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Robot To Explore Mysterious Pyramid Passage
a_timid_mouse writes "The National Geographic Society, using the same kind of robot used to search for survivors in the ruins of the World Trade Center, is trying to solve a mystery that lies deep in the bowels of the 4,500-year-old Great Pyramid of Giza. Up a tiny square tunnel is a stone hatch with copper handles that was discovered in 1872. No one knows the purpose of the shaft, and no one knows what lies behind the hatch. Enter the Pyramid Rover."
It's a 4000-year-old weed stash
Let's just hope that Geraldo Rivera doesn't decide to cover it live, which will guarantee that nothing interesting is down there.
So the robot wakes the mummy, gets cursed, and comes out of the pyramid with XP embedded in it's firmware...
The robot will find the first occurance of the smiley face, if only to show up the smuggness of the person who retreived the vax backups.
-Adam
DUH
The pyramids were created by an alien civilization as a star gate. They're returning in 2038 to enslave us.
11*43+456^2
1 - about 10 years ago
2 - copper, not iron
3 - handles (loop), not spikes
4 - fibre optic camera is small enough to fit in/through the cracks, maybe reach the other side?
5 - there is another sensor for seeing 'thru' the stone that is blocking the pathway, range is 3 ft thru concrete, maybe 2 or 3 times that through stone of the pyramid structure.
6 - the stone is of the nice variety only found in the chambers of the interior of the pyramid
Unanswered questions lead to more investigation.
Heres the deal..
The shafts themselves were discover in 1840 or something..
The thing you saw was Rudolph Gattenbrink about 1992?
He was commissioned to add ventilation fans to the shafts that actuall reach the outside surface. The tourists created too much humidity inside the pyramid and were causing damage.
Of the 4 shafts, only two make it out.
Now, Rudolph sent his robot up the other 2 shafts to see if they reach the surface. One of them bent in such a strange way, they couldnt get past one of the bends. One of them ended at this mysterious door that had polished stone leading up to it... (Polished stone was reserved for important areas of the pyramid.) The door also had some metal like handles. (Wasnt this stone age construction?)
His discovery of that door is what you saw on television.
So the question has been for 10 years, Whats behind the freaking door!
Rudolph has offerred many times to go back to the pyramid with his robot. But due to political issues, Egypt doesnt want him to work on that site. They dont like how he documented and revealed his first find.. Egyptology is more politics than science... Alot of people think that Rudolph is being robbed of credit. I noticed the CNN article mis-credits the discovery of the door.... Poor Rudolph and these pyramid games.
Sooooo... The Egyptian authorities have allowed National Geographic to build its own robot. Thats what this is. They are going to try and determine whats behind the damn door.. Im sure they have already looked. In fact many believe there is a room behind the door that can be reached through a different passage that hasnt been revealed to the public. There have been reports of secret drilling in the pyramid in 1998? time frame. (They closed the pyramid to allow "renovations!" hahah!)
There have been rumours that an underground system of passages connect the pyramids with each other.. There have been rumours that a black dog/man (anubis?) statue is behind the door. There have been rumours and rumours and rumours. I guess this presentation on monday will actually probably only create more rumours. If its empty, did they remove stuff befhore hand. If there is something there, who knows what will happen.
I wonder if training an animal to go into such claustrophobic places would be cheaper and easier (disregarding any PETA complaints).
Jesus saves....And takes 1/2 damage.
This was tried several years ago. The robot they used did not have a fiber optic camera, and was unable to see past the door, however, it did have a laser on it, and they shined the laser through the cracks in the sides of the door and were unable to see the dot, so there is some evidence that there is a large room behind the door.
The new robot has a fiber optic camera, and some kind of device which will allow it to see through up to 3 feet of rock.
One thing that kind of pisses me off about the whole egyptology thing, is that the egyptian government is pretty strict on who they let come and do work like this over there. If they don't agree with some of your views on the history of the pyramids, good luck getting a permit to do anything there. The history of the pyramids is very sketchy, and how the traditional egyptologists think their theories are 100% correct is very arrogant.
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According to the web site, it's going to be on TV 9/16, 8pm (eastern/pacific) on Fox. Pretty cool...
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
So the question has been for 10 years, Whats behind the freaking door!
Another question is: If the shaft is so darn narrow we need a state-of-the-art robot to explore it, how did they build the freakin door in the first place?
Operator, give me the number for 911!
Simple -- It's an example of floor-up engineering.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Probably the easy way.
Remember the pyramids are built up out of seperate blocks. They probably cust the shafts out out of the blocks as they were being laid. Cut the bottom part of the shaft out of one block, cut the upper part out of another block, then set it on top of the lower block, continue until the shaft reaches it's destination. As for the door, well you just set in place at the top of the shaft, then build up the pyramid around it.
