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Semi-related, the Great Pyramid was also scanned using muon radiography, by which a "big void" was discovered [0]. Muons can penetrate through a lot of material, so they can see through very large, thick things like the pyramids.

Muon tomography was also used to scan the Fukushima reactors [1] and see where the fuel ended up.

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.01576.pdf [1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS-Muons-suggest-location...



Wild. I was speculating about this in 2003 on my blog. Very interesting news.

https://javarants.com/deconstructing-the-pyramids-76081876b3...


I thought this was going to be a conspiracy theory, but it was an interesting read about a simple (yet intriguing) idea. Thank you for sharing.

As a side note, what's the blog architecture? I seem to remember seeing an XML error when I hit a link that does not exist (like at [1]) but I can't remember where :).

[1] https://javarants.com/hn-error


Just Cloudfront and an S3 bucket.


Thanks for those links.

This virtual visit mentions that, because it shows a similar experiment being done now (I suppose they're trying to find if there are more voids that could be hidden chambers)


A void? Is it another chamber? I have so many questions. Though from the images, it doesn't seem like a chamber. https://www.livescience.com/scan-great-pyramid-of-giza


I bet it's the aliens' server-room.


Is there any non invasive way to see the interior of the chamber? I hope we are aren't gonna leave it be.


To whom do you refer to with "we"?

I hope we leave it be until we develop the tech to measure it non-invasively.

The tech available to Napoleon's Egyptologists or the British in the 1800s would not have allowed him to do it. They would have picked up anything they could carry and brought it back to Room 4 in the British Museum. Our tech in 2022 does not currently allow us to see the interior of the chamber more precisely than "there's a void there."

It's likely to not have been breached for millenia, it would be positively criminal to drill to it.

I say wait a couple hundred years until some future archaeologist will have a neutrino or muon scanner with sufficient resolution to read the hieroglyphics. It'll keep.


In a few hundred years geopolitical balances could be wildly different than today: Egypt could somehow come to dominate as a new global empire with Cairo as it's capital, opening it to the vulnerability of a nuclear attack, removing the pyramids before we ever get to develop the scanning technology.


I wonder… would a nuclear attack wipe out the pyramids? Not one directly on them, but centered on the nearby city?


The Giza complex is right next to Cairo. Actually, it might be within the city limits. Far enough from the downtown core to survive a single moderate nuclear blast I would think.


While the postcards show the pyramids standing in the desert, the city comes to within ~300m of the base. Downtown is only 10km from the pyramids.

https://i.imgur.com/eKq7Zcz.jpg


Now you have me thinking.

What if we nuked the pyramids? I'm not saying we should, but I am saying like, you know, maybe.

Nahhhh, we would never do something like that. It would be a travesty.

But like, maybe, we could just like, ynkow, just drop 1 nuke on the pyramids. Just as like, a little thing.

No, no way would we do that. Neeeever would we do that.

But just 1 nuke? right on top? That would be, that would be something. It would be interesting. I mean the pyramid is so symmetric. It's one of those things with a mythical power. Same thing with a fission weapon! Mystical power. It would take just 1 nuke going off right on top of the pyramids for like -- something crazy might happen.


Giant alien robots might wrestle each other while clambering around on it. It has happened before.

(Cf. "Transformers 2")


By "we", I meant society and the authorities/academics who are researching this.

I don't there is a way in there without some amount of drilling. I was personally thinking of a fibre optic camera that could be somehow sent in there but there would be still some kind of damage caused to the Pyramid, though I am no expert on this topic at all.


Cryopod/Egg chamber.


A void. It looks uneven, not like a chamber, but quite large.


Stone contractor promised to deliver 1000 blocks, only installed 753 blocks. Pocketed the difference.


It was the world's first pyramid scheme.


That contractor must have had really big pockets...


That's what I think whenever I play Minetest. My inventory can fit 40 stacks of 99 cubic meters of stone: 3960 cubic meters, about 10000 tonnes. I guess Sam's backpack is bigger on the inside than the outside...


What is Minetest?


Minetest is an open source voxel game engine. Fundamentally it is very similar to Minecraft.

https://www.minetest.net/


Relevantly, not only can you build 3-D models of pyramids in it, there's even a mod for it that generates them at random: https://content.minetest.net/packages/Wuzzy/tsm_pyramids/


Thanks Dad.


Pessimism: We wonder how these pyramids were build thousands of years ago, and thousands of years from now, people will wonder what muons and such, which some later mythology refers to, might have been.


As well loosely related, it is a few years that there are projects to use muograpgy to better undertstand how the dome of the Duomo in Florence was built by Brunelleschi:

https://bldgblog.com/2022/09/

maybe they will start this year.


Looks like that gear is still there (in the bedrock chamber) scanning. The 3D tour mentions it.




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