While I agree with the majority of your comment, it still seems to me that it's a dubious proposition to say with certainty that the workers weren't slaves merely because they were treated well. To me, the word "slave" implies forced laborer. When you're talking about work that hard, it makes sense to keep you workers fit, slave or no. They were skilled workers, not easily replaceable. I simply find it hard to believe that if a pyramid worker tired of his profession, he would be allowed to leave and go on about his business. To me that's slavery.
The same could be said about medieval feudalism.
They are going to find the outside of the pyramid.
I suspect that these shafts were so they could measure how far from the center the "queens" chamber was. They also may have had been useful for venting the CO from the lights they used.
Why would they need to do that? The Queen's chamber is built high in the body of the pyramid. It wasn't carved into the pyramid later. The architects could always measure its corners with reference to the corners of the pyramid itself.
I suspect that the larger pyramids were built in such a way that there would always by a pyramid when the king kicked the bucket. This would me adding layers over the existing one. If you start with a small one, the lowerest chamber would have be under part of the oldest structure in the early days. Latter the "queens" chamber was would have been the mid point and later the "kings" chamber would have been center point as more layers were put on the outside. If you go with that theory and figure in the likely times of death of a king vs relative power of the king and his ability to build large projects there is a strong correlation.
Sorry that doesn't work either. The Great Pyramid is clearly atypical in having three chambers. Most pyramids seem to have had one or two at most.
Almost all construction of the pyramid's interior would have been completed in the open air before succeeding layers were put into position. There is almost no decoration in any 3rd or 4th pyramids (a factor which has made their attribution very difficult).
The 5th and 6th Dynasty pyramids are much more richly decorated with the so-called Pyramid Texts; a set of magic spells intended to whisk Pharaoh to the afterlife.
Besides, the Great Pyramid is the only one with such shafts. Again it is fascinatingly atypical.
The first step pyramids grow outwards from a central core. Layers of core stone are laid in tilting rows at 90 degrees to the facets of the steps. The casing was then applied around the outside of the rough inner core.
However, the size of the pyramid was almost always determined in advance so as to allow the completion of the ancillary temples and service buildings which hunker up to the side of the pyramid. These are substantial constructions in their own right - the enclosure for the Step Pyramid is no less than 15 hectares of buildings and courtyards.
Geometrically true pyramids did not grow in accretion layers. Their inner cores are almost always very roughly cut local stone laid in horizontal layers. Only the casings were laid with any precision. (By later times the core was built of mud brick or even rubble with the casing holding the whole lot together.
Two pyramids come close to the method you are talking about. There is the first pyramid of all, the Step Pyramid of Zoser at Saqqara, which went through several phases of development, starting off as a flat bechlike structure known as a mastaba. This was gradually extended, then converted to a step pyramid and finally to the six step pyramid we see today. In each case the structure was more or less complete before the additions were made. It does seem that the Egyptians were really groping in the dark when they worked on Zoser's pyramid.
The second, which is much more interesting is the Pyramid at Meidum. We believe this was started by the Pharaoh Huni of which we know very little indeed and rose originally as a seven step pyramid which was more or less completely cased. It is possible that Huni was buried in the pyramid, but at some later date, probably during the reign of Snofru, the pyramid was dramatically altered. The gaps between the steps were filled with relatively loose stones and a pyramidal casing placed around the structure. This collapsed in much later times leaving the pyramid as a complete ruin.
We have several abandoned pyramids in various states of construction that show how they were designed. The most famous is the Blind Pyramid at Saqqara, ascribed to Sekhemkhet, successor to Zoser. The structure was never finished and never assumed a pyramidal form. It was used however, a sarcophagus, sealed, was found when the pyramid was excaveated. But it was empty... No one knows why the pyramid was raised or if it ever held more than one burial. Certainly other Pharaohs, Snofru and Amenemhet III had more than one.
Likewise the smallest of the three great pyramids, that of Menkaure is clearly unfinished. The inner core was completed from local stone, and all of the casing stones were put into place - the top being Tura limestone (a lovely creamy white fine limestone from the East bank of the Nile), the lower stones being Aswan red granite. But the casing was not cut to its final shape, leaving the bottom very rough.
Ground Penetrating Radar tends to return a lot of false positives as it reflects back from the joints between the stones.
(It was also used unsuccessfully in the Valley of the Kings to look for lost tombs. There, the various strata and joints in the rocks ruined the experiment.
In the 1970s, cosmic rays were used to analyse the Pyramid of Khephren (the second pyramid at Giza). A detector was placed in the burial chamber which is located below the base of the pyramid, just offset from the centre.
The experimenters found no evidence of voids in the body of the pyramid.
I don't believe the experiment was repeated with any of the other pyramids.
Here are more beer pots... They must of contained beer...
We know the Egyptians drank beer in preference to water as the fermentation process helped purify the water and reduced the risk of waterborne disease.
And, look at the fingerprints... Surely Eygptians built this... My question is, wouldn't they have done their best to make sure flat surfaces were just that, flat, and free of fingerprints, because I would think fingerprints would make the thing look ugly.
No, the interior of the Pyramid is really quite roughly hewn (albeit a lot better than most pyramids). Only the outer courses were finished to a fine standard after the blocks were lain in-situ. Constructing the big pyramids required blocks to be placed every minute or so, there was no time to do anything other than the roughest of shaping.
Next point which really got to me was the fact that NO SLAVES were used and that it was a labor of love... That's such BULLSHIT. The evidence presented allows one to conclude several facts.
Perhaps they didn't show all the evidence?
1) There was good food... Meats, fish, probably fruit. BUT was there enough for all? This I doubt. The better food was either a reward for the most productive teams OR for the skilled workers.
Sorry wrong. Not only was Egypt one of the traditional breadbaskets of the Near East (by Roman times it fed large parts of the Empire), but a good portion of the land was owned by Pharaoh (we have the estate records). This food was used to feed people on state projects.
Meat would have been rarer than in the modern diet, but there would have plenty of vegetarian foods, beer and bread to keep people going.
2) There were dorms... But only for about 2,000... This would mean an estimated 23,000 had to sleep elsewhere... Again leading to a conclusion of two or three possible workforces.
