Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids

6/18/2026 at 6:48:03 PM

The classic Mcsweeney's for the HN crowd is "E-mail Addresses That Would Be Really Annoying to Give Out Over the Phone"

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/e-mail-addresses-that-wo...

by chadd

6/18/2026 at 8:49:01 PM

My father in law has email address that is about his small dog. He's Scottish and his dog growls a lot. So his address is weegrrrr.

Oh let me tell you the fun of spelling that one over the phone. He's also not the most patient man in the world either :-)

by NikolaNovak

6/18/2026 at 9:17:54 PM

Tell him to be careful. The chinese government might try to re-educate his email address.

by dafugg

6/18/2026 at 11:45:35 PM

How so?

by NikolaNovak

6/18/2026 at 11:59:03 PM

The Chinese government has been rounding up Uyghurs (pronounced like we-gir) to reeducate them. And the government really does not like it when people talk about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin...

by Fezzik

6/18/2026 at 11:54:53 PM

Took me a while admittedly (probably a "me problem") but it's a word play of "Uyghur".

by folkrav

6/19/2026 at 7:26:13 AM

I was considering changing my name to Mark Withasea because I keep getting asked so many times "Is that Mark with a K, or a C?"

by ddmf

6/18/2026 at 9:16:05 PM

"The WiFi password is fourwordsalluppercase. One word, all lowercase."

by orthoxerox

6/18/2026 at 6:51:49 PM

I love that gmail was only 4 months old when this came out.

by evtothedev

6/19/2026 at 9:14:33 AM

During the dot-com boom I registered dotcodotuk.co.uk and set up dotcodotuk@dotcodotuk.co.uk. Strangely the novelty of this wore off very quickly.

by oniony

6/19/2026 at 3:24:17 PM

Occasionally on here is user fanf with email address dot@dotat.at

by pjc50

6/18/2026 at 9:28:07 PM

lol, that's what I'd call a dense piece of text:

(header)

  [email protected]
  [email protected]
  [email protected]
  [email protected]
  [email protected]

(end article)

by tremon

6/19/2026 at 3:25:09 PM

Is that being injected by an extension or something? It's perfectly readable to me.

by pjc50

6/19/2026 at 8:36:16 PM

It's address (de)obfuscation via javascript, meant to prevent harvesting of spam targets via simple scraping. The HTML plain-text reads what I wrote, there's a javascript hook to replace the placeholders with actual e-mail addresses. But the amount of substance on that page did not merit a reload with javascript enabled.

by tremon

6/18/2026 at 10:53:36 PM

i laughed at that for five straight minutes thank you

by mixxit

6/18/2026 at 6:29:44 PM

"I personally can't conceive of how one might built this, and I must be a million times smarter than people 4500 years ago, ergo people didn't build this." is how the Ancient Aliens theory always sounds to me.

by AdmiralAsshat

6/18/2026 at 6:41:15 PM

There's a ton of people that, for some reason, just can't grok that humans have been largely behaviorally and biologically identical for the past 200k years.

The average ancient roman plebeian's life would not look dramatically different from ours today, minus technology of course. They worked a day job, ate at thermopoliums (basically fast food), lived in crowded apartment complexes with various forms of slum lords, deal with high rent prices, and roman graffiti is littered with complaints about politicians, sports teams, and the rising cost of living.

With the pyramids, we have the Wadi al-Jarf papyri, a detailed logistics logbook documenting the teams moving the stones for the great pyramids, along side payroll records much like any other spreadsheet you'll find on someone's corporate computer today.

We are not so different from our ancient ancestors at all.

by thewebguyd

6/18/2026 at 8:56:08 PM

It has always been my understanding that if talking about homo sapiens sapiens: then if you could „snatch“ a newborn from 200k years ago and raise it just like any other human baby today, there is nothing in terms of biology etc. that would stop said baby from becoming an engineer, astronaut, formula one race driver, lawyer, programmer, or CEO (or any other modern profession for that matter).

Never read up if that pet theory of mine has any merit, though.

by ManuelKiessling

6/19/2026 at 6:42:51 AM

I used to think that as well. This book recently made me think again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_10,000_Year_Explosion

by limbicsystem

6/18/2026 at 11:01:30 PM

There’s some adaptations to disease etc but basically my understanding is that this is true.

by SequoiaHope

6/18/2026 at 7:23:33 PM

A couple years ago I realized that I had somewhat subconsciously made the same assumption. The thing that snapped me out of it was my awe in watching Clickspring (YT) try to recreate the Antikythera Mechanism. That device's complexity and craftsmanship is proof to me that despite the lack of technology, there were some astonishingly smart and resourceful people living thousands of years ago.

by aqfamnzc

6/18/2026 at 9:13:23 PM

Maybe they learned from the aliens?

by HeyLaughingBoy

6/19/2026 at 3:42:05 AM

The Obelisk at the Vatican weighs in at 360 tons. And was moved from Egypt to Rome by the Romans around 40AD. And then moved to it's present location in the 1586. The Romans moved at least 8 Egyptian Obelisks to Rome and also commissioned a couple.

The only thing really amazing about the pyramids is how many couple of ton blocks they carved out and transported. It's around 250 blocks a day for 25 years.

by Gibbon1

6/19/2026 at 12:10:51 PM

A thing of note, the Nile banks have been one the most fertile arable land around the whole mediterranean, that's why it was invaluable to the roman empire. Why it matters is that only in a place where you have very fertile land can you afford to have sooooo many people not working in agriculture and feed them to work for your tyrannical pet project

by cassepipe

6/20/2026 at 3:55:48 AM

There’s one in London too.

by pyuser583

6/19/2026 at 7:03:02 AM

There is even a controversial theory that individual human intelligence peaked around 3000 years ago.

