Re:Enough with the polygons - lets get some physic
on
Nvidia's NV20
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· Score: 1
Exactly my point - the increased graphics acceleration has allowed game developers more cpu time free to concentrate on other areas of gameplay like physics and AI - while at the same time increasing the visual complexity and realism of 3d worlds. So if we could accelerate the physics we would yet again increase the realism of physics events and handling and allow yet more time for good _gameplay_ and _story_ - which IMHO is what its all about.
Enough with the polygons - lets get some physics!!
on
Nvidia's NV20
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· Score: 1
Great - more polygons, more beziers, more shiny surfaces and volumetric lighting. Wow. Yahoo.
Zippidee-doo-dah-day.
We all know what more of the same is - its more of the same. What I want to see is more realism in terms of actions not just models. What good is a ten million polygon monster if he still walks and flops like R2D2.
What I want is a common physics API so that we can start getting some acceleration in that - and then we can have some 3d puzzles that are a bit more exciting than just "wander the maze and kill things" or "push the box next to the wall"... (snore).
Better physics performance means more interesting use of the wonderful graphics we already have available - which leads more directly to better games than does yet another boost in poly count.
Re:Developers will hit the wall sooner or later
on
Nvidia's NV20
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· Score: 2
The maximum complexity for worlds will be a limit that won't be hit for a very long time. Look at the difference in world complexity between what is done for the highest quality 3d movies ( think Final Fantasy ), and compare with the most complexe real-time worlds.
Obviously the developers of 3d worlds in film have not yet maxed out their imaginations in terms of what to build, and how detailed to make it - and the gap between their work and the realtime 3d scene is a very big gulf indeed.
So I really don't think we'll be coming up to any significant blockages in terms of human imagination anytime soon. I suppose one might argue that as soon as we hit the point when 3d world complexity is visually indistiguishable from reality we may have hit the max. needed realism. But then of course there's always the visual effects of cosmic-zoom where you might want to soar through the microscopic cracks in someone's skin, etc. So there's plenty of room to keep plugging away.
"If there is not sufficient economic opportunity in an area for a person to be able to afford the necessities of life then perhaps they should move. because at that point they have a negative contribution to society."
I'm sorry to say, but this is really just BS capitalistic argument at work here. The truth of the reality is that the necessity of providing food for a nation requires that many people live in areas which are so remote that the cost of providing such "essential" services gets very high. As a society we don't feel like paying $14 for a loaf of bread, or $10 for a box of corn flakes, or whatever the cost would be if the money paid to such remote farmers for their work was balanced with the cost of living out there. Therefore we regulate and subsidize in order to provide a standard of living across the board.
There are some who would argue that either we should let these people live in midieval conditions if that's all they can afford from their work, or that we simply don't really need such a universal standard. This is also bogus for a number of reasons, not to mention being coldhearted and bastardly - but let's stick to the economic reasons.
Uniform standards of living raises the overall economic health of the nation as a whole because it creates a uniform and vast body of consumers. Those who can't afford to buy products won't buy them. The fallacy of a lot of "capitalist dogma" of saying that the market will take care of itself, and the value of the dollar should make everything settle naturally into its own equilibrium is that it actually reduces economic growth overall. If you cut off portions of your population by saying that their work is not sufficient to pay for certain products & services, you shrink the total market - which raises the cost of production for everybody else, and resultantly makes it unnaffordable for others etc. Subsidizing and providing a blanket standard of living to all increases the economic health of the country as a whole.
Re:Nuclear fission is the only sustainable power t
on
Wave Driven Generators
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· Score: 1
Could you please site some examples of how renewable ( sun, wind, wave, etc. ) energy pollutes MORE than nuclear??
I agree with this statement when batteries are used to store the power - as there are no reasonably cheap and safe battery systems available. But given that batteries are not used - where does the pollution come from??
Re:Nuclear fission is the only sustainable power t
on
Wave Driven Generators
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· Score: 1
You are citing deaths and injuries which are a direct and immediate result of the meltdown. These statistics do not calculate the deaths and injuries which result as a long-term consequence of the hightened radiation levels.