Sorry, wrong again. The Gizan necropolis has never been completely excavated. Large amounts of the site - including temples are now buried by modern developments, other parts of the site are buried under the waste from the quarrying in later times. There is plenty of room for more habitation. Your argument is like saying because we've only found a few houses in Yorks' Coppergate there can't have been a Viking city called Jorvik.
3) "Advanced" medical surgery was available... BUT for who? The skilled workers or the slave mules?
Egyptian medicine was the highest regarded in the Ancient World. Imhotep, architect of the first pyramid was also renowned for his medical learning and much later identified with Aescapulus by the Greeks.
This was a state organisation, the Pharaoh would have been interested in a healthy workforce. There is no reason to suspect that health care was anything other than good.
The Pyramids are social engineering on an epic scale. For one third of the year the Nile would have flooded all of the arable land in the country. 90% of the workforce would have been unemployed and restive - so they were put to work on the Pyramids. In exchange, they got food and the country remained stable.
Unfortunately, the structures also sucked wealth out of the economy and helped bring about the disintegration of the Old Kingdom.
One problem we have looking back at Egypt is that we try to put our own processes into the heads of people who thought and worked in a very different way. We know that the Romans and the Greeks used slaves to construct their vast projects; we've read the Bible and seen how Exodus talks about Israelite slaves in Egypt and we colour our image with those thoughts.
The Egyptians did keep slaves, they weren't squeamish about the fact and their temples and tombs are decorated with images of slaves.
During the Old Kingdom Egypt was a very isolated country and did not have ready access to foreign populations for slaves. Slavery becomes much more common (although never as common as in Greece and Rome) in the Middle and New Kingdoms as Egypt broke out of its isolation and began to invade Nubia (to the South), Libya (to the West) and the modern Near East.
But we don't find any signs of slavery on the pyramid sites. We do find household junk, dockets, mentions of the origins of the workforce and so on. We know they were Egyptian workers.
My conclusions...
1) There were slaves, used as mules to get the stones into near position.
Unskilled labourers certainly with skilled team masters, but not slaves.
2) Skilled workers positioned blocks accurately, these would receive the medical treatment and better accomodations.
Modern reconstructions show that unskilled labourers working under supervision of skilled workers can perform the task to the required precision.
3) Managers... All factories have them, why wouldn't the "advanced" Eygptians... Of course managers and overseers would be taken care of.
Better food was used for feeding the skilled and managers, and used as a reward for top performing slaves...
There were managers, we have their tombs. Of course they had better food (more meat, wine that sort of thing), but that doesn't mean the people working for them were slaves any more than the fact that the head of a company earns more than his staff, enjoys fine Bordeaux and has a house in the Hamptons.
Doctor Hawass is the site manager for the Giza necropolis. All excavations on the site are his responsibility.
The Egyptians are naturally very protective over their sites because of the way they were repeatedly screwed during the 19th and 20th centuries, when the best stuff was taken out of the country and ended up in the Louvre, British Museum or the Metropolitan Museum.
And this isn't just any monument, this is the most famous ancient monument in the World. There is no way they will let foreigners run the show.
I don't imagine the British would be any different if someone wanted to work on Stonehenge, or the Americans if someone wanted to excavate - errr... um... (cheap gag)
jdbear said:
Read a bit of it first, then tell me how peaceful and loving the muslim faith is. After all, islam doesn't mean peace, as was explained by several muslim clerics shortly after September 11th, 2001. It actually means "Submission" and a Muslim is "One who submits."
What you left out was that it means 'One who submits to Allah' (My emphasis). Christianity embodies similar sentiments with respect to God.
As for the teachings of Mohammed being inconsistent, have you ever checked out the Bible? I seem to remember the Book of Exodus Chapter 20, Verse 13.
Thou shalt not kill.
Notice the lack of get-out clauses, weasel words, exemptions or hazy verbage. It couldn't be more clear if it were written on stone tablets - oh right it was.
Yet the rest of Exodus and a good chunk of the remainder of the Old Testament apends inordinate amounts of time relishing various divinely-inspired murders and laying down supposedly God-given rules on who should be killed and just how they should die.
Where is the consistency in the Bible?
Should I mention that it wasn't Islam that started the Crusades? Islam, Judaism and Christianity were all getting on perfectly well in the Middle East until the Christian West decided to intervene; the consequences of which we are still feeling today.
Yes they would; lower fuel consumption, much greater endurance, less risk of a catastrophic failure - and lots of area for solar cells that can help power the relay.
You have to design a special ship, normal airships fly relatively low and their useful load drops off quite rapidly with altitude. You have to think about building BIG for quite a small payload. Then consider things like reliability, redundancy and UV light eating away at the envelope. But it should be doable.
A British company, the Advanced Technology Group is prototyping just such a relay. It's called StratSat and the prototype could fly in the next year or two.
The first question which should be answered is 'What is the orbital lifetime of this material?'
If the junk is only up there for a few years it makes more sense to spend time and energy on reducing the amount of junk being introduced into orbit. In a relatively short time, gravity and drag will clear the orbits for us.
When you consider the time it takes to approve, test and build a major project, a sensible Clean-Launch (tm) program and good old Nature would have fixed the worst of the problem at a much lower cost.
Naturally this is less of a solution further up where orbital lifetimes go into the hundreds if not thousands of years.
But some things to think about should be, don't paint the upper sections of rockets, leave them bare metal (no paint chips), burn the motors to exhaustion after deploying your satellites (no fuel explosions) and wherever possible deorbit the final rocket stages as soon as their task is done (no junk). And we should look at moving satellites into disposal orbits when their task is done.
Just my 10 cents worth, but I'll accept a couple of million in 'research grants' if they're going.
You're quite right, the waste will first be vitrified (mixed with boron and silica, melted and poured into glass rods). These are then encased in stainless steel for burial.
The real problem here is the length of time involved for waste to become safe enough to re-enter the environment. Almost all nuclear disposal companies work on the premise that no matter how good the encasement technology, some or all of the containers will fail and expose their contents before a safe level has been reached.
The logical solution is to then rely on another layer of defence - to stop water entering the repository in the first place. If it can't get in, the decay products can't get out. Salt structures are just perfect for these purposes and we know that they don't allow liquids in or out as salt domes help trap oil in the Gulf of Mexico - that oil has been there for millions of years.
