Screenshots of people being insane on Facebook. Please censor names/pics of end users in screenshots. Please follow the rules of lemmy.world
If only. It's funny to think, but hot air balloons could have been bronze age tech ( they almost certainly never were). All they would need is a giant sack made from fine thread, a source of heat, fuel, ballast, ropes, and a basket. Totally doable, but it's another one of those things nobody thought of until very late.
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I gotta be honest, this is the first conspiracy aliens nutjob theory that I could actually expect to see on myth busters. Not with different glasses, but at least with hot air balloons. Granted, those didn't exist for centuries still, but at least this sounds remotely possible
Such experiments have been done before. Not in Egypt, as far as I know, but it was shown through demonstration that the Nazcans, who drew the famous shapes in the Peruvian desert you can only see clearly from above, had all of the materials to build a functional hot air balloon.
The problem is that there's absolutely no evidence they ever did such a thing.
https://www.hallofmaat.com/americas/grounding-the-nasca-balloon/
Also, if you're making a picture for a god, it doesn't really matter if you can't see it.
Lol!
And super dense ~~helium~~ hydrogen!
(The size of the Hindenburg isn't relative to how much it could lift it was relative to the amount of ~~helium~~ hydrogen gas required to lift things.)
Can't tell if the parenthetical is sarcasm or just genuinely wrong.
You need a certain amount of hydrogen to create lift.
The size of the Hindenburg would be relative to the amount of hydrogen needed to create such a lift.
Therefore, the size of the Hindenburg isn't relative to how much it can lift. The amount of hydrogen is the only thing that is relative.
If you wanted to gain the same amount of lifting power in a smaller package, you would have to make the hydrogen denser which would turn it into a completely different element in and of itself which is why the statement in the post is funny and mine numbingly stupid.
I still can't tell if you're being intentionally sarcastic or if you genuinely don't know how aerostatics work.
🤷
*Hydrogen
You are correct sir.
This is why you need to completely cut off your internet before you take a hit of that good shit
Nope, found my line. This is too absurd and well typed for me to believe this one isn't just taking the piss.
That's how the modern flat earth movement started.
I've seen one that said they were built with sound
I mean they weren't on mute.
Actually that puts a funny idea in my head. Several pyramids away from Giza, the stepped pyramid, the bent pyramid and the ruined pyramid were all built by Sneferu, Khufu's father, and obviously only one or none of them could have been his tomb. What if he had some weird obsession that they had to be built in utter silence and gave up on one and made them start again if any of the men so much as grunted?
*Sneeze*
"AMUN DAMN IT, MERET! NOW WE HAVE TO BUILD ANOTHER ONE!"
taps head Guaranteed job security.
You must not be familiar with Graham Hancock. That's kind of his whole schtick- sounding like he knows what he's talking about by sounding erudite but talking absolute garbage.
Because they definitely had a good supply of helium and/or hydrogen laying around to fill these balloons with, when levers and wheels were too advanced.
Right.
You know you can make hydrogen out of water right? You just need high voltage electricity.
You need high current, not voltage. Electrolysis of water starts somewhere around 1.5V
Likewise, why would they bother with balloons, at all? We know they were highly advanced, it seems more likely they'd just skip to planes?
I'm assuming you subscribe to the Baghdad battery idea? Even that would produce only a tiny amount of electricity if it did at all. It definitely couldn't be used for this or even the lighting idea some crazy people support. It may have produced a tiny jolt and have been used for religious purposes as they couldn't explain the small shock.
I'm taking the piss
Which the ancient Egyptians clearly had
Clearly they used methane.
Crowds of farm labourers during flood season, all lined up just waiting for their turn to fart into the balloon.
It would be another age before they realized they could fill the balloons twice as fast using camel farts.
Formula for surface area of a sphere: πD^2^
Surface area of 30m diameter balloon: 2827.43 m^2^
Average cow hide size: 4.6 m^2^ source
For one balloon, you'd need 614 cows (approx)
Ooooh, i love this idiot! It overlaps my historical leather working hobby with my hatred of pseudohistorical bullshit.
So, a 30m diameter sphere contains 14.000m3 of gas. Every liter of hydrogen lifts 1.14 grams, and for helium it's 1.05 grams. So 14.000m3 = 14 million liters, or about 14 million grams, which is 14 tons. Sounds pretty decent until you realize that animal hide isn't exactly weightless.
A tanned cowhide, before it's split, is over 4cm thick. Vegetable tanned cattlehide weighs something like 40 kg for a 5m2. But lets see how thick out balloon is. If it can lift 6 tons, it can only weigh some 8000kg itself. Our 30m sphere has a surface area of some 2800m2, so that means our animal hides can weigh, at most, 8000/2800=2.8kg per square meter. Those at home have probably noticed that 2.8 is a bit less than the 8kg you need to use cowhide.
So, what kind of leather or hide were those balloons then? Well leather is usually sold in "ounces per square foot" (even in Europe), so we can just look it up. 2.8kg per square meter is about 9.2 ounce per square foot (says wolfram alpha), and a handy table I have printed says that's around 3.6mm thick.
So, we are too believe that the Egyptians made a 30m balloon, out of what is basically cheap-belt and saddlebag leather, somehow got that not just air-tight, while being ridiculously thin, and then used it to build massive structures.
i think they would likely be using intestines or cow stomachs as did the rigid airships of the time, as it was the only material that could hold back hydrogen, so that would've been an option. Especially with leather production, though someone would have to have thought about it first.
I'm not sure either hydrogegn OR helium would've been accessible at the time, though if we're tying to logically analyze this, its probably worth considering they would've alleviated like 80% the mass of the stone, and not all of it, as it's a little redundant to make the thing float.
Not just air-tight, lighter-than-air-tight. I'm not sure if it's true for the whole set of lighter-than-air gasses, but helium is infamously difficult to keep from leaking, even with modern technology.
Good at making gasses behave is a weird choice for ancient technologies we lost.
Hydrogen is even worse. It basically moves through solid steel cylinders.
Hah gain even more lifting power and also sidestep the whole need of creating helium by filling it with vacuum!
\s if needed 🤷🏻♀️
I will note there is historic precedent for using gut, not hide, for lifting gas envelopes. Airship R101 had gut gas bags.
Do they need to do that before, or after they learn how to harness a tremendous amount of hydrogen? Which they conveniently forgot to mention anywhere.
You also think that they would have made a few pictures of that happening, instead of the pictures they did make, which clearly show manual slave labor building the pyramids.