I personally know of deaths extending from the Chernobyl disaster affecting people as far away as the Island of Crete - and sickness in both humans and livestock also. When livestock and crops die or are made sick/damaged, it adversely affects the economy - which will naturally lead to an increase in poverty, malnutrition, etc. All of which dramatically increase the number of dead and sick far above the immediate results of the accident. I'm afraid the figures you're citing here just don't calculate these factors, and cannot be a true representation of the results of a nuclear accident.
Re:Nuclear fission is the only sustainable power t
on
Wave Driven Generators
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· Score: 1
[ about the disposal of nuclear waste ] "Irrelevant since it takes up so little space and can be rendered immobile."
Given the length of time many of these materials remain toxic, you cannot guarantee that they will truly remain immobile. If it takes 10,000 years for some material to become nontoxic, how can anyone possibly guarantee it will remain safely contained for that long? Given that numerous civilizations can rise and fall in that amount of time, and even the continents and shape of the earth may change.
Please don't promise things like this - nobody can ever deliver upon it.
Re:Nuclear fission is the only sustainable power t
on
Wave Driven Generators
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· Score: 1
"Significantly. The danger for workers of a power source is roughly a function of the density of its fuel. You have to consider the routine deaths that occur daily with all forms of power production, not just consider the big accidents. Nuclear fission has, by far, the highest power density fuel and therefore the fewest injuries and deaths."
Please illustrate the various worker accidents that might occur with wave-generated electricity? Are you thinking of people being swept away into the sea? I fail to see the incredible dangers you speak of.
Somehow I don't think that too many surfers are going to protest building these things on Scottish islands - the north atlantic has a tendency to cause even the most manly surfers to "shrink"... brrr
"0.1% of the ocean's kinetic energy being able to power the planet - that's a pretty small amount of the total."
It sounds like a small amount of the total - but lets stop and think for a moment. The oceans are HUGE - more than 70% of the worlds surface area. If the statement here is correct and it means that 0.1% of the total energy within the oceans, we're talking about constructing powerplants over 360,796.8 square kilometers of oceans ( earth's surface: 509,600,000 km2. ocean's surface: 70.8% = 360,796,800 km2. 0.1% of which = 360,796.8 km2 )
Perhaps this was a misquoted statistic. Maybe they meant 0.1% of the earth's coastlines - which comes to a suprisingly small figure of only 312 km. Although the statement is vague - do the include the complete volume of the oceans? That would be huge - and how would one trap deep-sea knetic energy?
"But how do you teach someone to land on a planet when the nearest planet is 100 light years away? Can you drive? Were you taught in a classroom? You don't teach piloting skills. That needs training. That needs someone with real world experience."
Actually I hold a pilot's licence - so I know quite a bit about flying as it happens. Absolutely you need hand's on experience to learn to fly - but guess what. They'd be in a spaceship!!!! And besides, computer automated landing and flight controlls are not so difficult. But navigation and pilotting control are not the same thing - you can teach navigation from a book no problem.
"Ths would require infinitely efficient communications with a vessel that may or may not be following."
Infinitely efficient? no - not at all.
A simple radio signal would be more than sufficient. Whether a ship was following or not would make no difference. If you broadcast a signal in the direction of the originating world, it would naturally be intercepted by any possible ships part way between the two points - or given differences in possible orbit patters you simply broadcast the signal in a wide range such that you cover all possible areas in which rendezvousing ships could be located. It's remarkably simple.
Sorry but it can't happen that way. There isn't enough material to do it thay way. Argument ended... "
Well there's more than one way to build a ramp. Yes, if you're thinking of the big dirt ramp theory than yes, its true, this would be an unrealistic model. Although given that the egyptians bothered to build pyramids in the first place, I don't think they were really all that concerned about how practical a solution was.
but there are many other ramp solutions than a single giant dirt ramp. There is for example the wrap-around ramp model, the cut-back ramp model, all of which require very much less space or material/time to build.
As for wood, its well known that most Egyptian wood was imported from Lebanon, and any used in the building of the pyramids would likely have come from there. As for burning it, well if they had enough badasses with whips to keep the gangs of workers in line - I'm sure they could manage guarding some logs at night.