Here in the UK it was proposed to construct waste dumps in the anhydrite layer under the North West of England. There was uproar when the scheme was made public and the then government backed down fearing an electoral backlash. The next scheme was to build a deep repository in the rocks near the Sellafield reprocessing plant in Cumbria. A 'rock laboratory' was planned as the first phase of the process, but after an interminable enquiry and millions of Pounds down the drain, the project was cancelled. BNFL, who designed the project, hadn't done their geology properly, the rocks on the site were not only waterlogged by perculating ground water, but extensively faulted.
So at the moment the UK has the World's largest reprocessing plant and nowhere to put the waste. I guess that means the US is ahead of us:)
Granite is not a good repository material. Granite is a so-called 'jointed' rock. Look at a granite exposure and you will see that it has rectilinear cracks in the vertical and horizontal planes. The vertical cracks were formed when the magma cooled, the horizontal ones by the release of stress as overlying rocks are eroded.
Water can penetrate into these joints and travel great distances, often picking up acidic compounds which make it extremely corrosive. Mines in granite areas are usually wet - I went down a tin mine in Cornwall, and at 800 metres we were being drenched by rain water perculating through the rock. That water had got there in a few weeks.
Put radioactive waste in such a place and it would start leaching extremely quickly.
A better place would be a salt dome - such as those fringing the Gulf of Mexico. Salt domes or those made of anhydrite (calcium sulphate) are lovely things - they're easy to dig into and you can excavate caverns in the middle of the structure to hold the waste.
But best of all, salt domes flow over time. Leave a salt mine for any length of time and the salt flows in to fill the gaps. Have a quake - no problem, the dome heals itself.
Use an anhydrite dome and they're even totally water proof.
Some of them even come to the surface, so no deep drilling required.
Of course those salt domes do tend to be in Dubya territory. Which probably makes them a political no-no.
The Space Shuttle has had to have its cockpit windows replaced because of impacts with tiny objects - such as particles of paint, which are capable of gouging visible craters in the surface.
Whilst we have only intentionally put a few thousand pieces into orbit, we have put much more debris up there. Pieces of paint from the booster, particles ejected by explosive bolts, nuts, bolts screws... Sometimes old rocket stages disintegrate or explode. A Pegasus booster exploded in 1996 putting an estimated 300 000 particles larger than 4mm into orbit, over 500 of those particles were large enough to be tracked by ground radar.
I'm not sure if Ed White's glove is still up there after he lost it on Gemini 4:)
Some spacecraft (such as the Soviet nuclear-powered radar satellites) have ejected their coolant as a stream of droplets...
The US had a program called West Ford that ejected 400 million copper dipoles from the Midas satellites - no idea if they are up there.
The Soviets constructed anti-satellite satellites that exploded in close proximity to other spacecraft - a number of those were tested...
Fortunately most objects will either re-enter after a short period or are safely sitting in unused orbits, but a good number are in the popular orbits where they could cause havoc to a delicate mirror.
In fact some people have even gone so far as to suggest that the sheer number of things up there could cause a catastrophe... if one object hits another, it could eject more particles which impact on other objects releasing further particles in a cascade of debris that would clutter up low-orbit space and make it unusable.
Not sure if I believe them, but its a scary prospect and probably not one we should test.
The origin of the Moon is still under some debate, but there is one clear theory that holds up under examination.
Your first theory, that it formed alongside the Earth seems to make immediate sense - after all most satellites do just that. However, when Apollo travelled to the Moon it brought back enough lunar rock for a chemical analysis. The Moon's rocks are quite bizarre - they contain no water, very few elements with low melting points and a correspondingly higher amount of refractory minerals. These indicated that the Moon had been heated to a very high temperature for a period of time, its volatiles had escaped into space and it had then cooled. But the same hadn't happened to Earth - strange!
From the density of the Moon we know it contains relatively little iron and nickel, which implies that its composition is different from the inner Earth.
More work by American and Soviet sample return missions showed that the Moon has exactly the same oxygen isotope ratios as Earth. We know that different parts of the Solar System have different ratios. This hints that the Moon formed somewhere near Earth.
Finally the Moon's composition does not match that of most meteorites (a few pieces of the Moon have been identified as meteorites), which implies that it has a different origin from them.
Your second theory also seems sensible - planets do capture satellites, Jupiter has several small companions that are probably asteroids or comets that just came a little too close to get away, Mars' two moons are almost certainly asteroid captures and the huge moon of Neptune - Triton is in a very strange orbit that hints at possible capture.
However, if you run the orbital mechanics of the Earth capturing the Moon it doesn't seem to work. The Moon would be moving at a relatively high velocity, there would be very little time for capture and the effect of such a large body (relative to the size of the Earth) would have probably disrupted the Earth's orbit.
So we need a new theory...
The current theory holds that the Earth formed roughly where it sits nowadays. At a very early stage in the formation of the Solar System the Earth was accreting from smaller pieces. The heat of the impacts and some radioactive decay of short lived isotopes meant that the interior of the Earth was hot, it began to differentiate with iron and nickel sinking to the centre, lighter silicate minerals rising to the top.
Somewhere near the orbit of Earth another planet was also coalescing, but in an orbit that crossed that of the Earth. This planet would have been about the size of modern Mars.
At some point, the smaller planet made an oblique impact on Earth. it ploughed through the silicate-rich upper layers, splashing those into space - but did not eject much of the Earth's core. The smaller planet was absorbed into the Earth, the ejected material formed a ring of debris.
This hot debris evaporated off its low temperature elements, its water and organic materials and began to coalesce into the modern Moon. The much larger Earth reformed and carried on evolving into the modern planet.
Voila! High temperature minerals - check. No volatiles - check. Little iron - check. Same oxygen isotopes - check.
Super computer simulations (I'm sure someone has the link to hand) show that the mechanism is workable, but I doubt if we'll ever know for sure.
Would have made a fabulous ILM effect shot though!
There are perfectly acceptable lunar orbits where objects can remain for long durations. The main problem with any object orbiting close to the Moon is that the lunar gravitational field is quite 'lumpy'. The dark Mare (Seas) are filled with dense lava that have a noticeable effect on orbiting objects.