> Crabtree bases his argument on the fact that, for more than 99 percent of human evolutionary history, we have lived as hunter-gatherer communities, which has led to big-brained humans. Since the development of agriculture and cities, however, natural selection on our intellect has effectively stopped and mutations have accumulated in the critical intelligence genes.

https://wcuquad.com/101393/news/humans-are-no-longer-as-inte...

by consumer451

6/19/2026 at 2:17:58 PM

I think the gap here variation. Yes, people living 50,000 years ago were likely quite similar to _some_ people alive today, just probably not very similar to the types of people who are able to peacefully sit around on the internet and read history books for pleasure, who would most likely ask that question.

by lqstuart

6/18/2026 at 6:46:12 PM

There are ideas that ancient human thinking was very different and primitive compared to modern. For example (and others): The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes (1976)

by comrade1234

6/18/2026 at 7:15:20 PM

In the half century that has passed since the publishing of that book, plenty of work has been done to say that ancient human thinking wasn't primitive, especially the ones that made the pyramids 4,600 years ago, such as the Red Sea Scrolls: How Ancient Papyri Reveal the Secrets of the Pyramids by Mark Lehner and Pierre Tallet (2022) which alludes to the minds of competent and intelligent humans

by seanclayton

6/18/2026 at 8:41:28 PM

Comparing Plato to various current-day companies and governments, this is true. Assuming "primitive" means "clear or unobscured".

by jleyank

6/18/2026 at 6:51:15 PM

That one is an interesting scifi premise, but deeply unpersuasive when it comes to actual humans.

by crooked-v

6/18/2026 at 6:57:58 PM

It was one of the main influences for the cyberpunk Snow Crash novel.

by Hikikomori

6/19/2026 at 1:52:54 AM

And an even bigger influence in Stephenson's first book, The Big U.

by shawn_w

6/18/2026 at 6:49:29 PM

In much the same way there are 'ideas' that aliens built pyramids.

by applfanboysbgon

6/18/2026 at 11:52:37 PM

probably this is an effect of a much more simple environment and tasks in the past: Sleep, hunt and not been hunted, eat, reproduce. the minds seems simpler, but is apparent.

We live in a more complex world, this produce someting more complex, culture, ideas, knowledge, tasks, technology, craps.. but basic intelligence i think is the same (if not better in the past, less "pollution")

by effed3

6/19/2026 at 7:14:33 PM

If I was to sum up Jaynes' most relevant idea, I'd say it is that language is a technological advancement that evolved to handle more abstract and powerful concepts over time. Ten thousand years ago, humans were biologically the same as today, but their tool of language wasn't advanced enough to effectively communicate or contemplate some concepts, and it led to a reduced inner monologue and explicit self-awareness.

When I first read it, I remember thinking that this was the most interesting book I've read that is probably wrong.

by kbelder

6/19/2026 at 7:56:23 PM

I don't have read jaines. To me the language was different yes, but the mind is another thing, but the two are cleary related. I think humans need (and create) more concepts, more complex/different idea, to grasp/describe a more complex world around, but the mind is equally capable now as 50k-years ago.

Probably in the past minds can contemplate things we are not more aware today, who know? is not all about rational and scientific thinking, is not more or less advanced, is simply different, and in the past humans needed a quite different set of ideas and tools than today.

Just travel to Papua-NewGuinea and check with some tribe in a lost valley, straigh from Neolythic, some does not have a concept of "3", but children can learn arithmetic as everyone else, they can contemplate every concept we have, given the right path.

by effed3

6/19/2026 at 4:56:42 AM

> With the pyramids, we have the Wadi al-Jarf papyri

Yeah but that was planted by the aliens, who got the idea from God when she was planting all the dinosaur fossils in 4,004 BC.

by pseudohadamard

6/18/2026 at 6:51:26 PM

Romans, huh? Many of them were slaves, they believed they could learn the future by looking at the patterns of birds in flight, a Roman's bloodline was very important to the Roman's importance. You can take "behaviorally identical" too far, ideas got better over time, people in the past had bad ideas.

by card_zero

6/18/2026 at 9:11:40 PM

If that's sarcastic, good one :)

If genuine, I'm puzzled. In the current world we have a tremendous amount of people who hold various superstitious beliefs as well as spend tremendous amount of time on their genealogy. And nepotism never went away. I agree those are "bad ideas", but don't see how they differentiate us from people 5k years ago?

by NikolaNovak

6/19/2026 at 7:33:37 PM

I guess I got downvoted for not supplying very persuasive examples. The point is, cleverness is having good ideas-about-ideas, and these have obviously improved over time, so people in the past were obviously not so clever.

I could point at all the self-help books that promise to improve the way you think, or Wikipedias list of fallacies, but I don't those are great examples either. It's frustrating that I can't make a simple point just because it needs more research. I hoped people would find better examples themselves.

I don't think your word "tremendous" works, I think superstition declined and values improved, but it's hard to nail this down for people who are keen to disagree. Does that include you? Why?

by card_zero

6/18/2026 at 6:57:00 PM

Still sounds a lot like humans today. Many are still slaves, many believe they can learn the future by reading cards with funny pictures on them, for some bloodline is very important, as is race.

I don't think we are meaningfully different at all. The same types and groups of people and social structures all still exist today. I suppose the big difference is those of us who are well adjusted know that racism is not good, and tarot cards are meaningless woo woo. But there were also such skeptics back then too.

by thewebguyd

6/18/2026 at 7:08:36 PM

I don't understand the downvote, it's like "nooo, their ideas were exactly as good as the ones we have today, humans don't learn over time, how dare you imply we used to be stupider, it's sacrilege".

So I object to this weird article of faith every time it comes up, we can't have been exactly as sensible and exactly as clever in the past as we are today, it doesn't make any sense to say that. But it's somehow become right-on to say that it's so, as if denying it is a prejudice like timeism or something. It obviously matters to some world view, equality maybe?

by card_zero

6/18/2026 at 9:14:12 PM

We have access to different data points today. But the way I read the original post is that human mind as such did not meaningful change. If you took a Roman or Egyptian embryo from 5k years ago and incubated it today, you'd have a modern human. The fact that many people back then had crazy ideas, is orthogonal to the biological argument at hand - and that's before we look at amount of people with crazy ideas today, many of which are largely the same.