As I've said before, the exact construction methods used to build the pyramids are not known, but just because something is unknown doesn't automatically make it likely to be caused by aliens or seamonsters or anything of the type.
"Look at what we did with the mars probes... If we had a few pyramids there, probably we wouldn't have had a problem with them crashing on the surface!:)"
Yeah, they wouldn't crash into the surface, just crash into a pyramid instead.
"Yes. How to build pyramids can be written in a book. Flying and landing spaceships requires training. A driving test is not something that you do on paper. Similarly for flying - You need a planet and a reasonably good spacecraft and fuel supply to teach landing on a planet. Simulators can only go so far. The amount of alien technology used for building pyramids is quite small."
I assume that if it takes them generations to reach another planet, that they have plenty of time for each generation to train the next - not all knowledge has to be written down to be preserved over generations - you simply get the older ones to teach the younger ones how to fly the ship - isn't that the way we do it?
How do you know how much alien technology goes into building a pyramid? Did the aliens give you a copy of the encyclopaedia galactica? Where do you get this kind of knowledge from?
But to do that they need to redraw the map each time someone gets there. They need to guess where previous visitors landed. They actually need someone on every single vessel. Who says they don't ever want to send unmanned supply ships? "
Why would you need to redraw the map? the continental drift from the age the pyramids were built until now has been so minuscule as to hardly make any difference. i could draw you a map on a piece of scrap paper in under 2 minutes just from my memory of what the continents look like that would be sufficient for finding Egypt from space.
Scannning the entire surface of the earth for pyramidal shaped objects has got to be the most wasteful way of finding a landing spot. The best technique would be to arbitrarily pick a coordinate on the surface of the planet on which to build a marker which would indicate where the landing spot was. And even that's a complicated process.
And if the aliens can travel across the gulf of space, they can certainly send a message back to their home world. Even if the message takes as long to get back as a return trip ( assuming that they can travel at the speed of light ), but any other ships partway between their homeworld and the earth would receive the message in mid-voyage and would know where to go. -- including unmanned ships.
"The Egypteans seemed to want to stay at home and didn't seen to have a spirit of adventure. The old writings say they would use forien crews for their boats. I wonder if there was something about their religion that keep them from going far. "
Well, they did present the nile and egypt in their mythology as the cradle of all of creation, so I can imagine that for them travelling as far away as Judea ( Israel ) would be like sailing off the edge of the world.
Well considering most of their contemporaries were pre-literate, then yes you're absolutely right. Perhaps they were more literate than many other civilizations of the time - but that doesn't really say much. Consider it this way:
98-99% of the population are farmers.
of the remaining 1-2%, the vast majority are
craftsmen or merchants. so perhaps 0.2% of the total population makes up the upper eschelons of scribes, priests and nobility. most nobles, and many priests cannot read or write - so what are you left with? not much...
It is not necessarily true that any of this has to do with pre- or post-continental drift.
There is no reason that an earlier civilization could not have travelled in boats across the atlantic - particularly the short africa - south american neck. Bringing up the issues of continental drift makes such a proposal almost unbelievable.
It is true that the sphinx is much older than previously suspected, and that the dates of other monuments are suspect too. But the time gap between them and the central american pyramids are quite huge - thousands of years. A common old civilization would have trouble explaining this time gap.
Yes, there are many gaps in our knowledge of Ancient Egypt. No doubt about it. Trying to reconstruct the society of 6000 years ago, especially a society in which a miniscule portion of the population was literate is always going to be tricky.
Yes, science has its own politics, and there are always less than honest people who are willing to fudge evidence - or accuse others of doing so - to increase their position.
However none of this is in anyway an indication that the Egyptians were influenced by aliens!!
Ok, this account becomes a bit easier to entertain than the navigation beacon theory. But you still have to explain why it is a theory worthy of being entertained at all.
What makes you think that these monuments were the influence of aliens? There are plenty of cultures worldwide which would have been prime for alien influence that never constructed pyramids. As far as mythologies about powerful beings from the sky or up above - this is universally human whereas pyramid building is quite unique and isolated - so there is little correlating evidence there.
Remember a few rules of theory making/evaluating:
1. the simplest explanation is the best. There is no need to involve complexe explanations when a simple one will do.