Although first discovered during the Lunar Orbiter missions of the 1960s (where they produced slightly irregular orbital periods), their effects were not recognised until much later. The small satellite deployed from Apollo 16 was lost in part thanks to unforeseen gravitational effects. It is quite possible that the Soviet Luna 15, which raced Apollo 11 to the Moon was also lost when its guidance system became confused by the irregular gravitational fields.
However, periodic reboosts from freighters could keep a lunar telescope in a perfectly stable orbit.
Alternatively, there are the various Lagrange Points in the Earth-Moon system where a large telescope could be built and maintained.
However, the question has to be; with modern computer technology and adaptive optics do we need space telescopes at all? I can see a case for those telescopes designed to receive wavelengths which don't get through the atmosphere, but for optical purposes it seems to be cheaper and easier to build them down here.
Naturally a far-side radio telescope would be nice to get away from all the radio chatter, microwave oven emissions and garage door opener signals from Earth. I believe ESA has done some long-range studies of such a project, but there are no immediate plans for one.
While I agree that some of the early predictions of total oil production were well off the scale, those predictions were made in days when we really didn't understand the processes behind the formation, trapping and extraction of oil. We do now have a good model of all three.
Geologists are near unanimous that oil is produced from the decomposition of plant remains (only Thomas Gold seems to hold out for an abiotic source, but his 'evidence' is lacking). We understand how these remains are converted into oil by heat and pressure. There is a minimum depth to which sediments must be buried before the oil generation process starts. We also understand that there is a maximum depth after which oil molecules are thermally cracked into natural gas. This 'oil window' allows us to demarcate areas of the planet where oil could have formed.
We understand traps that hold oil. The planet has now been pretty much entirely surveyed for such structures. There are very few provinces where undiscovered oil is likely to exist in quantity - the Central Asia, Middle East and South China Sea are the most likely regions for more discoveries.
We have mathematical models showing the distribution of sizes of oil fields. Put bluntly, the big ones are in the Middle East and there is next to no chance of finding large new fields in the US and Europe. We can predict the size and distribution of new fields with some accuracy.
Therefore we can start to draw up models of oil reserves for the entire planet. Indeed this has already been done by geologists, starting with Doctor M King Hubbert, whose 1956 model predicted US oil production would peak in the early 1970s (it peaked in 1970). His model has also been used to predict production in Europe and global production. In each case the model seems to hold.
Hubbert predicted global oil production would peak in the 2000 to 2010 range. Most geologists now concur with this figure - but some are arguing that the World reserves have been grossly inflated by countries trying to maximise production quotas, (some estimates put the inflation of reserves at 180 billion barrels - about twice the reserves of Kuwait) and production may peak in the 2003 - 2004 time frame.
If the Hubbert model is correct, then we are in a nasty situation, even grossly increasing the amount of oil in recoverable reserves, say by 500 billion barrels (that's more than twice the reserves in Saudi Arabia), only defers maximum production by ten years. And there is no belief that these sort of reserves exist.
On to your other points. We are using more fuel each year. Whilst an engine of a given size is becoming more efficient, more people are driving cars, more of them are driving cars more frequently and more vehicles are being built that have larger engines consuming more fuel. World fuel demand is rising. And the fastest growing section of demand is air travel which uses prodigious amounts of (untaxed) fuel.
Hybrids are a good idea, but they require liquid fuels. Oil is the best fuel - it is incredibly energy dense and convenient. Alcohol is less energy dense (and may not make economic sense when you factor in the energy costs of production) and the alternative fuels are environmental disasters. Oil shale and oil sands need huge amounts of energy to become usable, consume vast amounts of water in the process and pump incredible amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.
We will have to get really radical. But first, the problem is that the developed economies are being forced to import more of their oil from the Middle East. It is the single largest reserve in the World and will become increasingly important as the Alaskan, Texan, Mexican and North Sea fields run down. In a few years the UK will become an oil importer once again (with god knows what consequences for our already horrendous trade deficit); imported oil is already the US's single largest bill and will continue to rise no matter what happens in the Alaskan National Reserve. China is demanding more oil imports as is India, and we all know what happens when things start to get scarce...
Or American missiles for that matter. So-called missile tests are shams, the missile is hauled out of its silo, taken to a clean room, dismantled, tested, reassembled and then fired. Hardly a realistic simulation of how they would be used.
And the Russians have a very modern mobile launched ICBM called Topol-M, originally flown in 1994 it is comparable to anything in the West. Currently it carries a single warhead, but it is capable of being MIRVed. The Russians imply that the missile was designed to deal with an anti-missile missile system, so its re-entry vehicles are probably stealthy and may well steer themselves to their targets like the US Pershing warheads.
Sorry, I forgot to include this in my other posting.
There was no treaty in place at the time, only an unofficial moratorium on testing that had been in place since 1958.
The reason for the Soviet test is still unclear, but it is probably related to Khrushchev's wish to secure his position at the Twenty Second Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Under his leadership the Soviet Union had taken an early lead in space and was showing some impressive economic growth. This was another chance to show what a powerful leader he was. Like most of Khrushchev's gambles it was ill thought through and backfired badly.
The United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, which forbade explosions in the atmosphere, on land, in space or under the sea.
And to up the spookiness,the Tsar Bomba (King of Bombs), codenamed Ivan was originally designed to be a 100 MT explosion using a uranium jacket. Soviet scientists were so concerned by the potential fallout from such a weapon that they successfully petitioned for the uranium jacket to be replaced by one made of lead. Had the original design been exploded it would have contributed one quarter of all the fallout ever released from nuclear tests.
As it was, the explosion was visible from 1000km away and its thermal effects could be felt by observers more than 250 km from the explosion.
Fortunately it was a one off political stunt that would have never made a feasible weapon.
Hydrogen peroxide has also been used as an oxidiser with kerosene fuel. The British Black Arrow launcher used the system to put our only satellite into orbit.
Take a look at the photo of the launch of Prospero (it's a Geocities site so it might be slashdotted by the second person who uses it:) ). There is a smaller image here.
