Once upon a time I had a whole conversation with a guy about whether the pyramids were made by aliens. He had an issue with the size of the blocks, so I explained how it was likely done-

• Local quarry chips the blocks out of the rock, wedging them to fall directly onto rollers (logs).
• Workers move rollers from the back of the block to the front while oxen pull the block itself slowly to the pyramid.
• Block is slowly driven up a very long, gradual ramp to the work site, where it is wedged into place.

His gotcha response - where did they get the rope? So I had to explain that ropes have existed much longer than nylon.

This reminds me of an episode of Unsolved Mysteries about pets. A woman was rescued from drowning by her dog, and they went on to interview a bunch of fakers like psychics and such and spent a bunch of time theorizing that maybe the dog was some reincarnated family member or that it had some amazing magical mental connection to her.

Then they had a biologist on for like 20 seconds who was like, there's no magic here, the dog (a Neufoundland) did exactly what it was bred to do - pull people out of the water. Which IMO is just as fucking interesting as Fluffy being psychic but that's just me.

Of course they quickly made sure to have Bob jump in and cast doubt on all that sciency BS before signing off on that segment. And while typing this it occurred to me that this sort of preying on superstition and ignorance explains a lot about why we are in the mess we're in right now.

Never understood the whole conspiracy angle on the pyramids. When I was in school we always learned that the fascination with the pyramids wasn't just with the labor, engineering and man power required but with the division of labor, the social command and the economic planning required.

Remember that the pyramids have no direct tangible return on investment and were multi generation endeavors. So the question encroaching a contemporary observer is: ¿What must the structure of a society look like that produces such monuments?

This ancient aliens nuttery has been around since the 1950s, with books by Erich Von Daniken and Immanuel Velikovsky. Much of their "proof" can be easily refuted by anyone with a basic understanding of science.

Carl Sagan did an amazing point-by-point counter of Velikovsky's "Worlds in Collision" in his book "Brocas Brain"

tiered looking palaeontologist

Suspicious at best. Pyramids are in on the conspiracy.

What's way more interesting, imo, are the theories about lost civilizations.

Allegedly, some advanced civilization(s) existed before recorded history. I heard they found some artifacts in Egypt, seemingly made with tooling and techniques too advanced for the old Egyptians. Moreover there appear to be records suggesting some pyramids where there before the Egyptians build their own.

Very cool stuff, definitely more plausible than aliens, but I never looked into it any deeper.

Pi is just kinda like that. It pops up everywhere if you look hard enough for it.

Divisible by pi in what units? Surely not meters, they weren't in use back then.

Anything is divisible by pi if you approximate hard enough

But everyone knows the pyramid was invented before the wheel, duh.

/s

Relevant Philomena Cunk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkABtY4VV38

everyone forgot about circles.

Is the flat earth round or a triangle?

The show was a good entertainment with some amount of exposition to historic artifacts and construction and cultural remains still present..

Also the host's hair was nice.