2. the fact that two things are unknown or mysterious is not grounds for assuming they are the same thing, or related. Mystery is by its nature undefined and devode of the kinds of features that make for logical associations.
To say:
pyramid building == mystery
aliens == mystery
therefore: pyramid building == aliens.
is just a fault in reasoning.
3. There is a strong difference between something being possible and being probable. It is possible that the pyramids were farted out of giant psychedelic frogs - but it is not probable. A good theory has to be probable, not just possible.
As for how animals know about north-south.
In the case of these termites, it may be that they have an instinctual response to the warmth of the sun, and so naturally tend towards such construction. Simple instinctual coding like:
if( front == warm || back == warm ){
turn 90 degrees;
}
if( left == warm || right == warm ){
build straight forward;
}
It is also interesting to note that very many animals seem to have an instinctual sense of north & south based on magnetism. Many cellular colonies will align themselves along the force lines of a magnet if it is left next to them. Geese have a high magnetic content in their blood and monarch butterfiles seem to use a magnetic sense to conduct their epic multi-generation migrations across continents. Various desert plants use a magnetic sensibility to detect oncoming storms and close their flowers. The list goes on and on.
Traditionally it was held that magnetic fields have no effect on living organisms - but this is far from true. Given a constant force present in the environment it makes sense that a creature would evolve to account for it in some way. The earth has had a magnetic field since the dawn of life - it is not surprising that living creatures take advantage of it.
I really have no idea if the medieval cathedrals are bigger than the pyramids, but as soon as a cathedral reaches at least 4500 years in age, we'll talk again. Same goes for office buildings.
Medieval cathedrals are taller on average than the great pyramid, but definitely not more massive - much less building material involved for obvious reasons. However they are more impressive architecturally than pyramids for the same reason, their height and mass is supported by thin walls and buttresses, but the intelligence of the design is that it works to support it. Given that most Cathedrals are now ~700-800 years old, and the amount of weathering they've sustained ( in harsher climates than egypt to boot ) chances are that without any serious fires/earthquakes/wars they will survive that long. Mind you they have considerable human maintenance - which the pyramids didn't have.
As for office buildings, chances are they won't last much more than a half century or so, they are not robust structurally, and will lose strength rather quickly. Today we build for size and cheapness - durability is rarely considered.
When you're measuring 'bigness', are you talking about volume, or mass? I'm pretty sure I could put together an aluminum shell of a building that had a much larger volume than any pyramid, with a work force of less than 50 people.
Putting together the same volume with huge blocks of limestone on the other hand...
There is apparently one crane in the world which could lift the biggest blocks of limestone found in ancient monuments.
Height, not volume or mass. Naturally the pyramids are more massive than Cathedrals, after all pyramids are solid lumps of stone - Cathedrals are not.
There are more ways than cranes to stack lumps of stone - ramps and trucks for example. Yes, modern building methods are far in advance of Ancient Egyptian standards - that's not the issue. Nobody has ever bothered to try to recreate a pyramid of the same scope and size as an Egyptian one, so we can only speculate to how easy it would be, but given what we can build today I find it doubtful whether it would really be a problem.
Similarly for figuring out how the Egyptians did it. We must think like intelligent beings to solve the puzzle - that's how they did it. Thinking like superstitious beings doesn't build pyramids - it builds paranoia.
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Exactly my point - the increased graphics acceleration has allowed game developers more cpu time free to concentrate on other areas of gameplay like physics and AI - while at the same time increasing the visual complexity and realism of 3d worlds. So if we could accelerate the physics we would yet again increase the realism of physics events and handling and allow yet more time for good _gameplay_ and _story_ - which IMHO is what its all about.
Great - more polygons, more beziers, more shiny surfaces and volumetric lighting. Wow. Yahoo.
Zippidee-doo-dah-day.
We all know what more of the same is - its more of the same. What I want to see is more realism in terms of actions not just models. What good is a ten million polygon monster if he still walks and flops like R2D2.
What I want is a common physics API so that we can start getting some acceleration in that - and then we can have some 3d puzzles that are a bit more exciting than just "wander the maze and kill things" or "push the box next to the wall"... (snore).