Amazingly clean looking exhaust, the rocket almost seems to be hanging there.
The entire programme was cancelled in one of Britain's perennial financial crises of the time. The Black Arrow went on to become the first stage of Europe's ELDO launcher, which was in turn cancelled following failures of its upper stages. Sadly, we then abandoned rocket development.
No, the United States used to use the Scout family of launchers to place small payloads (less than 150 kg) into orbit.
Solid fuel rockets have some great properties - they are relatively simple, lacking all the plumbing of a liquid system, the propellants are quite stable and they are easier to transport.
BUT, they are less controllable - when they start burning they only stop when the fuel is gone, a liquid rocket can throttle its power for optimal performance.
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Best wishes,
Mike.
Why would they need to do that? The Queen's chamber is built high in the body of the pyramid. It wasn't carved into the pyramid later. The architects could always measure its corners with reference to the corners of the pyramid itself.
I suspect that the larger pyramids were built in such a way that there would always by a pyramid when the king kicked the bucket. This would me adding layers over the existing one. If you start with a small one, the lowerest chamber would have be under part of the oldest structure in the early days. Latter the "queens" chamber was would have been the mid point and later the "kings" chamber would have been center point as more layers were put on the outside. If you go with that theory and figure in the likely times of death of a king vs relative power of the king and his ability to build large projects there is a strong correlation.
Sorry that doesn't work either. The Great Pyramid is clearly atypical in having three chambers. Most pyramids seem to have had one or two at most.
Almost all construction of the pyramid's interior would have been completed in the open air before succeeding layers were put into position. There is almost no decoration in any 3rd or 4th pyramids (a factor which has made their attribution very difficult).
The 5th and 6th Dynasty pyramids are much more richly decorated with the so-called Pyramid Texts; a set of magic spells intended to whisk Pharaoh to the afterlife.
Besides, the Great Pyramid is the only one with such shafts. Again it is fascinatingly atypical.
The first step pyramids grow outwards from a central core. Layers of core stone are laid in tilting rows at 90 degrees to the facets of the steps. The casing was then applied around the outside of the rough inner core.
However, the size of the pyramid was almost always determined in advance so as to allow the completion of the ancillary temples and service buildings which hunker up to the side of the pyramid. These are substantial constructions in their own right - the enclosure for the Step Pyramid is no less than 15 hectares of buildings and courtyards.
Geometrically true pyramids did not grow in accretion layers. Their inner cores are almost always very roughly cut local stone laid in horizontal layers. Only the casings were laid with any precision. (By later times the core was built of mud brick or even rubble with the casing holding the whole lot together.
Two pyramids come close to the method you are talking about. There is the first pyramid of all, the Step Pyramid of Zoser at Saqqara, which went through several phases of development, starting off as a flat bechlike structure known as a mastaba. This was gradually extended, then converted to a step pyramid and finally to the six step pyramid we see today. In each case the structure was more or less complete before the additions were made. It does seem that the Egyptians were really groping in the dark when they worked on Zoser's pyramid.
The second, which is much more interesting is the Pyramid at Meidum. We believe this was started by the Pharaoh Huni of which we know very little indeed and rose originally as a seven step pyramid which was more or less completely cased. It is possible that Huni was buried in the pyramid, but at some later date, probably during the reign of Snofru, the pyramid was dramatically altered. The gaps between the steps were filled with relatively loose stones and a pyramidal casing placed around the structure. This collapsed in much later times leaving the pyramid as a complete ruin.
We have several abandoned pyramids in various states of construction that show how they were designed. The most famous is the Blind Pyramid at Saqqara, ascribed to Sekhemkhet, successor to Zoser. The structure was never finished and never assumed a pyramidal form. It was used however, a sarcophagus, sealed, was found when the pyramid was excaveated. But it was empty... No one knows why the pyramid was raised or if it ever held more than one burial. Certainly other Pharaohs, Snofru and Amenemhet III had more than one.
Likewise the smallest of the three great pyramids, that of Menkaure is clearly unfinished. The inner core was completed from local stone, and all of the casing stones were put into place - the top being Tura limestone (a lovely creamy white fine limestone from the East bank of the Nile), the lower stones being Aswan red granite. But the casing was not cut to its final shape, leaving the bottom very rough.
Best wishes,
Mike.
(It was also used unsuccessfully in the Valley of the Kings to look for lost tombs. There, the various strata and joints in the rocks ruined the experiment.
In the 1970s, cosmic rays were used to analyse the Pyramid of Khephren (the second pyramid at Giza). A detector was placed in the burial chamber which is located below the base of the pyramid, just offset from the centre.
The experimenters found no evidence of voids in the body of the pyramid.
I don't believe the experiment was repeated with any of the other pyramids.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Here are more beer pots... They must of contained beer...
We know the Egyptians drank beer in preference to water as the fermentation process helped purify the water and reduced the risk of waterborne disease.
And, look at the fingerprints... Surely Eygptians built this... My question is, wouldn't they have done their best to make sure flat surfaces were just that, flat, and free of fingerprints, because I would think fingerprints would make the thing look ugly.
No, the interior of the Pyramid is really quite roughly hewn (albeit a lot better than most pyramids). Only the outer courses were finished to a fine standard after the blocks were lain in-situ. Constructing the big pyramids required blocks to be placed every minute or so, there was no time to do anything other than the roughest of shaping.
Next point which really got to me was the fact that NO SLAVES were used and that it was a labor of love... That's such BULLSHIT. The evidence presented allows one to conclude several facts.
Perhaps they didn't show all the evidence?
1) There was good food... Meats, fish, probably fruit. BUT was there enough for all? This I doubt. The better food was either a reward for the most productive teams OR for the skilled workers.
Sorry wrong. Not only was Egypt one of the traditional breadbaskets of the Near East (by Roman times it fed large parts of the Empire), but a good portion of the land was owned by Pharaoh (we have the estate records). This food was used to feed people on state projects.
Meat would have been rarer than in the modern diet, but there would have plenty of vegetarian foods, beer and bread to keep people going.
2) There were dorms... But only for about 2,000... This would mean an estimated 23,000 had to sleep elsewhere... Again leading to a conclusion of two or three possible workforces.
