RE: Information & Power /Alexandria library

Billy Brown (bbrown@conemsco.com)
Thu, 6 May 1999 09:24:52 -0500

Dwayne wrote:
> The lower courses of the Temple of Jupiter at Baalbeck are, according to
the
> quotes I have seen, too massive to be moved using currently available
> technology. Now, these may be quotes from engineers who have vested
> interests, or they might be correct.

There is no particular limit to how big an object can be moved with current technology. Once you get bigger than a few hundred tons you'll want to build custom equipment for the job, but that's mostly a matter of convenience - its more efficient than setting up large teams of comercial bulldozers & such. You can scale up to tens of thousands of tons before things even start to get tricky, which is far larger than anything that the ancients ever moved.

It might be usefull to point out here that we usually think in terms of moving something a few thousand miles in a matter of days or weeks. The ancients, OTOH, were usually moving things a few dozen miles over the course of months or years. If you think like the ancients, those amazing feats suddenly start seeming a lot more doable.

> I have also seen footage of engineers saying that it is technically
> impossible to align a site as large as the Great Pyramid at Giza with
> the accuracy the pyramid displays. There's more to it than just moving
> rocks about.

Again, we're pretty sure we know how they did it. You just need a good knowledge of naked-eye astronomy, and lots of patience and attention to detail.

BTW - Surely you realize that in the modern world we can align a building to essentially infinite precision? (i.e. our instruments permit such high precision that the thermal flexing of the building & ground will produce much larger errors than an imprecision of our measurements)

> The vitrified forts in ireland?

Never heard of them. Do you have a link?

Billy Brown, MCSE+I
bbrown@conemsco.com