mesopotamian astronomy. For years our ancestors harvested herbs and plants to heal diseases and wounds. “Cavemen” were building megalithic temples in Malta thousands of years ago.
Just because they didn’t have Facebook and plastic bags, doesn’t mean that they were stupid.
I don’t doubt that this is a factor, but it’s not like the phenomenon is limited to just ancient inventions by non-white ethnicities.
I’ve definitely heard people saying that microwave ovens, very much not ancient tech, very much invented in America by a white person, were actually salvaged alien tech from crashed UFOs.
Holy fuck, finally someone not shoe horning racism into this somehow. Its not racism, these people think EVERYONE back in Egyptian times were stupid, not just non white people
That’s true, but there’s sort of a network of these different beliefs that tend to chain together into a belief system that, I would say, strongly correlates with sorts of weirdly racist conspiratorial shit. If you’re willing to reject the invention of the microwave, this totally arbitrary thing, and say it was from aliens, it’s pretty easy to blow that up and say that maybe the pyramids were also aliens. Like, you already believe in aliens, you already believe in a well-organized conspiracy capable of hiding facts, it’s not that big of a leap to make that like, oh, maybe the aliens also did the pyramids. Maybe the aliens are here all around us already, and then bim bam boom bob’s your uncle and suddenly you believe all this fucked up shit.
Then, you know, kind of, spin it out even further, and then a lot of this misinformation and conspiracy is going to come from fucked up kind of racist narratives and shit like that. The realm of misinfo and conspiracy is more occupied by that, almost by necessity.
‘Super intelligent’ sure seems like a stretch.
They were simply human. So if things were anything like they are now, then most folks likely were frothing removed, but there were also a few smart folks.
The history channel’s take, as well as others, that ancient civilizations could not have accomplished what they accomplished on their own, and therefore it’s aliens is peak Right-wing cope.
“Obviously those backwards non-white civilizations couldn’t have accomplished this on their own, because of their skin color. So therefore, the obvious solution is that they accomplished it because a hyper-intelligent space-fairing civilization took notice of their existence and arbitrarily decided to help them. This makes much more sense.” - Thought process of the utterly deranged.
Genuinely the only reason this smooth brain take is so popular is because its been echoed in media as an admittedly fun story-telling mechanism. But that’s all it is, a story. To put this on the history channel and claim it’s history is just one of the reasons why the History Channel has had their reputation sink in the past 20 years.
The racism of UFO conspiracies gets worse the deeper you go. For instance, it is a common belief that there are multiple races of aliens, but the really “good” ones are either the “Nordics” or the “Tall Whites.” They are generally described as being tall, white, blonde-haired and blue eyed.
Lmao that just sounds like regular terrestrial racism
I’m strangely proud of the effort these dummies put in to export their racism into the galaxy. Hell they’re taking ancient tribalism and backwards ideals into the new era! Extrapolating and expanding on the concept when provided new information! Embracing rather than attacking science! Can religion claim the same?
/s here juuust in case
The implication of ET genetic programs involving hybridization efforts between certain male and female Homo Sapiens and extraterrestrial beings is a huge subject that many people are scared to talk about.
lol—so this is basically ‘God made white people special because Reasons’ for non-religious people I guess
for non-religious people I guess
This can also plague the religious, to be fair. Every one of these conspiracies has some level of fucked up gnosticism going on inside of it, usually.
I’m more surprised with their logistics (documented) and the amount of slave labor (suspected) that needs to build these tombstones just to burry a dude, and sacrifice many people, animals, resources alongside them (discovered). Their fucking ego is of inhumane proportions. Maybe it’s better to believe in aliens than imagining this dick measuring contest of dead fuckers that probably killed way more people than their average wars. Pharaohs are the ultimate bastards. Instead of a damaged Sphinx, I’d love if someone punched off their noses instead.