Sorry, wrong again. The Gizan necropolis has never been completely excavated. Large amounts of the site - including temples are now buried by modern developments, other parts of the site are buried under the waste from the quarrying in later times. There is plenty of room for more habitation. Your argument is like saying because we've only found a few houses in Yorks' Coppergate there can't have been a Viking city called Jorvik.
3) "Advanced" medical surgery was available... BUT for who? The skilled workers or the slave mules?
Egyptian medicine was the highest regarded in the Ancient World. Imhotep, architect of the first pyramid was also renowned for his medical learning and much later identified with Aescapulus by the Greeks.This was a state organisation, the Pharaoh would have been interested in a healthy workforce. There is no reason to suspect that health care was anything other than good.
The Pyramids are social engineering on an epic scale. For one third of the year the Nile would have flooded all of the arable land in the country. 90% of the workforce would have been unemployed and restive - so they were put to work on the Pyramids. In exchange, they got food and the country remained stable.
Unfortunately, the structures also sucked wealth out of the economy and helped bring about the disintegration of the Old Kingdom.
One problem we have looking back at Egypt is that we try to put our own processes into the heads of people who thought and worked in a very different way. We know that the Romans and the Greeks used slaves to construct their vast projects; we've read the Bible and seen how Exodus talks about Israelite slaves in Egypt and we colour our image with those thoughts.
The Egyptians did keep slaves, they weren't squeamish about the fact and their temples and tombs are decorated with images of slaves.
During the Old Kingdom Egypt was a very isolated country and did not have ready access to foreign populations for slaves. Slavery becomes much more common (although never as common as in Greece and Rome) in the Middle and New Kingdoms as Egypt broke out of its isolation and began to invade Nubia (to the South), Libya (to the West) and the modern Near East.
But we don't find any signs of slavery on the pyramid sites. We do find household junk, dockets, mentions of the origins of the workforce and so on. We know they were Egyptian workers.
My conclusions... 1) There were slaves, used as mules to get the stones into near position.
Unskilled labourers certainly with skilled team masters, but not slaves.
2) Skilled workers positioned blocks accurately, these would receive the medical treatment and better accomodations.
Modern reconstructions show that unskilled labourers working under supervision of skilled workers can perform the task to the required precision.
3) Managers... All factories have them, why wouldn't the "advanced" Eygptians... Of course managers and overseers would be taken care of. Better food was used for feeding the skilled and managers, and used as a reward for top performing slaves...
There were managers, we have their tombs. Of course they had better food (more meat, wine that sort of thing), but that doesn't mean the people working for them were slaves any more than the fact that the head of a company earns more than his staff, enjoys fine Bordeaux and has a house in the Hamptons.
Best wishes,
Mike.
The Egyptians are naturally very protective over their sites because of the way they were repeatedly screwed during the 19th and 20th centuries, when the best stuff was taken out of the country and ended up in the Louvre, British Museum or the Metropolitan Museum.
And this isn't just any monument, this is the most famous ancient monument in the World. There is no way they will let foreigners run the show.
I don't imagine the British would be any different if someone wanted to work on Stonehenge, or the Americans if someone wanted to excavate - errr... um... (cheap gag)
Best wishes,
Mike.
Read a bit of it first, then tell me how peaceful and loving the muslim faith is. After all, islam doesn't mean peace, as was explained by several muslim clerics shortly after September 11th, 2001. It actually means "Submission" and a Muslim is "One who submits."
What you left out was that it means 'One who submits to Allah' (My emphasis). Christianity embodies similar sentiments with respect to God.
As for the teachings of Mohammed being inconsistent, have you ever checked out the Bible? I seem to remember the Book of Exodus Chapter 20, Verse 13.
Thou shalt not kill.
Notice the lack of get-out clauses, weasel words, exemptions or hazy verbage. It couldn't be more clear if it were written on stone tablets - oh right it was.
Yet the rest of Exodus and a good chunk of the remainder of the Old Testament apends inordinate amounts of time relishing various divinely-inspired murders and laying down supposedly God-given rules on who should be killed and just how they should die.
Where is the consistency in the Bible?
Should I mention that it wasn't Islam that started the Crusades? Islam, Judaism and Christianity were all getting on perfectly well in the Middle East until the Christian West decided to intervene; the consequences of which we are still feeling today.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Yes they would; lower fuel consumption, much greater endurance, less risk of a catastrophic failure - and lots of area for solar cells that can help power the relay.
You have to design a special ship, normal airships fly relatively low and their useful load drops off quite rapidly with altitude. You have to think about building BIG for quite a small payload. Then consider things like reliability, redundancy and UV light eating away at the envelope. But it should be doable.
A British company, the Advanced Technology Group is prototyping just such a relay. It's called StratSat and the prototype could fly in the next year or two.
Best wishes,
Mike.
The other big white bird of British aviation - the TSR 2. Utterly magnificent but doomed from the start.
If you ever get a chance to visit Duxford, do check out the TSR2.
And for an even older design which still looks good, it has to be the Comet 1 - just a shame about that minor design flaw...
Best wishes,
Mike.
Yes they can, NASA call the system Thrust Vector Control - presumably so they can have one more TLA.
Best wishes,
Mike.
I feel sorry for the radiocarbon dating people.
Best wishes,
Mike.
If the junk is only up there for a few years it makes more sense to spend time and energy on reducing the amount of junk being introduced into orbit. In a relatively short time, gravity and drag will clear the orbits for us.
When you consider the time it takes to approve, test and build a major project, a sensible Clean-Launch (tm) program and good old Nature would have fixed the worst of the problem at a much lower cost.
Naturally this is less of a solution further up where orbital lifetimes go into the hundreds if not thousands of years.
But some things to think about should be, don't paint the upper sections of rockets, leave them bare metal (no paint chips), burn the motors to exhaustion after deploying your satellites (no fuel explosions) and wherever possible deorbit the final rocket stages as soon as their task is done (no junk). And we should look at moving satellites into disposal orbits when their task is done.
Just my 10 cents worth, but I'll accept a couple of million in 'research grants' if they're going.
Best wishes,
Mike.
It's one of our most endearing traits :)
Best wishes,
Mike.
