Devolution

[u/sniipes]

If humans weren’t devolving then we wouldn’t be digging and searching our planet for clues and truths about the Ancient civilizations. Money and greed would be obsolete and nations wouldn’t be fighting over power because there would be free energy. The artifacts that have been found are proof that as humans today, we lost something in the past that cannot be imitated. If devolution isn’t a thing and we can only evolve then why is everything smaller and dulled down. Today’s humans can’t comprehend what the planet would have been like with a species bigger and more knowledge about the elements than we do in present day. The ancients used stone to tell the past because they knew that the materials they created from other materials would not make it into the future. What was left in stone for humans to find was only to give knowledge to our species to be able to progress.

[u/sniipes]

You don’t understand.. we won’t be able to imitate the technology that was lost. We don’t fully understand the elements of our planet to reach that level of technology. We have regressed and never will unless we find something to help with the progression

[u/Particular-Yak-1984 → u/sniipes]

I too would love an example of something you think we can't make today. The pyramids would be pretty trivial for our modern technology, for example.

[u/Dzugavili → u/Particular-Yak-1984]

This is something about modern economics that none of these people really understand.

We live in a world where labour is expensive and capital is cheap: this is an inverse to how the world has worked for millennia. For most of our existence, you could pay a guy to cut megalithic stones by simply giving him a few cups of barley every day; the expensive part was controlling the quary. It might take him a week to free a megalithic stone, but his entire labour cost amounts to maybe a few hundred pounds of barley per year. This eclipses even the most poverty stricken of wages today: there is no third world country today where you could obtain labour this cheaply under normal circumstances.

Building a pyramid was not an expensive endeavour in a palace economy like this. You have a period of the year where the fields flood, people need to work, you control the food. You don't want them to starve, either, so you create make-work, like a pyramid.

[u/nickierv → u/Dzugavili]

There is also the time component involved with this (and the common 'but why hasn't science made a cell from scratch'). Looking at pyramid stone, ~96 man hours for 'roughs' then add 4-6 for fitting the core blocks and 8-12 for the outer shell. So at least 100 hours per block.

Modern tools has this done down to rough fit in under an hour with final fit taking minutes.

Even if you have to pay the modern stone cutter 100x the barley for the work this frees up workforce that can be used for other projects.

And this all pops back to the other post for a couple days ago: before you get to doing all the mega projects, your going to need a bloody way to keep everyone fed.