Pyramids weren’t built by slaves, but there’s certainly class warfare going on in other ways. Egypt had a lot of farmers sitting around while the Nile was in its flood stage, and they appear to have paid them to work on monuments. Still, it’s a lot of work to feed the ego of one ruler.
Hugh, one another stereotype shattered I guess? But still, I don’t feel these people workmaxxed themselves just to be the supreme male alpha predators. If they could just sit around, they could’ve done just that, or organized their living space, or anything, instead of a very traumatic and power-consuming labor. It’s a different condition, but the dynamic seems close.
I mean, that isn’t to say the egyptians didn’t have slaves. Just that pyramid building was a job reserved to engineers and scholars rather than unskilled laborers. Evidence suggests they had a meat rich diet, access to medical care, and worked in 3 month shifts. I’d say they were doing better than the great majority of egyptians.
The group that navigated their project is usually left ignored. The main focus on those who dragged these heavy bricks into their places. There were obviously more of them than actual engineers.
Those were farmers who were not working at the time (due to periodic flooding of the Nile or whatever). I believe they paid their taxes in labor instead of grain, which earned them more money on their harvest. They benefitted from free food and the pharaoh had fewer people milling around with nothing to do (potential revolutionaries).
They weren’t slaves, they were just normal farmers paying their taxes. They could probably just leave if they had to. I seem to remember we have records of their attendance. Some people were not present and the reason is like “drunk” or something.
They weren’t just “dragging heavy bricks” though. They had pulley systems and used many techniques such as boats, sleighs or logs lubricated by animal fat to transport the stones. Obviously still hard work but far from the depiction we see in the media with people being whipped while pushing giant stones uphill.
Yeah, they used a lot of things that we use today in a more advanced form.
It’s just these cartoons are historically incorrect, but they give highschoolers a great inspiration to pray for OSHA and 8\5 day rather than praying for the pharaoh and his last apartments.
It seems like a good result.
Probably all the same reasons we don’t have 90% of the population doing their own thing now: they’ll starve if they don’t.
They aren’t called business empires for nothing. And imho all empires should fall. And we should now build public restrooms to these persons. My urine’d leak by itself if I’d stay over a toilet named after a past or modern pharaoh. Ramzes, Bezos, piss off.
If I don’t have enough food/money, and I can’t work as a farmer, maybe doing other work in the off season isn’t the worst idea. It’s what my grandfather did. And what do I care if the end result is a stupid monument or whatever as long as the money is good?
Powerful people committing horrific human-rights violations just to satisfy their own ego?
Damn, that’s never happened in the history of anything. /s
Yes, surely it’s because of their skin color and not because it was so long ago that people underestimate the amount of technology and labor they had access to.
Don’t they say the same things about Stonehenge?
Sort of, there’s a long train of things here. The Stonehenge theories primarily come from “Chariots of the Gods?” by Erich von Däniken who stole a lot of the Stonehenge stuff from Robert Charroux who thought that white people were actually descended from aliens and brought technology and civilization to the rest of the world.
Something can’t just be mildly amusing or funny, dude has to cry laugh for 5 whole minute.
This is a stolen Cunk on Earth bit, so if they mean they cry laughed for five straight minutes watching the episode, I would believe them
Something can’t just be a similar joke, it has to be “stolen”
Yea but then he’s missed about 300 jokes in that time span and needs to rewind it
Alien conspiracy theories about the Egyptian or Mayan Pyramids, the statues on Easter Island, the Nazca Lines, etc also have the implicit racist undertone of “well it’s not like the actual humans from those primitive and backwards cultures could build it!” Basically, non-white people built something too advanced and white people don’t like that.
By comparison, we never see alien conspiracy theories for mediaeval castles and cathedrals. No TV show is saying “so you’re telling me that a bunch of serfs who couldn’t read and didn’t know basic arithmetic could build a castle? Nah they were too primitive it was probably aliens.”