You're quite right, the waste will first be vitrified (mixed with boron and silica, melted and poured into glass rods). These are then encased in stainless steel for burial.
The real problem here is the length of time involved for waste to become safe enough to re-enter the environment. Almost all nuclear disposal companies work on the premise that no matter how good the encasement technology, some or all of the containers will fail and expose their contents before a safe level has been reached.The logical solution is to then rely on another layer of defence - to stop water entering the repository in the first place. If it can't get in, the decay products can't get out. Salt structures are just perfect for these purposes and we know that they don't allow liquids in or out as salt domes help trap oil in the Gulf of Mexico - that oil has been there for millions of years.
Here in the UK it was proposed to construct waste dumps in the anhydrite layer under the North West of England. There was uproar when the scheme was made public and the then government backed down fearing an electoral backlash. The next scheme was to build a deep repository in the rocks near the Sellafield reprocessing plant in Cumbria. A 'rock laboratory' was planned as the first phase of the process, but after an interminable enquiry and millions of Pounds down the drain, the project was cancelled. BNFL, who designed the project, hadn't done their geology properly, the rocks on the site were not only waterlogged by perculating ground water, but extensively faulted.
So at the moment the UK has the World's largest reprocessing plant and nowhere to put the waste. I guess that means the US is ahead of us :)
Hope this helps.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Water can penetrate into these joints and travel great distances, often picking up acidic compounds which make it extremely corrosive. Mines in granite areas are usually wet - I went down a tin mine in Cornwall, and at 800 metres we were being drenched by rain water perculating through the rock. That water had got there in a few weeks.
Put radioactive waste in such a place and it would start leaching extremely quickly.
A better place would be a salt dome - such as those fringing the Gulf of Mexico. Salt domes or those made of anhydrite (calcium sulphate) are lovely things - they're easy to dig into and you can excavate caverns in the middle of the structure to hold the waste.
But best of all, salt domes flow over time. Leave a salt mine for any length of time and the salt flows in to fill the gaps. Have a quake - no problem, the dome heals itself.
Use an anhydrite dome and they're even totally water proof.
Some of them even come to the surface, so no deep drilling required.
Of course those salt domes do tend to be in Dubya territory. Which probably makes them a political no-no.
Best wishes,
Mike.
The Space Shuttle has had to have its cockpit windows replaced because of impacts with tiny objects - such as particles of paint, which are capable of gouging visible craters in the surface.
Whilst we have only intentionally put a few thousand pieces into orbit, we have put much more debris up there. Pieces of paint from the booster, particles ejected by explosive bolts, nuts, bolts screws... Sometimes old rocket stages disintegrate or explode. A Pegasus booster exploded in 1996 putting an estimated 300 000 particles larger than 4mm into orbit, over 500 of those particles were large enough to be tracked by ground radar.
I'm not sure if Ed White's glove is still up there after he lost it on Gemini 4 :)
Some spacecraft (such as the Soviet nuclear-powered radar satellites) have ejected their coolant as a stream of droplets...
The US had a program called West Ford that ejected 400 million copper dipoles from the Midas satellites - no idea if they are up there.
The Soviets constructed anti-satellite satellites that exploded in close proximity to other spacecraft - a number of those were tested...
Fortunately most objects will either re-enter after a short period or are safely sitting in unused orbits, but a good number are in the popular orbits where they could cause havoc to a delicate mirror.
In fact some people have even gone so far as to suggest that the sheer number of things up there could cause a catastrophe... if one object hits another, it could eject more particles which impact on other objects releasing further particles in a cascade of debris that would clutter up low-orbit space and make it unusable.
Not sure if I believe them, but its a scary prospect and probably not one we should test.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Your first theory, that it formed alongside the Earth seems to make immediate sense - after all most satellites do just that. However, when Apollo travelled to the Moon it brought back enough lunar rock for a chemical analysis. The Moon's rocks are quite bizarre - they contain no water, very few elements with low melting points and a correspondingly higher amount of refractory minerals. These indicated that the Moon had been heated to a very high temperature for a period of time, its volatiles had escaped into space and it had then cooled. But the same hadn't happened to Earth - strange!
From the density of the Moon we know it contains relatively little iron and nickel, which implies that its composition is different from the inner Earth.
More work by American and Soviet sample return missions showed that the Moon has exactly the same oxygen isotope ratios as Earth. We know that different parts of the Solar System have different ratios. This hints that the Moon formed somewhere near Earth.
Finally the Moon's composition does not match that of most meteorites (a few pieces of the Moon have been identified as meteorites), which implies that it has a different origin from them.
Your second theory also seems sensible - planets do capture satellites, Jupiter has several small companions that are probably asteroids or comets that just came a little too close to get away, Mars' two moons are almost certainly asteroid captures and the huge moon of Neptune - Triton is in a very strange orbit that hints at possible capture.
However, if you run the orbital mechanics of the Earth capturing the Moon it doesn't seem to work. The Moon would be moving at a relatively high velocity, there would be very little time for capture and the effect of such a large body (relative to the size of the Earth) would have probably disrupted the Earth's orbit.
So we need a new theory...
The current theory holds that the Earth formed roughly where it sits nowadays. At a very early stage in the formation of the Solar System the Earth was accreting from smaller pieces. The heat of the impacts and some radioactive decay of short lived isotopes meant that the interior of the Earth was hot, it began to differentiate with iron and nickel sinking to the centre, lighter silicate minerals rising to the top.
Somewhere near the orbit of Earth another planet was also coalescing, but in an orbit that crossed that of the Earth. This planet would have been about the size of modern Mars.
At some point, the smaller planet made an oblique impact on Earth. it ploughed through the silicate-rich upper layers, splashing those into space - but did not eject much of the Earth's core. The smaller planet was absorbed into the Earth, the ejected material formed a ring of debris.
This hot debris evaporated off its low temperature elements, its water and organic materials and began to coalesce into the modern Moon. The much larger Earth reformed and carried on evolving into the modern planet.
Voila! High temperature minerals - check. No volatiles - check. Little iron - check. Same oxygen isotopes - check.
Super computer simulations (I'm sure someone has the link to hand) show that the mechanism is workable, but I doubt if we'll ever know for sure.