For everything there is is usually a hard a way and a n easy to do it. The trick is finding the easy way.
ImhotepBot crushes the puny Pyramid Rover.
In the Star Trek evil Mirror Universe, virtuoso cellist Yo-Yo Ma is gangsta hiphop star DJ Yo Ma-Ma.
Custom robot, shmustom robot. They just need one of these:
h tm l
http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/fun-stuff/5776.s
(Mini Rover)
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
A previous attempt to penetrate the mysterious
shaft ended in disappointment when it was discover
that Lara Croft's cross-section was too large to
permit her entry into the shaft.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
The BEST place to get info about the shafts and the history is:
http://www.cheops.org/
It is a site constructed by Rudolph Gattenbrink and contains all of his findings in a very public way... AutoCAD drawings of how each block was cut to form the shaft, etc...
Zahi Hawass (The director of the Giza site) loves to take credit for anything and everything.. I true ego-maniac... I would love to see Rudolph Gattenbrink get the credit he deserves...
There is a petition located at:
http://www.dailygrail.com/petition/
> The thing you saw was Rudolph Gattenbrink about 1992?
The 'thing' certainly was Upuaut (the name of the robot) and here's the official website of Gantenbrink and his robot.
Everybody knows that the Great Pyramid was a water pump, right?
Kunkel expounds his astonishing theories.
Give this guy some money, please, so we can either be amazed or have a jolly good laugh at his expense.
Bronze age. Not that those terms are as meaningful as you might think!
Especially when the last agricultural use of flint that I know of was on Cyprus where threshing sled blades of flint were being made up into the 1950s. The tractor powered thresher finally crowded out animal traction threshing sledges, within our, well my, lifetime.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
Well, the passage is easy. You cut it as you're building the pyramid. It's nowhere near as imponderable as the pyramid itself.
And the brethren went away edified.
Or maybe it's the control room to the alien launch facility....
And the brethren went away edified.
The best proof that the pyramids aren't the product of some strange advanced alien or Atlanean technology is that they are in fact pyramids. Genuinely advanced tech can construct buildings of that size using many other designs. The primitive tech of the ancient world limited them to the basic rockpile shape; they simply didn't have building materials that could support anything else. This is the real reason for the ubiquitousness of the pyramid, from the Maya back through the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, not that they were based on any mystical prototype.
And the brethren went away edified.
That doesn't mean that a pyramid will last a long time if it's not built out of the right materials. There are numerous pyramids between Giza and Saqqara, but not all of them are still pyramid shaped. Towards the end of the Old Kindom, pyramids became decidedly low-buget affairs, constructed out of unbaked mud brick with limestone casings. Once the casing stones were removed for building material by later generations, the things just started to erode away. The pyramids of Giza also had their casings removed -- only the Second Pyramid preserves a few courses near the top -- but since their cores are stone they endured anyway.
In any event, I doubt longevity was a consideration, at least as far as the shape was concerned. The oldest pyramid was just a century or so older than the Great Pyramid, so they really had no data to go on in that regard. There were plenty of other monuments in Egypt at least as old as the Stepped Pyramid at the time, many older, and probably in just as good a condition.
It's not just that there are no other buildings of the ancient world comparable in height to the Pyramids that have survived; it's that there are no buildings in the ancient world comparable in height at all, not even in ruined condition. Every monument of significant height in the ancient world is roughly pyramid shaped, even when they weren't "houses of eternity", like ziggurats or Mesoamerican pyramids. That strongly suggests they knew of no other way to build something that tall except by shaping it like a pile of rocks. (I said "size" in my earlier post when "height" would have been better. That's a hazard for me when posting to /. from work; I generally don't have the time to phrase it as clearly as possible. I'm a sloppy writer by habit, and I make lots of mistakes in first drafts.)
You're right: it's perfectly possible that there will be nothing behind this stone. But it's more fun to speculate about there being something rather than nothing. We'll know in a few days either way.
And the brethren went away edified.
The architectural history of this structure has been fairly well established. It was begun as a standard mastaba, which was extended in two or three stages. Then, having apparently reached the limit of how grandiose a mastaba could be, three more mastabas were stacked on top of it, forming a 4-stepped pyramid. As Djoser was not yet dead, it was then expanded once again into the six-stepped form it still retains. It seems to me that the original mastaba was expanded until it was as grandiose as that particular form could have achieved with the building materials available -- it's built from stone cut into small, brick-sized blocks -- and that the piling up of successive mastabas may have been the only form that occurred to the architect to make it even more grandiose.
And the brethren went away edified.