Basically I think we have to pick a lane on whether we are talking biology, vs culture, vs knowledge and accumulated data.

by NikolaNovak

6/19/2026 at 7:38:55 PM

Yes, but I don't know why we'd be talking about biology in the first place, unless everybody's going around assessing everybody else a biologically stupid or smart. (If so, where do they think the smart ones get their good ideas from, are those ideas supposed to be inborn? Or exuded from a strong and genetically healthy idea-gland?)

by card_zero

6/18/2026 at 7:13:56 PM

I didn't downvote you.

But, I'm not saying that humans haven't learned anything, but that cognitively we haven't changed. A roman citizen has the exact same brain capacity to reason and adapt as we do today. There is zero separation from ancient human vs. modern human in that aspect.

You are conflating collective knowledge with individual human intelligence. That roman looking at bird entrails to predict the future was using the exact same pattern-recognition ability we use today to look at data visualizations, or trend graphs.

You could go back in time, steal an ancient roman baby, and raise them in today's year and they would be no different from you or I.

by thewebguyd

6/18/2026 at 7:43:19 PM

I agree with the "steal an ancient roman baby" premise. The "roman citizen" example is not as strong. Cognitive ability is not just genetics. The grown-up roman would be missing a lot of advantages during their upbringing that weren't available back then. Also, limiting it to just "citizens" means limiting it to their upper class.

Compared to Roman times, we've had pretty big advances in nutrition, healthcare, education, and widespread middle class wealth. It's not unreasonable to infer that these would have an impact on cognitive ability similar to the effect they've had on life expectancy.

That being said, there's definitely a present-ist bias, as the McSweeney's article does a good job mocking. I do believe their best thinkers were as good as our best thinkers.

by bjt

6/18/2026 at 8:20:49 PM

Life expectancy didn't change that much, what changed is infant mortality.

And for cognitive ability: plenty of firsthand accounts from Enlightenment thinkers about thesuperior reasoning abilities of average members of hunter-gatherer/American Indian tribes compared to the typical European at the time, and they arguably already had better access to nutrition/education/healthcare.

Cognitive ability is for sure related to some extent to these factors, but actual practice of reasoning (through public debates, leisure time, storytelling) seems to have been much more influential on the actual realisation of cognitive potential, and I'm not sure there'd be a stark difference between a typical human today, or even a typical Westerner, vs a typical Roman citizen.

by constantius

6/18/2026 at 8:58:36 PM

Plato begs to differ re: philosophy. Ancient people could memorize staggeringly more than folks today. They probably also paid (far) more attention to their surroundings. Like Rangers in D&D, they could read blades of grass and state what/when walked by...

by jleyank

6/18/2026 at 11:12:37 PM

A lot of this is simply due to environment that they live in.

When I was in nautical school, I was taught to always be aware of sea state regardless of where I was/what I was doing so I'd get in the habit of always knowing what the sea was doing.

Now I live on a farm. We are always very aware of the weather and instinctively comparing what we see around us to what the forecasts say.

When I lived in a city, I was barely aware of even if it was supposed to rain later or not. Going from your climate-controlled house to your climate-controlled car, to your climate-controlled job, you simply don't notice those things except superficially.

by HeyLaughingBoy

6/18/2026 at 8:55:45 PM

> Life expectancy didn't change that much, what changed is infant mortality.

Life expectancy means at birth commonly. Life expectancy changed because infant and child mortality changed.

by pseudalopex

6/18/2026 at 7:53:31 PM

Well no, not even as good. For instance, your comment invokes the idea of prejudice, and the value of being unprejudiced. Did Romans know about that, and consider it important? Maybe, I couldn't say offhand, but my point is that they might not have had some valuable idea like that. I think we can say with certainty that they must have lacked some idea of great value to thinking. That makes the ancients all worse at thinking, all of them. This doesn't of course mean that their best ideas were bad though!

by card_zero

6/19/2026 at 5:11:33 AM

They certainly understood the value of being unprejudiced, indeed many of the ideas of how to think that permeate Western Civilization came from the Ancient Greek and Roman civilizations.

>I think we can say with certainty that they must have lacked some idea of great value to thinking.

I believe there is one idea that they lacked which is that of the Scientific Method, and perhaps some others that helped ignite the Industrial Revolution.

However

>That makes the ancients all worse at thinking, all of them.

No, that does not follow at all. For that to follow you would have to show that those ideas were more valuable to the process of thinking than all the others that they did have.

Furthermore there has been sufficient argument already put forth here in this thread that their abilities at memorization and rhetoric provided a better ground for thinking than a lot of modern people possess, you would have to show that these ideas they did not possess are of so much greater value that they essentially negate the things in which they show superior skills.

You might suppose that to do this all you would need to do is to point around at the highly technological world we live in, but this would be seem to be a categorical error because we are discussing their ability to think not their technological levels. You could make the argument that the superior technology is the output of the process of thought, but I don't think an HN post will be sufficient to make that argument.

Finally assuming the Scientific Method was so superior an idea that it made the Ancients worse at thinking it would actually only make them worse at thinking than people who reasonably understand and apply the Scientific Method in their daily lives, which one look at the news should tell you is not that many people.

by bryanrasmussen

6/19/2026 at 7:49:16 PM

> For that to follow you would have to show that those ideas were more valuable to the process of thinking than all the others that they did have.

OK, good logic. But that implies could be still very valuable ideas of the ancients which are now lost. I suppose that's what classicism was all about. But we've been through classicism already a couple of times (starting in the renaissance). It seems likely we caught up with most of the powerful ideas of the ancient world.

I'm picking up a "bring back the seven liberal arts!" vibe from your comment, and it has a certain something going for it as an idea, I must admit. Even so ...

by card_zero

6/18/2026 at 10:38:30 PM

Seneca wrote slaves and free men were equal essentially. The Torah said foreigners should be treated as natives.

You lacked the idea of begging the question seemingly.

by pseudalopex

6/19/2026 at 7:50:47 PM

I don't flaming care about the specifics! I keep picking bad examples, examples are hard, you should argue my side and do the examples for me.

by card_zero

6/18/2026 at 8:56:58 PM

Same religions. Same political structures. Same engineering - we've only recently duplicated their concrete, and man, could they build roads and aqueducts. Yeah, they had a dodgy number system, but they had military and political organizations that lasted 1000+ years. They had worldwide trade, and unified far more territory than anybody today.

by jleyank

6/18/2026 at 7:34:31 PM

Yes, of course that's right. But I thought you were the one conflating collective knowledge with individual human intelligence, when you said "behaviorally". Behaviors being due to ideas, not nature (I don't much rate nature's effect on smarts anyway).