This is such an absurd take. There’s people in Europe who believe that Europe’s megalithic structures were built during the time of Atlantis and devote their whole existence to proving it, just to give one example. And of course, Stonehenge, neolithic Europes intergalactic landing site/astronomical calendar/astral energy power plant.
Megalithic structures like the Baalbek stones or Göbekli Tepe from preliterate times are aweinspiring enough to get anyone’s imagination going, it’s that simple. And some people then have a hard time distinguishing their imaginings from reality. They seem impossibly large and their purpose and methods of construction are lost to time, so it’s easy to come up with fanciful ideas to fill in the blanks. Sure, we now have decent theories of how the pyramids were built, but that weren’t always the case.
Castles and cathedrals were built too recently for even the wildest of wild brains to believe they weren’t built by humans.
It also implies aliens are dumb as dirt.
“Hey Xorglib, what did you do on your vacation to Earth? Did you teach them how to cure diseases? Or maybe advance their technology by a millennium or two?”
“Oh. Ummm…I helped them move some stones into a giant 3D triangle to immortalize their god emperor. And that was it.”
“Asshole.”
Just the alien version of building sand castles.
We do see Stonehenge included in ancient alien theories sometimes though.
People say the exact same things about Stonehenge.
And just like that, that long ass comment about how it’s actually racism is deflated.
Jesus fucking Christ sometimes it’s not racism.
Stonehenge was built by Mesolithic hunter gatherers though? They were dark complected.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/made-at-ucl/stories/face-cheddar-man-revealed
You really think folks speculating about the origin of stonehenge decades ago were thinking “this couldn’t have been built by people of dark complection!”. That is a very extreme reach.
I have no idea, but one person said that alien architect theories were racist:
Basically, non-white people built something too advanced and white people don’t like that.
Then you said they say the same thing about Stonehenge prompting capital to say:
And just like that, that long ass comment about how it’s actually racism is deflated. Jesus fucking Christ sometimes it’s not racism.
I just don’t see how bringing Stonehenge into it is a gotcha that proves it’s not racism, since it was also built by brown people.
And yet, no one knew that when these theories were being thought up
Or it was early European farmers from the Eastern Mediterranean. Who cares what color they were?
But in reality, fucking no one thinks about race when they speculate aliens might be involved in stuff like this.
They generally think “there’s no way people were this advanced way back then”.
People should stop shoehorning race into everything.
Remember one about the inca or something, and they said that there was no way they could cut perfectly fitting stone bricks for their walls, so it must have been aliens or something
Except maybe they just ground out the imperfections after excavating the stone, the exactly the way European masons did.
Utter nonsense. The reason alien conspiracy theories don’t exist about castles and cathedrals is because the construction of these buildings was almost always very well documented and in many cases these documents still exist today. As far as I know there are no testimonies on the construction of the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids other than the structures themselves.
But there were? Just off the top of my head you have Deir al-Medina, which is the village were the workers assigned to the tombs in the valley of kings were assigned to (not exactly the pyramids, but similar enough). We have records of how they complained about bad working conditions and missing supplies, which were usually promptly dealt with because of the importance of the tombs to royal ideology.
Also: what about the texts literally in the pyramids that describe how they were being built and by whom (at least by whom further up in the hierarchy)? It’s not like those aren’t texts because they’re not written in the Latin alphabet. Archaeologists did not, in fact, make up how pyramids/tombs were constructed.
Also, the Mayans most likely had extensive records as well, but we’ll never know for certain because the Spanish colonists destroyed everything Indigenous without regard.
Honestly I get angry whenever Western media describes the Mayans or any Indigenous community in the “new world” as “mysterious” or “little is known about them,” without the accompanying context of why so little is known about them, as if they’re fairies or something. Couldn’t be the fact that the colonial powers deliberately tried to erase them right?
Couldn’t be the fact that the colonial powers deliberately tried to erase them right?
Cue a new sticker of “We did that!”
They stacked things on top of other things? Must be aliens!