Better physics performance means more interesting use of the wonderful graphics we already have available - which leads more directly to better games than does yet another boost in poly count.
The maximum complexity for worlds will be a limit that won't be hit for a very long time. Look at the difference in world complexity between what is done for the highest quality 3d movies ( think Final Fantasy ), and compare with the most complexe real-time worlds.
Obviously the developers of 3d worlds in film have not yet maxed out their imaginations in terms of what to build, and how detailed to make it - and the gap between their work and the realtime 3d scene is a very big gulf indeed.
So I really don't think we'll be coming up to any significant blockages in terms of human imagination anytime soon. I suppose one might argue that as soon as we hit the point when 3d world complexity is visually indistiguishable from reality we may have hit the max. needed realism. But then of course there's always the visual effects of cosmic-zoom where you might want to soar through the microscopic cracks in someone's skin, etc. So there's plenty of room to keep plugging away.
If this yopy thing could run ssh and/or make a remote xwindows session I would definitely get one.
Whoa - talk about bad web design - who on earth decided to use a white font on top those clouds??
I'm sorry to say, but this is really just BS capitalistic argument at work here. The truth of the reality is that the necessity of providing food for a nation requires that many people live in areas which are so remote that the cost of providing such "essential" services gets very high. As a society we don't feel like paying $14 for a loaf of bread, or $10 for a box of corn flakes, or whatever the cost would be if the money paid to such remote farmers for their work was balanced with the cost of living out there. Therefore we regulate and subsidize in order to provide a standard of living across the board.
There are some who would argue that either we should let these people live in midieval conditions if that's all they can afford from their work, or that we simply don't really need such a universal standard. This is also bogus for a number of reasons, not to mention being coldhearted and bastardly - but let's stick to the economic reasons.
Uniform standards of living raises the overall economic health of the nation as a whole because it creates a uniform and vast body of consumers. Those who can't afford to buy products won't buy them. The fallacy of a lot of "capitalist dogma" of saying that the market will take care of itself, and the value of the dollar should make everything settle naturally into its own equilibrium is that it actually reduces economic growth overall. If you cut off portions of your population by saying that their work is not sufficient to pay for certain products & services, you shrink the total market - which raises the cost of production for everybody else, and resultantly makes it unnaffordable for others etc. Subsidizing and providing a blanket standard of living to all increases the economic health of the country as a whole.
I agree with this statement when batteries are used to store the power - as there are no reasonably cheap and safe battery systems available. But given that batteries are not used - where does the pollution come from??
I personally know of deaths extending from the Chernobyl disaster affecting people as far away as the Island of Crete - and sickness in both humans and livestock also. When livestock and crops die or are made sick/damaged, it adversely affects the economy - which will naturally lead to an increase in poverty, malnutrition, etc. All of which dramatically increase the number of dead and sick far above the immediate results of the accident. I'm afraid the figures you're citing here just don't calculate these factors, and cannot be a true representation of the results of a nuclear accident.
"Irrelevant since it takes up so little space and can be rendered immobile."
Given the length of time many of these materials remain toxic, you cannot guarantee that they will truly remain immobile. If it takes 10,000 years for some material to become nontoxic, how can anyone possibly guarantee it will remain safely contained for that long? Given that numerous civilizations can rise and fall in that amount of time, and even the continents and shape of the earth may change.
Please don't promise things like this - nobody can ever deliver upon it.
Please illustrate the various worker accidents that might occur with wave-generated electricity? Are you thinking of people being swept away into the sea? I fail to see the incredible dangers you speak of.
Somehow I don't think that too many surfers are going to protest building these things on Scottish islands - the north atlantic has a tendency to cause even the most manly surfers to "shrink" ... brrr
It sounds like a small amount of the total - but lets stop and think for a moment. The oceans are HUGE - more than 70% of the worlds surface area. If the statement here is correct and it means that 0.1% of the total energy within the oceans, we're talking about constructing powerplants over 360,796.8 square kilometers of oceans ( earth's surface: 509,600,000 km2. ocean's surface: 70.8% = 360,796,800 km2. 0.1% of which = 360,796.8 km2 )
Perhaps this was a misquoted statistic. Maybe they meant 0.1% of the earth's coastlines - which comes to a suprisingly small figure of only 312 km. Although the statement is vague - do the include the complete volume of the oceans? That would be huge - and how would one trap deep-sea knetic energy?