Maybe I need to spell this distinction out next time it comes up, which will be the next ancient history thread, probably. I guess the endless repetition of "they were just as smart as we were you know!" is in order to counteract an unstated idea that the ancients were some other species, like orangutans in bronze armor, I don't know. Maybe it's common to vaguely think that about them? But this gratuitous counter-point should be on a strictly genetic basis, or else you'd be accidentally denying that ideas improve.

by card_zero

6/18/2026 at 11:41:08 PM

is not too difficult to find "very bad ideas" today, just look around. The point is about knowledge and culture, not individuals

by effed3

6/18/2026 at 6:51:09 PM

It's more specifically "I personally can't conceive of how one might built this, so non-white people definitely didn't build this"

by Avshalom

6/18/2026 at 6:55:07 PM

My original comment was more along those lines, but then I did a quick Wiki refresher on Chariots of the Gods (possibly the origin of the popular "Ancient Aliens" push), and noted that the author included Stonehenge among his examples, so I changed course.

by AdmiralAsshat

6/18/2026 at 6:38:10 PM

Ancient Aliens conflates two very different ideas.

The show’s core argument is that ancient civilizations were more advanced than we give them credit for. That may be true, but “more advanced” does not mean they had superior technology or help from aliens. It can simply mean they had technical knowledge, methods, or craftsmanship that we have since lost or forgotten.

Elon Musk has made a similar point about the US space program. We landed on the moon more than 50 years ago, but in some ways we now have to relearn how to do it (because we forgot how). That does not mean we had better technology in the 1960s, and it certainly does not mean aliens were involved. It means knowledge, systems, expertise, and institutional capability can fade over time. And that doesn't mean aliens were involved (as the tvshow would make you believe).

by alberth

6/18/2026 at 6:44:43 PM

> It means knowledge, systems, expertise, and institutional capability can fade over time

This has also been happening since ancient times. Famously, how to make roman concrete was lost after the fall of the empire and Europe did not reinvent high quality concrete until much later in the 18th century. They also lost entire industrial-scale manufacturing pipelines for pottery and had a regression back to crude, hand-shaped pottery.

Turns out we humans have been dealing with the same human problems for hundreds of thousands of years.

by thewebguyd

6/18/2026 at 6:51:25 PM

This reminds me of Gall’s Law. You cannot create a complex system, you must create a simple system and improve it over time.

The issue arises when you get so many iterations in, you’ve forgotten the process. Any catastrophic event can mean you won’t be able to create the silicon chip or airplanes and so much other technology.

Maybe I’m wrong and people and books do exist that can explain the process and human might would succeed.

by theturtletalks

6/19/2026 at 2:04:29 AM

A semiconductor company couldn't get their second plant to work until they tore it down and set it up again in an exact copy of the floor layout of the first plant. They don't know why.

by inigyou

6/19/2026 at 3:31:33 AM

The Freefall webcomic can sympathize. http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1500/fc01415.htm

by ahazred8ta

6/18/2026 at 6:48:01 PM

Have we actually forgotten how to land to the moon? That sounds very fishy, I’m pretty skeptical that’s not the case, that was done at a time where we had good records and still have access to them. And it’s close enough to current time that people who worked on it are still alive (not all of course). Coming from musk makes me believe that’s not true, he’s far from a reliable narrator

by dgellow

6/18/2026 at 7:11:05 PM

Many of the manufacturing processes used to make the Apollo spacecraft were not followed in the production floor - and nobody wrote those changes down. That's one well-known example of Apollo-era knowledge lost, there are a few others if you seriously care to DDG them.

by dotancohen

6/18/2026 at 8:59:05 PM

Can you see how far

"some Apollo program last-minute production-floor manufacturing changes were not written down"

is from

"humans lost fundamental technology needed to land on the moon"?

by marshray

6/19/2026 at 1:16:16 PM

1. You are correct it's not very far.

2. "Not far" is the difference between "land humans on the surface of the moon and return them safely to Earth" and not doing that. Some of this stuff was unbelievably lucky, go read about the F1 engine baffles - getting that right was pure stupid luck as much as it was engineered.

And there were literally hundreds of these examples - across five different space vehicles and the interfaces between them.

by dotancohen

6/19/2026 at 4:01:33 PM

Yes, it's absolutely a lot of work, cost, and risk to design and qualify a new rocket for human spaceflight from scratch. Especially if you've let all your institutional knowledge drift away in the meantime.

I just don't think that comes close to meeting the bar of "lost technology" in the sense that term is used by the extraterrestrial pyramid theorists (i.e., the manipulation of fundamental physical forces allowing the blocks to be levitated into place).

by marshray

6/19/2026 at 6:59:26 PM

I agree with you about that. We are facing an engineering challenge, not a physics challenge.

by dotancohen

6/18/2026 at 9:10:45 PM

In aerospace, those are the same statements. Those production floor changes are often the difference between a payload working or failing.

by throw2ih020

6/18/2026 at 9:19:04 PM

How many years did these production floor changes take to engineer?

by marshray

6/18/2026 at 9:28:35 PM

Over a period from 1960 to 1969:

> Landing humans on the Moon by the end of 1969 required the most sudden burst of technological creativity, and the largest commitment of resources ($25 billion; $187 billion in 2024 US dollars)[24] ever made by any nation in peacetime. At its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities.[25]

A large chunk of those industries and supporting academia no longer exist in the US outside the defense sector.

by throw2ih020

6/18/2026 at 10:22:09 PM

I remain in awe at the Apollo program, it is a most marvellous thing, and I am aware that it was not always received well at the time.

Comparing the cost, the Iran war cost the US between 25 billion and 113 billion, so 187 spending billion over 9 years is not insurmountable. Political will provided. Alas.

by gherkinnn

6/19/2026 at 4:52:03 AM

Obviously I was asking about the lifespan of an individual undocumented change, not the entire Apollo program prior to 1970.

by marshray

6/19/2026 at 6:41:44 AM

Okay, but dgallow at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48589728 asked "Have we actually forgotten how to land to the moon?", not "can we build a Saturn V rocket which is fundamentally the same as the ones from nearly 60 years ago?"