Funnily enough (to me), the (white) Anglo-Saxons spoke of the Roman ruins in Britain as having been built by giants, because they could not imagine how they had been constructed.
You’re talking about the same type of people that think the earth is flat. These people don’t think about race, they see a mystery and try to see their agenda in it.
My social studies teacher was fond of pointing out that people in ancient times had the same size brain we have now and where they lacked academics for math literacy they spent all their time working out tradecraft.
Yes let’s make it a race thing. Have you considered that maybe the majority of ancient structures are found in those countries. These countries were more civilized and were building much more sophisticated stuff before white people were. The few ancient white structures that we don’t understand how they built and still stand do have conspiracies around them e.g. stonehenge.
Most of this ancient alien shit dates back ti the nazis, give or take a specific or two. Serisously replace alien with arian and youre half way there. Plus nazis still use it as a recruitment method.
You’re doing literally the same thing ancient astronaut theorists do. Drawing lines between unconnected dots. You have no evidence the Nazis inventing it, it was just sci fi authors. Ancient Astronaut stuff is dumb without everyone exhaustingly trying to brand EVERYTHING as somehow linked to the Nazis. Please touch grass.
Miniminuteman archeology basically dedicates his channel to debunking this crazy shit. He has even brought in other archeologists if he finds out he got something wrong. It’s a great channel.
Oh dude, I love his videos. I haven’t watched him in a bit, but I should check him out again.
que ominous musicDid Leonardo da Vinci possess secret knowledge of the Great Pyramid’s builders which he encoded into his Vitruvian Man?!
Or y’know… they boths mathed.
Just a friendly correction: it’s cue. Que is ‘what’ in Spanish.
alternatively “queue”, when the music isn’t appropriate just yet
Wait… No? I thought standing in line was a queue and a director would give you a cue.
Like, here’s your cue to stand in queue.
You’re absolutely right, a queue is a line where you wait and a FIFO data storage. I was making a pun, since both Spotify and YouTube (and likely numerous other platforms) have a “queue” for titles to play after the current one, and the verb “putting something at the end of a queue” is “to enqueue”, sometimes shorted to *to queue" (which normally means to stand in line yourself, a favorite pastime of the British)
Exactly. The DJ is a native Spanish speaker and he’s asking which ominous music you want him to play. /s
Even if you don’t use a wheel, if you do enough geometry Pi is bound to appear eventually
At which point you need to form a quasi-religious cult to suppress the information, for fear of people discovering the heretical existence of irrational numbers.
Too che.
aliens could definitely build upside down they have the technology
Australians.
History for Granite has some great videos on the construction methods of the pyramids. Fron how the casing stones were cut to size, to trying to figure out where the construction ramps would have been. Very interesting channel.
Reminds me of the time a bunch of people were fascinated with a pen that writes up side down and someone blurted out ‘pencils’. This was after some Seinfeld episode about a pen.
Is this the old joke about American astronauts spending $1M to invent a pen that writes in space while Russian cosmonauts just used pencils?
There’s technically a reason why you wouldn’t want to use graphite in space (the particles don’t just fall to the floor, they float around in the air and get into places they shouldn’t), but also NASA is notorious for going through ten different private contractors to do what a proper public sector organization would internalize.
Also, Pilot created that pen as a marketing ploy without having an official contract. NASA did pick it up, but IIRC, Pilot technically lost money on the project. Of course, marketing costs money, so they were fine with that.
Do you mean Fisher? Pilot is a Japanese pen company who doesn’t have anything to do with the space pen, as far as I know.
Yes, mixed them up.
Yeah imagine trying to sharpen a pencil in space.
In my fourth grade computer lab, they didn’t even allow pencils around the Apple IIe’s. (Yeah I’m old lol.)
Yeah imagine trying to sharpen a pencil in space.
You just click the little eraser on the back to extend the graphite.
What is this future black magic wizardry?
The bent pyramid of Sneferu is proof that the pyramids weren’t built by some higher being.