N.B. My statistics come from articles on britannica.com
Actually I hold a pilot's licence - so I know quite a bit about flying as it happens. Absolutely you need hand's on experience to learn to fly - but guess what. They'd be in a spaceship!!!! And besides, computer automated landing and flight controlls are not so difficult. But navigation and pilotting control are not the same thing - you can teach navigation from a book no problem.
"Ths would require infinitely efficient communications with a vessel that may or may not be following."
Infinitely efficient? no - not at all. A simple radio signal would be more than sufficient. Whether a ship was following or not would make no difference. If you broadcast a signal in the direction of the originating world, it would naturally be intercepted by any possible ships part way between the two points - or given differences in possible orbit patters you simply broadcast the signal in a wide range such that you cover all possible areas in which rendezvousing ships could be located. It's remarkably simple.
Sorry but it can't happen that way. There isn't enough material to do it thay way. Argument ended... "
Well there's more than one way to build a ramp. Yes, if you're thinking of the big dirt ramp theory than yes, its true, this would be an unrealistic model. Although given that the egyptians bothered to build pyramids in the first place, I don't think they were really all that concerned about how practical a solution was.
but there are many other ramp solutions than a single giant dirt ramp. There is for example the wrap-around ramp model, the cut-back ramp model, all of which require very much less space or material/time to build.
As for wood, its well known that most Egyptian wood was imported from Lebanon, and any used in the building of the pyramids would likely have come from there. As for burning it, well if they had enough badasses with whips to keep the gangs of workers in line - I'm sure they could manage guarding some logs at night.
As I've said before, the exact construction methods used to build the pyramids are not known, but just because something is unknown doesn't automatically make it likely to be caused by aliens or seamonsters or anything of the type.
Hell, if we had 5% of the worlds output we could build a whole other planet!!
Yeah, they wouldn't crash into the surface, just crash into a pyramid instead.
I assume that if it takes them generations to reach another planet, that they have plenty of time for each generation to train the next - not all knowledge has to be written down to be preserved over generations - you simply get the older ones to teach the younger ones how to fly the ship - isn't that the way we do it?
How do you know how much alien technology goes into building a pyramid? Did the aliens give you a copy of the encyclopaedia galactica? Where do you get this kind of knowledge from?
But to do that they need to redraw the map each time someone gets there. They need to guess where previous visitors landed. They actually need someone on every single vessel. Who says they don't ever want to send unmanned supply ships? "
Why would you need to redraw the map? the continental drift from the age the pyramids were built until now has been so minuscule as to hardly make any difference. i could draw you a map on a piece of scrap paper in under 2 minutes just from my memory of what the continents look like that would be sufficient for finding Egypt from space.
Scannning the entire surface of the earth for pyramidal shaped objects has got to be the most wasteful way of finding a landing spot. The best technique would be to arbitrarily pick a coordinate on the surface of the planet on which to build a marker which would indicate where the landing spot was. And even that's a complicated process.
And if the aliens can travel across the gulf of space, they can certainly send a message back to their home world. Even if the message takes as long to get back as a return trip ( assuming that they can travel at the speed of light ), but any other ships partway between their homeworld and the earth would receive the message in mid-voyage and would know where to go. -- including unmanned ships.
Well, they did present the nile and egypt in their mythology as the cradle of all of creation, so I can imagine that for them travelling as far away as Judea ( Israel ) would be like sailing off the edge of the world.
Well considering most of their contemporaries were pre-literate, then yes you're absolutely right. Perhaps they were more literate than many other civilizations of the time - but that doesn't really say much. Consider it this way:
98-99% of the population are farmers.
of the remaining 1-2%, the vast majority are
craftsmen or merchants. so perhaps 0.2% of the total population makes up the upper eschelons of scribes, priests and nobility. most nobles, and many priests cannot read or write - so what are you left with? not much...