Reading about the design for the F-1B engine gave me some understanding of the issue.

The F-1B was meant as a modernized version of the Apollo Saturn F-1 main engine.

The original design used extensive hand-welding, and the specific details of how to handle tricky situations likely not included in the manufacturing processes details because it was simply expected from an expert welder of the time.

That sort of expertise is far less common now. But rather than try to find those welders, the designers of the new engine used newer methods like additive manufacturing to replace welding entirely.

The old F-1 engine used a lot of complicated mechanical control methods. The F-1B used computer controls.

The new design had fewer components, was lighter, and was designed for a 15% performance boost over the original design.

So, sure, perhaps we can't exactly build a new Saturn V rocket following the 1969 blueprints, due to missing production floor changes. But we would never try because we are not limited to 1960s building methods if we wanted to use the Saturn V design as the basis for going back to the moon.

by eesmith

6/18/2026 at 8:51:55 PM

There are two parts to manufacturing technology: The written knowledge of what to build, and the process knowledge of all the gotchas and tricks and skill that people experienced in their craft rarely write down. (In many cases the great craftspeople with the knowledge are not great teachers or writers). Manufacturing an object is not like compiling code, where if you pick the right inputs and machines you get the same output. The actual process of building is so full of domain knowledge and variability that ten different people following the same written instructions can get wildly different results.

Derek from SmarterEveryDay ran into this when trying to get a product manufactured in the US and shared his experience: https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY?t=1386

by throw2ih020

6/18/2026 at 11:16:04 PM

Thanks, that’s very interesting

by dgellow

6/18/2026 at 7:16:18 PM

It has been a common meme within NASA since before SpaceX was founded.

The hard part of putting humans on the moon and bringing them back safely is not a problem if basic scientific knowlege, it is more an engineering challenge in an incredibly complex and bespoke domain. It is the know how that this component from this manufacturer has this kind of failure rate under these conditions, but when interacting with this other component under these conditions the failure rate is much higher, but that can be mitigated if we apply this kind of technique, but only if the temperature stays within X....

by jubilanti

6/19/2026 at 2:05:57 AM

In the same way we've forgotten how to write Windows 1.0 programs. Sure, we can work it out again - specially with modern reverse engineering tools. But that's the point - we'd have to work it out again.

by inigyou

6/19/2026 at 12:06:02 PM

Wait until you hear about "I don't remember leaving my phone in the toilets" ergo "There must be alternative parallel timelines we regularly jump to and from"

by cassepipe

6/19/2026 at 7:02:56 PM

...and also CERN is to blame somehow.

by krapp

6/18/2026 at 8:25:23 PM

This is a strawman argument, their real one is: "These megalithic structures would be tremendously difficult for anyone to build even today with all of our modern technology, and yet they did it hundreds of times before even inventing the wheel, in several places across the world."

by an0malous

6/18/2026 at 10:12:16 PM

It is a weird argument because we totally could build a Great Pyramid replica. Ships and trains hauling stone and tower cranes plopping them into place. We are really good at moving things and lifting them. It would probably be the quarries that be the bottleneck.

If wanted it in concrete, would be faster. Or could do it in steel or steel/concrete with some interior space (Luxor in Las Vegas is size of smaller pyramid).

by ianburrell

6/19/2026 at 12:25:16 AM

Yeah, they probably didn't have to file for environmental review and eminent domain.

by toast0

6/18/2026 at 6:41:18 PM

> People dramatically underestimate what thousands of organized humans can accomplish when they are adequately fed, aggressively supervised, and denied alternative career paths.

Somehow I feel personally attacked.

by yongjik

6/18/2026 at 9:48:05 PM

The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them..."

by prmph

6/18/2026 at 6:39:34 PM

Related: Masonry Techniques of the Inca’s Master Builders

https://www.earthasweknowit.com/pages/inca_construction

This article was a fantastic read, and thoroughly debunks a lot of ancient alien style stuff.

by data-ottawa

6/19/2026 at 2:34:38 AM

Very informative article with excellent photographs.

You should post it to HN for greater visibility instead of being buried in the comments.

by rramadass

6/20/2026 at 7:00:35 AM

Please someone explain why people today not making them anymore not make ancestors better than us.

Ancestors were great. I just want a plan of how to do it.

by 3dedb728-3f77

6/18/2026 at 6:44:04 PM

If aliens built the pyramids they did a pretty shit job. You can see the evolution where they started building a pyramid and realized it would be too high so they changed the angle half-way up. If they had computers and geometry they probably would have gotten it right from the start.

by comrade1234

6/18/2026 at 8:58:07 PM

Reminds me of my career explaining how to build simple webpages without using large abstraction libraries/frameworks for JavaScript.

by austin-cheney

6/19/2026 at 6:27:36 PM

I don't think humans really invented raisins.

by stevage

6/18/2026 at 6:15:35 PM

Saying that aliens built them is as likely as claiming magic built them.

by WalterBright

6/18/2026 at 9:07:00 PM

Magic is explicitly something outside the realm of possibility, but I get what you’re saying.

by kulahan

6/18/2026 at 6:31:45 PM

The Testament of Solomon indulges this craziness.

> the text describes how Solomon was enabled to build his temple by commanding demons by means of a magical ring that was entrusted to him by the archangel Michael.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testament_of_Solomon

by echelon_musk

6/18/2026 at 6:49:10 PM

> The Testament of Solomon is a pseudepigraphical composite text ascribed to King Solomon but not regarded as canonical scripture by Jews or Christian groups. It was written in the Greek language, based on precedents dating back to the early 1st millennium AD, but was likely not completed in any meaningful textual sense until sometime in the Middle Ages.

