> Dwayne wrote:
> > The lower courses of the Temple of Jupiter at Baalbeck are, according to
> the
> > quotes I have seen, too massive to be moved using currently available
> > technology. Now, these may be quotes from engineers who have vested
> > interests, or they might be correct.
>
> There is no particular limit to how big an object can be moved with current
> technology. Once you get bigger than a few hundred tons you'll want to
> build custom equipment for the job, but that's mostly a matter of
> convenience - its more efficient than setting up large teams of comercial
> bulldozers & such. You can scale up to tens of thousands of tons before
> things even start to get tricky, which is far larger than anything that the
> ancients ever moved.
Are you sure of this? That we can move single objects over ground weighing thousands of tons?
> It might be usefull to point out here that we usually think in terms of
> moving something a few thousand miles in a matter of days or weeks. The
> ancients, OTOH, were usually moving things a few dozen miles over the course
> of months or years. If you think like the ancients, those amazing feats
> suddenly start seeming a lot more doable.
"think like the ancients" means "have a casual disregard for human life and the ability to command tens of thousands of people to do whatever the hell you want" :-)
> > I have also seen footage of engineers saying that it is technically
> > impossible to align a site as large as the Great Pyramid at Giza with
> > the accuracy the pyramid displays. There's more to it than just moving
> > rocks about.
>
> Again, we're pretty sure we know how they did it. You just need a good
> knowledge of naked-eye astronomy, and lots of patience and attention to
> detail.
> BTW - Surely you realize that in the modern world we can align a building to
> essentially infinite precision? (i.e. our instruments permit such high
> precision that the thermal flexing of the building & ground will produce
> much larger errors than an imprecision of our measurements)
Do we? I know we can, but do we? Has anyone done this in practice? The engineer I saw quoted said that he builds very large buildings and it would be impossible to align an object as large as the Great Pyramid to the degree it is. Um, I mean, make sure it is square etc. when I say align. Gah.
> > The vitrified forts in ireland?
>
> Never heard of them. Do you have a link?
Nup, have a look. Large forts with walls made of rock heated until it fused into a single block of glass.
Dwayne
-- mailto:ddraig@pobox.com http://i.am/dwayne "the cricher we kno as dwayne is only the projection into our dimension of something much larger and wirder." ---clae@pa.ausom.net.au ....return....to....the....source.... chairs are cheaper than aircraft: http://snopes.simplenet.com/spoons/noose/balloon.htm