There is no reason that an earlier civilization could not have travelled in boats across the atlantic - particularly the short africa - south american neck. Bringing up the issues of continental drift makes such a proposal almost unbelievable.
It is true that the sphinx is much older than previously suspected, and that the dates of other monuments are suspect too. But the time gap between them and the central american pyramids are quite huge - thousands of years. A common old civilization would have trouble explaining this time gap.
Yes, science has its own politics, and there are always less than honest people who are willing to fudge evidence - or accuse others of doing so - to increase their position.
However none of this is in anyway an indication that the Egyptians were influenced by aliens!!
What makes you think that these monuments were the influence of aliens? There are plenty of cultures worldwide which would have been prime for alien influence that never constructed pyramids. As far as mythologies about powerful beings from the sky or up above - this is universally human whereas pyramid building is quite unique and isolated - so there is little correlating evidence there.
Remember a few rules of theory making/evaluating:
1. the simplest explanation is the best. There is no need to involve complexe explanations when a simple one will do.
2. the fact that two things are unknown or mysterious is not grounds for assuming they are the same thing, or related. Mystery is by its nature undefined and devode of the kinds of features that make for logical associations. To say:
pyramid building == mystery
aliens == mystery
therefore: pyramid building == aliens.
is just a fault in reasoning.
3. There is a strong difference between something being possible and being probable. It is possible that the pyramids were farted out of giant psychedelic frogs - but it is not probable. A good theory has to be probable, not just possible.
In the case of these termites, it may be that they have an instinctual response to the warmth of the sun, and so naturally tend towards such construction. Simple instinctual coding like:
if( front == warm || back == warm ){
turn 90 degrees;
}
if( left == warm || right == warm ){
build straight forward;
}
It is also interesting to note that very many animals seem to have an instinctual sense of north & south based on magnetism. Many cellular colonies will align themselves along the force lines of a magnet if it is left next to them. Geese have a high magnetic content in their blood and monarch butterfiles seem to use a magnetic sense to conduct their epic multi-generation migrations across continents. Various desert plants use a magnetic sensibility to detect oncoming storms and close their flowers. The list goes on and on.
Traditionally it was held that magnetic fields have no effect on living organisms - but this is far from true. Given a constant force present in the environment it makes sense that a creature would evolve to account for it in some way. The earth has had a magnetic field since the dawn of life - it is not surprising that living creatures take advantage of it.
Medieval cathedrals are taller on average than the great pyramid, but definitely not more massive - much less building material involved for obvious reasons. However they are more impressive architecturally than pyramids for the same reason, their height and mass is supported by thin walls and buttresses, but the intelligence of the design is that it works to support it. Given that most Cathedrals are now ~700-800 years old, and the amount of weathering they've sustained ( in harsher climates than egypt to boot ) chances are that without any serious fires/earthquakes/wars they will survive that long. Mind you they have considerable human maintenance - which the pyramids didn't have.
As for office buildings, chances are they won't last much more than a half century or so, they are not robust structurally, and will lose strength rather quickly. Today we build for size and cheapness - durability is rarely considered.
When you're measuring 'bigness', are you talking about volume, or mass? I'm pretty sure I could put together an aluminum shell of a building that had a much larger volume than any pyramid, with a work force of less than 50 people.
Putting together the same volume with huge blocks of limestone on the other hand...
There is apparently one crane in the world which could lift the biggest blocks of limestone found in ancient monuments.
Height, not volume or mass. Naturally the pyramids are more massive than Cathedrals, after all pyramids are solid lumps of stone - Cathedrals are not.
There are more ways than cranes to stack lumps of stone - ramps and trucks for example. Yes, modern building methods are far in advance of Ancient Egyptian standards - that's not the issue. Nobody has ever bothered to try to recreate a pyramid of the same scope and size as an Egyptian one, so we can only speculate to how easy it would be, but given what we can build today I find it doubtful whether it would really be a problem.
Similarly for figuring out how the Egyptians did it. We must think like intelligent beings to solve the puzzle - that's how they did it. Thinking like superstitious beings doesn't build pyramids - it builds paranoia.
There is a thing we call "fiction", perhaps you and the aliens haven't heard of it.