Yeah that’s super reliable…

by irishcoffee

6/18/2026 at 6:52:13 PM

Moreover cannonical and historical truth are orthogonal axes.

by kelseyfrog

6/18/2026 at 6:25:26 PM

For real

by iamarobot

6/18/2026 at 6:21:43 PM

one piece of "evidence" some conspiracy believers cite to prove aliens is, roughly: a bunch of places around the world independently all built similar pyramid-like structures (egypt, machu picchu, etc.). so it must be aliens.

the fact that the easiest way to pile up a bunch of big rocks without it crumbling down is to have a wide base and a narrow top is seemingly forgotten.

by john_strinlai

6/18/2026 at 6:39:14 PM

>without it crumbling down

Which is an underappreciated part. They didn't only build pyramids, it's just pyramids had a much higher chance of actually surviving the millennia so it looks like early human civilizations were weirdly obsessed with pyramids. You never hear any theories about how aliens built the Colossus of Rhodes, but the pyramids get it because they're still around.

by slg

6/18/2026 at 6:51:47 PM

If there was ever a candidate for alien intervention its the roman aqueducts, and like you said, I never see any conspiracies for that either. The romans figured out water filtration, built a massive underground network, figured out hydraulic pressure, and created concrete that can set underwater and resisted cracking.

Far more impressive than a pyramid IMO.

by thewebguyd

6/18/2026 at 6:34:32 PM

It strikes me that it also might be the best way to build a tall structure, for the ancients. It takes modern materials to build skinny and tall.

by qup

6/18/2026 at 11:26:06 PM

Really funny to read.

but refleting uppon: maybe "aliens" are another name for a kind of ignorance spreading around. basic science and history simply gone. Not so funny to think about.

by effed3

6/18/2026 at 9:03:19 PM

I think the more likely explanation is racism. If the pyramids were in Europe, nobody would challenge their human origin but pyramids are in Africa Surely aliens are involved.

by bji9jhff

6/18/2026 at 9:05:25 PM

This is such a weirdly misanthropic view of humanity. Why are people so desperate to find evil in this world when ignorance is not only nicer to believe, it’s insanely more accurate?

Like I get it, you’re depressed, but this doesn’t automatically make everyone everywhere that doesn’t believe some random facts “racist”.

by kulahan

6/18/2026 at 9:31:45 PM

If we interpret the grandparent charitably, they're saying the centuries-long history of people suggesting Africans couldn't have built the pyramids to justify their own racial bias [0] also applies to modern people. It doesn't seem like an outrageous position, nor does it preclude ignorance being involved.

[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-white-southerners...

by AlotOfReading

6/18/2026 at 9:12:47 PM

This is provably incorrect. Stonehenge is the target of alien conspiracies as well.

by applfanboysbgon

6/18/2026 at 9:35:14 PM

the article has a huge 'flash sale' and is selling shit. Not the best evidence to declare huge swathes of people racist. c If you search "extraterrestrial origins of Stonehenge" you'l find the same shit. 'Muh aliens' crowd are happy to attribute anything to aliens. The pyramids of bosnia? Nazca lines? Moai?

And why is it bad that people feel wonder at places literally called "wonders" and build stories around them? That's universal, not sinister. Egypt is steeped in religion, myth, and all kinds of craziness; most Egyptians don't hold a strictly secular, "logical" view of the world either, and no one calls them "racist" for it. From my time living in Cairo, people attributed most things to Israel and god, lol.

I also don't get tying a whole continent (an arbitrary construct) to a single race. There's no such thing as "the African race."

Weird comment. Hammers and nails, imo.

by gaiagraphia

6/19/2026 at 7:06:03 AM

Maybe you are just really, really determined to find racism in everything? Your claim is wildly wrong; I live in Europe and there is no shortage of kookiness and crackpotry around all the megalithic structures that dot the landscape, down to having actual cults worship them.

This isn't recent either. When Tolkien put the lines about Orthanc and the Stone of Erech looking unearthly into the Lord of the Rings, he reflected on the early Medieval people and their superstitions regarding Roman ruins. "There once was a race of giants that built X" was a common idea, and fanciful medieval authors would invent all sorts of humanoids that weren't human and were responsible for various wonders or evils.

Burial mounds in Ireland (sídh) are linguistically associated with the "fair folk" (aos sí) until today.

by inglor_cz

6/19/2026 at 2:59:27 AM

[dead]

by MemoryHoleHQ

6/18/2026 at 6:57:54 PM

Given that Giza pyramid took about 30 years, the internet and AI together took the same amount of time. So then AI is definitely a work of aliens from the far away galaxy.

by zkmon

6/18/2026 at 11:10:34 PM

https://www.war.gov/UFO/

by timnetworks

6/18/2026 at 6:42:41 PM

Egyptians were clever. They had rivers, water and advanced water-management technology.

The shaduf, which is a hand-operated lever with a bucket, to lift water from rivers and canals for irrigation.

The Nile River annually flooded which was monitored because it determined agricultural success.

As well, the Nile served as a transportation route. Huge stone blocks transported through and evidence suggests that canals and harbours were built near some pyramid complexes to help move materials closer to construction sites.

https://aeraweb.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/aeragram15_1-...

Clever people. Not as advanced as the Romans but they had technology and prospered for a long while.

by doublerabbit

6/18/2026 at 6:18:08 PM

the wild thing about this is that _we have contemporaneous records of how they were built_. They know the names of architects and managers. There's no mystery to it at all.

by empath75

6/19/2026 at 4:04:55 AM

There are egyptian paintings showing colossal statues being dragged on sledges by crews of men with ropes. -- https://www.science.org/content/article/scienceshot-ancient-...

by ahazred8ta

6/18/2026 at 6:21:07 PM

the aliens could have planted those records tho

by spogbiper

6/18/2026 at 6:32:43 PM

Extraterrestrial parallel construction.

by echelon_musk

6/18/2026 at 6:51:05 PM

There are no photos of Merer, they were actually extraterrestrial /s

by ceroxylon

6/18/2026 at 6:19:59 PM

links?

by soperj

6/18/2026 at 6:20:55 PM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary_of_Merer among many others.

by empath75

6/18/2026 at 8:42:58 PM

I thought these were just about limestone blocks being transported from quarries in Tura to Giza.

by BoardsOfCanada

6/19/2026 at 2:10:12 AM

aliens had to hire humans to move the stones?

by inigyou

6/18/2026 at 7:06:38 PM

They used kite-sails with rollers, according to Caltech

by khelavastr

6/18/2026 at 6:36:37 PM

I feel like people believe whatever they want and the narrative changes to “can you 105% guarantee aliens didn’t build them?”

