Warwick L Nixon Wrote:
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> Please explain the difference between raising
> approximately 80 % of the total mass 200 feet
> ..and the remaining 20% ,comprised of on average
> smaller blocks, and not including any massive key
> stones, the rest of the way.


The amount of work required to lift a stone is directly proportional
to the height it's lifted. Ek=Ep. This, of course, assumes equal
efficiency at each step and there are some confounding factors but
the work efficient work represented in a stone at 500' is exactly
five times the same work in a stone at 100'. A weight at 500' does
5 times as much work falling down as a stone from 100'. This is an
immutable fact of gravity so far as anyone knows. Of course we still
don't know what gravuty is so some day this might be overturned in
part or in whole.

But we have to operate in the real world. In the real world an ant
can pick up massive loads and climb trees with them. We could have
built the pyramids like this if not for a few real world things get-
ting in the way. As things become more massive like bones and muscle
they require increasing strenght just to support their own weight. We
can lift far more than an ant but far less proportionately.

These same considerations apply to everything. You can't build a 500'
crane because no metal known can support its own weight. You couldn't
lift a large load of stone with a helicopter because the blades would
have to spin so fast they'd fly apart or there would be no air left to
chop. Yes, you can build bigger and bigger copters and there are some
that could pick up one stone now but the Egyptians moved several at a
time. In the real world men take up real space. You can't just throw
more men at a stone to carry it since at some point not enough men can
even get close to the stone; they are in each others way. The same ap-
plies to dragging them up ramps, when they get to a corner there's no
where from whence to pull. It takes a certain number of men to do a
certain amount of work and if they can't all fit in the work area then
the job is impossible.

But the real world problems of lifting stones to 500' don't stop here.
This is where they get extremely intractible. The height to which some-
thing gets very difficult to lift is highly dependent on the means used.
A single straight on ramp as Petrie proposed for instance gets exponent-
ially more massive as it grows. Even modern machinery would be limited
to about 600' making a pile of anything using this method. Power consump-
tion would be enormous and the last 2 1/2 tons could require as much energy
as was needed to build the Great Pyramid.

You might think spiral ramps wouldn't gat all that much more energy inten-
sive as they rose but they present an increasing number of corners. If
the ramp dips to help get around the corner on the shorter legs near the
top there would be no altitude gained and the whole thing would be so lit-
tered with ramps you couldn't tell the spots without ramps from those with.
Of course spiral ramps have to be ruled out anyway since there is evidence
that they were not used.

If you pry stones up the side the odds of them falling rises as they do.
the speed at which they fall increases as does the damage they can do.

In the case of the Great Pyramid (as well as the earlier ones) the real
problem is getting enough men on the job to get the work done. Sure, they
could use long ropes and pull the stones from the opposite side just as
I'm suggesting and they'd have enough room. This would make the height
limitations more in line with the exponential increase in the weight of
the rope. If the rope is too massive the men can't pick it up and pull it.

If we built this today we'd would most definitely use the same method that
the ancients most probably did; counterweights. We'd pump water up to fill
them. There aren't any major limitations here since water can be relayed
by pumps and electricity flows just fine uphill (go figure).

The limitations are a characteristic of the beast. We don't know what beast
was used to raise them but ramp limitations are pretty much far lower than
500'. The fact that the stones were huge is clear indication that a very
robust beast was at play. If men dragged these up they would have been cut
in two, or more likely four, or even more likely eight. They were huge be-
cause lifting massive stones was so easy they moved them 8 or 10 at a time!
If they didn't need to push and pull them around on top the pyramid they
might have been even bigger yet.




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Man fears the pyramid, time fears man.