Would have made a fabulous ILM effect shot though!
Best wishes,
Mike.
Although first discovered during the Lunar Orbiter missions of the 1960s (where they produced slightly irregular orbital periods), their effects were not recognised until much later. The small satellite deployed from Apollo 16 was lost in part thanks to unforeseen gravitational effects. It is quite possible that the Soviet Luna 15, which raced Apollo 11 to the Moon was also lost when its guidance system became confused by the irregular gravitational fields.
However, periodic reboosts from freighters could keep a lunar telescope in a perfectly stable orbit.
Alternatively, there are the various Lagrange Points in the Earth-Moon system where a large telescope could be built and maintained.
However, the question has to be; with modern computer technology and adaptive optics do we need space telescopes at all? I can see a case for those telescopes designed to receive wavelengths which don't get through the atmosphere, but for optical purposes it seems to be cheaper and easier to build them down here.
Naturally a far-side radio telescope would be nice to get away from all the radio chatter, microwave oven emissions and garage door opener signals from Earth. I believe ESA has done some long-range studies of such a project, but there are no immediate plans for one.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Geologists are near unanimous that oil is produced from the decomposition of plant remains (only Thomas Gold seems to hold out for an abiotic source, but his 'evidence' is lacking). We understand how these remains are converted into oil by heat and pressure. There is a minimum depth to which sediments must be buried before the oil generation process starts. We also understand that there is a maximum depth after which oil molecules are thermally cracked into natural gas. This 'oil window' allows us to demarcate areas of the planet where oil could have formed.
We understand traps that hold oil. The planet has now been pretty much entirely surveyed for such structures. There are very few provinces where undiscovered oil is likely to exist in quantity - the Central Asia, Middle East and South China Sea are the most likely regions for more discoveries.
We have mathematical models showing the distribution of sizes of oil fields. Put bluntly, the big ones are in the Middle East and there is next to no chance of finding large new fields in the US and Europe. We can predict the size and distribution of new fields with some accuracy.
Therefore we can start to draw up models of oil reserves for the entire planet. Indeed this has already been done by geologists, starting with Doctor M King Hubbert, whose 1956 model predicted US oil production would peak in the early 1970s (it peaked in 1970). His model has also been used to predict production in Europe and global production. In each case the model seems to hold.
Hubbert predicted global oil production would peak in the 2000 to 2010 range. Most geologists now concur with this figure - but some are arguing that the World reserves have been grossly inflated by countries trying to maximise production quotas, (some estimates put the inflation of reserves at 180 billion barrels - about twice the reserves of Kuwait) and production may peak in the 2003 - 2004 time frame.
If the Hubbert model is correct, then we are in a nasty situation, even grossly increasing the amount of oil in recoverable reserves, say by 500 billion barrels (that's more than twice the reserves in Saudi Arabia), only defers maximum production by ten years. And there is no belief that these sort of reserves exist.
On to your other points. We are using more fuel each year. Whilst an engine of a given size is becoming more efficient, more people are driving cars, more of them are driving cars more frequently and more vehicles are being built that have larger engines consuming more fuel. World fuel demand is rising. And the fastest growing section of demand is air travel which uses prodigious amounts of (untaxed) fuel.
Hybrids are a good idea, but they require liquid fuels. Oil is the best fuel - it is incredibly energy dense and convenient. Alcohol is less energy dense (and may not make economic sense when you factor in the energy costs of production) and the alternative fuels are environmental disasters. Oil shale and oil sands need huge amounts of energy to become usable, consume vast amounts of water in the process and pump incredible amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.
We will have to get really radical. But first, the problem is that the developed economies are being forced to import more of their oil from the Middle East. It is the single largest reserve in the World and will become increasingly important as the Alaskan, Texan, Mexican and North Sea fields run down. In a few years the UK will become an oil importer once again (with god knows what consequences for our already horrendous trade deficit); imported oil is already the US's single largest bill and will continue to rise no matter what happens in the Alaskan National Reserve. China is demanding more oil imports as is India, and we all know what happens when things start to get scarce...
Best wishes,
Mike.
You can register with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) to get your name off *most* call lists.
I haven't had a cold call in months.
Best wishes,
Mike.
And the Russians have a very modern mobile launched ICBM called Topol-M, originally flown in 1994 it is comparable to anything in the West. Currently it carries a single warhead, but it is capable of being MIRVed. The Russians imply that the missile was designed to deal with an anti-missile missile system, so its re-entry vehicles are probably stealthy and may well steer themselves to their targets like the US Pershing warheads.
Best wishes,
Mike.
There was no treaty in place at the time, only an unofficial moratorium on testing that had been in place since 1958.
The reason for the Soviet test is still unclear, but it is probably related to Khrushchev's wish to secure his position at the Twenty Second Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Under his leadership the Soviet Union had taken an early lead in space and was showing some impressive economic growth. This was another chance to show what a powerful leader he was. Like most of Khrushchev's gambles it was ill thought through and backfired badly.
The United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, which forbade explosions in the atmosphere, on land, in space or under the sea.
Best wishes,
Mike.
As it was, the explosion was visible from 1000km away and its thermal effects could be felt by observers more than 250 km from the explosion.
Fortunately it was a one off political stunt that would have never made a feasible weapon.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Hydrogen peroxide has also been used as an oxidiser with kerosene fuel. The British Black Arrow launcher used the system to put our only satellite into orbit.
Take a look at the photo of the launch of Prospero (it's a Geocities site so it might be slashdotted by the second person who uses it :) ). There is a smaller image here.
Amazingly clean looking exhaust, the rocket almost seems to be hanging there.
The entire programme was cancelled in one of Britain's perennial financial crises of the time. The Black Arrow went on to become the first stage of Europe's ELDO launcher, which was in turn cancelled following failures of its upper stages. Sadly, we then abandoned rocket development.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Solid fuel rockets have some great properties - they are relatively simple, lacking all the plumbing of a liquid system, the propellants are quite stable and they are easier to transport.
BUT, they are less controllable - when they start burning they only stop when the fuel is gone, a liquid rocket can throttle its power for optimal performance.
Good luck to them.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Let's just hope he isn't working in the nuclear fleet. :)
Best wishes,Mike.