I mean even if you could people would still believe whatever they want… must be tiring for sure.

by sporedro

6/18/2026 at 6:35:21 PM

I think a lack of curiosity and capacity also play a role in some believing the conspiracies. The information is there. More accessible than ever, yet most out of reach for our brains addicted to instant gratification of doom scrolls and outrageous headlines that we’re blasted with by multibillion dollar attention optimization machines.

by geraneum

6/18/2026 at 7:26:28 PM

> The information is there.

Well. Not really? Of course a lot of information is available but still there is a lot of open questions.

Just considering the Great Pyramid of Giza: was it built with an external or an internal ramp? What was the purpose of the so called “well shaft”? What was the purpose of the “grand gallery”? What about the “air shafts”? Is the restoration of the so called “great step” in the “grand gallery” historically accurate? What is going on with the “big void” and the “small void” seemingly indicated by the ScanPyramid data? How did those who dug the “robbers tunnel” know how deep the granite plugs are?

My point is that there are enough interesting questions even after one learns “all there is to know”. They are just not in the realm of “aliens?” but much more like “what order were the ramps removed?”

by krisoft

6/18/2026 at 7:47:58 PM

Information is there to help steer people away from crazy conspiracy theories. The kind of information that help people even arrive at the questions you mentioned. That’s the whole point of my argument.

by geraneum

6/18/2026 at 8:52:51 PM

“People dramatically underestimate what thousands of organized humans can accomplish when they are adequately fed, aggressively supervised, and denied alternative career paths.“

by stpedgwdgfhgdd

6/18/2026 at 9:46:00 PM

It would be interesting to know who by Country or Language who believes ETs built the pyramids.

Personally I expect US would be the leader. The reason is because over the last 50 years there have been lots of shows describing how and why Space Aliens built the pyramids. Some of these shows were well produced.

In the US, it seems we are at the point if a show is based on fantasy, it is believed as fact.

by jmclnx

6/19/2026 at 7:22:16 AM

id say theres more here on the balkans

by gnoll_of_gozag

6/16/2026 at 10:07:10 AM

Not saying it was Aline’s but it was aliens

by buffer_overlord

6/16/2026 at 1:00:47 PM

Humans. The “aliens” do not like to leave overt signs of meddling.

The glyphs of Peru had more to do with the off worlders. Such are how tribesmen “represented” their local identities to the sky peoples.

In ancient times, the Greys did in fact visit primitive tribes peoples. They introduced themselves, chatted for a bit.

The Hopi and other end of the world myths were instigated by these conversations. Without their intervention the world was to be consumed by nuclear fires before 2012.

https://pastebin.com/42dTemNe

by dabadabad00

6/18/2026 at 6:26:57 PM

So it's a sci-fi short story? what reason would anyone have to believe this stuff?

by snapcaster

6/18/2026 at 6:30:51 PM

What reason do people have to believe the Moses story?

by expedition32

6/18/2026 at 8:53:06 PM

> This feels deeply insulting considering humans also created taxation, organized warfare, and raisins.

Offtopic, but why do people hate raisins so much? No other dried fruit gets so much hate.

I would imagine it's something genetic like the reason why some people dislike coriander (which has been shown to be related to genetic sensitivity to aldehydes).

by xdennis

6/18/2026 at 9:14:56 PM

I don’t understand why you wouldn’t like raisins? They’re pretty much just sugar.

by enneff

6/18/2026 at 9:08:31 PM

The only other dried fruit I see people eat regularly is cranberries, and those really can’t be eaten fresh. I think it’s just that most people don’t like dried fruit and this is their only exposure. It’s definitely one of the most sickeningly sweet natural things you can eat that isn’t a sweetener in and of itself.

by kulahan

6/18/2026 at 11:53:11 PM

Excuse me, fresh cranberries are delicious!

by msm_

6/18/2026 at 11:25:13 PM

For me it's cookies. Thinking I'm about to bite into a chocolate chip cookie only to be sorely disappointed!

Otherwise I like raisins, just fine on their own or in trail mix :)

by glitcher

6/18/2026 at 6:38:43 PM

Hopefully he gets replaced by AI and is relieved of his torment.

by moralestapia

6/18/2026 at 6:44:07 PM

We are literally about to build the next civilization and some still wonder if we can build the Pyramids while it's actually basic for today's technology, people are not on phase, it's scary to see that gap.

by pixel_popping

6/19/2026 at 7:25:35 AM

[flagged]

by Ha1zyydev

6/18/2026 at 6:56:09 PM

I think people fall into two distinct camps here: the wildly exploratory, who chase everything from lost civilizations to aliens, and the hyper-rationalists, who refuse to budge from safe, conventional explanations. When it comes to Giza, It may be disingenuous to write all the banter off as either conspiracy or bona fide science. While we understand the general progression of pyramid-building in Egypt, the sheer scale and precision of Giza creates blind spots.

There are major gaps in all explanations provided and there are a huge array of interesting but unprovable theories. People fill those gaps with whatever is compelling, but really, none are good enough to prove anything definitively and that includes the academic explanations.

It's entirely possible that we may never have the definitive answer for how they were built or even exactly why, and will have to live with the mystery. But humans rarely will accept that conclusion and we would rather invent certainty than put up with open questions.

by speak_plainly

6/19/2026 at 3:38:04 PM

We do know pretty much exactly when they pyramids were built though, (+/- a couple hundred years, which in this context is "Exact" enough) as there have been numerous carbon datings of organic material found in the mortar between the stones of the pyramids, which all broadly line up with the other textual evidence (Mehrer texts, etc.) and contextual evidence (Dating of the work camps surrounding the pyramids) and there really isn't any great mystery in how they were built either, just a lack of specificity in terms of what exact method was used (ie. was it an internal or external ramp, were pulleys used, etc.)

by rfwhyte

6/18/2026 at 6:34:44 PM

> aggressively supervised

Is that what we're calling it now?

by jmaw

6/18/2026 at 6:40:37 PM

that's the joke

by dmd

6/18/2026 at 10:09:54 PM

McSweeney's uses AI to write now?

I was extremely suspicious, and pasted the text into Pangram, said 100% AI generated (and yes, I trust Pangram as they have extremely low rates of false positives).

by rahidz

6/19/2026 at 2:09:23 AM

Pangram is wrong 49% of the time. Try it on your own writing or stuff from before 2021.

by inigyou

6/18/2026 at 6:19:01 PM

I can sympathise and understand why people don't believe this is within human capabilities.

Look at how fractured the government and political systems of the west have become. Humans forget. We've forgotten how to build pyramids, we've forgotten the second world war and the lessons learned.

by sscaryterry

6/18/2026 at 6:22:32 PM

"The government sucks therefore aliens built the pyramids" has to be the line of thinking I sympathize the least with in the entire span of human opinions.

by qsort

6/18/2026 at 6:34:45 PM

> We've forgotten how to build pyramids

What exactly has led you to believe this...?

by crazygringo

6/18/2026 at 10:45:08 PM

Taking what I said literally :D

by sscaryterry

6/19/2026 at 4:09:06 PM

I see no indication in your comment that it was meant any other way :D

by crazygringo

6/18/2026 at 6:26:01 PM

Modern construction firms would have no problem^ planning and building you a pyramid if you were willing to pay for it.

^ well, maybe some problems like any project, but they would overcome them.

by jrmg

6/18/2026 at 6:50:19 PM

Sure, but no-one on Earth today is willing to pay for a pyramid - or anything like it - even with the convenience of modern construction.

I have a similar feeling looking at the great cathedrals.

These structures took up a huge proportion of the community's money, labour and talent, for decades on end. They're orders of magnitude bigger than any 'normal' building of the time or for centuries later. All with no prospect of any tangible return.

If we set out now to build the largest structure that the limits of our technology allow, designed almost purely as a work of art with little regard to any function, what would that look like? I don't know, no-one's done it for centuries.

The closest thing is the Eiffel Tower. It's a national icon, the wrought-iron equivalent of a pyramid - but it took two years to build, not twenty. What would an Eiffel Tower with 10x the resources look like? And that's more than a century ago.

It's not hard to believe that humans could build these things, but it's occasionally hard to believe that they chose to.

by FLHerne

6/18/2026 at 7:23:10 PM

> Sure, but no-one on Earth today is willing to pay for a pyramid - or anything like it - even with the convenience of modern construction.

- Luxor in Las Vegas: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Las_Vegas_Luxor_04.j...

- Bass Pro Shop Memphis Pyramid: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Memphis_Pyramid.JPG

- Sunway Pyramid Mall, Malaysia : https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sunway_Pyramid_front...

- Walter Pyramid, Cal State Long Beach: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Csulb-pyr1.jpg

- Muttart Conservatory, Edmonton: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Muttart_Conservatori...

- Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, Kazakhstan: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D0%9C._%D0%90%D1%81...

by jubilanti

6/18/2026 at 7:31:07 PM

> What would an Eiffel Tower with 10x the resources look like?

The Burj Khalifa.

by jubilanti

6/18/2026 at 6:57:03 PM

Eiffel tower: 10,000 tons

Great pyramid: 5 or 6 million tons

So only around 500 times as much moving material around, feasible I guess. You might need a dedicated rail line built direct to the quarry.

Funny to mention cathedrals considering that they finished one in Spain just recently. There's also Guédelon Castle in France, still being slowly built.

by card_zero

6/18/2026 at 10:05:23 PM

To be fair you got to also move a lot of ore to refine that metal. But there was also a lot of mechanically generated power used to get it.

by AngryData

6/18/2026 at 9:07:18 PM

For anyone interested in modern humans' ability to move material around when it is economically advantageous to do so, try a web image search for "largest open pit mines".

by marshray

6/18/2026 at 10:49:29 PM

There is a big difference though between placing blocks precisely, and running dump trucks.

by sscaryterry

6/19/2026 at 4:58:28 AM

Look up a photo of one of the large mining trucks and compare it to the size of the blocks used in the Egyptian pyramids.

Working with blocks of this size is just not a problem for modern equipment.

by marshray

6/18/2026 at 9:04:05 PM

I found out that classical building with ornaments aren't that more expensive than modern glass boxes. The Berlin Baroque palace costed 680 Million euros which isn't atypical for buildings that size, and it includes carved stone ornamentation [1]. Modern CNC robots have made stone carving much more efficient.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HC1lLC7zY4&t=537s

by enaaem

6/18/2026 at 6:59:48 PM

The Burj Khalifa is exactly the kind of vanity megaproject you're talking about.

by crooked-v

6/18/2026 at 6:58:31 PM

> I don't know, no-one's done it for centuries.

I suppose the Burj Khalifa, the Sky Tree, the Sphere, and the Luxor don't count? Mount Rushmore? The only thing that's changed is that we've gotten more efficient at megaprojects and, I suppose, they've become so common you don't register them as interesting anymore.

by applfanboysbgon

6/18/2026 at 6:40:33 PM

Many medieval Britons believed that Roman ruins were built by giants.

by iamflimflam1

6/19/2026 at 7:18:42 AM

theres a huge pyramid right now in memphis tenessee??

by gnoll_of_gozag

6/18/2026 at 6:56:55 PM

The Luxor Las Vegas was built in 1993. It even had a replica tomb for a while.

by crooked-v

6/18/2026 at 6:21:45 PM

Are you for real?

by boringg

6/18/2026 at 9:10:48 PM

These are common false narratives pushed by "documentaries" on Netflix and cable television in the US.

by marshray

6/18/2026 at 10:46:30 PM

Christ, tongue-in-cheek?

by sscaryterry

6/18/2026 at 6:20:20 PM

> We've forgotten how to build pyramids.

Luxor in Vegas is way more complicated than the egyptian pyramids were.

by empath75

6/18/2026 at 6:52:00 PM

The bass pro pyramid store was built by aliens.

by Hikikomori