SO I recently watched an episode of Mega-Movers about ancient mega moves. For the uninitiated, that means big things are moved distances by either some machine or other ingenious and often Rube Goldberg-esque contraption. It’s a cool show, especially when you are the kind of guy that like really, really big equipment that can not only move weights equaling the size of Tom Cruise’s ego, but suck down dead-dinosaurs like they were going out of style (get it?).
Anyway, this show was about huge moves of really heavy things performed by people like the ancient Aztecs, the Romans and whoever the hell it was that built those freaky heads on Easter Island. The thing that really caught my attention, though, was a set of three stones, called theTrillithon. These stones are the largest hewn stones on the planet, and are a part of the foundation of the Temple of Jupiter, in a town called Baalbek in what is now Lebanon. Some info:
These stones were hewn from living rock and moved over three miles, hoisted up to 20 feet in the air and placed with such precision that a playing card can not be inserted between them and subsequent freaking huge stones. These stones are 70 feet long, ten feet tall and over 14 feet thick, and are estimated to weigh between 1,000 and 1,500 tons. They are part of a foundation for the temple of Jupiter and are of such high-quality that they support the load on top of them without having cracked.
The real kicker? These stones were placed at LEAST 3,000 years ago by the Romans, and many people believe that the Romans actually capitalized on the engineering of earlier people and built their temple on top of someone else’s foundation since it was obviously the most stable place around.
Why do I tell you of these amazing stones? Because there is no way that we could do the same thing today. Well, we could; modern floating cranes can lift a couple of thousand tons, and the space-shuttle transporter could probably move these stones to where they need to be, but it would require the creation of specialized equipment and complex hydraulic, electrical and other systems that would undoubtedly take months or years and millions of dollars and computer to come up with.
The romans did this without advanced math. Without computers, hydraulic motors, or heavy-lift trucks. Hell, at that time they were hurting for metal hard enough to help them; the stones were cut and shaped using harder rocks called “hammer-stones” because no one knew how to make metal hard enough to chisel rock.
My point is this (and this ties into an earlier post that I wrote while on the Apollo kick, uploaded incorrectly, screwed up, got frustrated with and lost motivation to re-write, so bear with me): Human reliance on technology and bureaucracy has crippled us when it comes to things like this.
Now hold on, before you start thinking of me as someone who is going to start mailing bombs to people, let me explain:
The Romans constructed massive edifices of stone and brick that still stand today three thousand years later with no materials engineering or structural load computations. 25 and 30 year old nerds at NASA built a spaceship that took a dozen people to the moon under budget, on time and with dazzling success using SLIDE RULES. Now we are hard pressed to put a new airliner in the air or a new bridge over a river a decade after it was thought up because of our insistence that everything be computed, vetted by 5,000 different agencies, re-engineered to meet the specifications of a different computer, mulled over by a dudesittin on the pot on his lunch break, run past a priest and the re-computed.
While I understand that this often makes things better built (by our standards) and safer, the fact that the Stealth Fighter – a quantum leap in technology and thinking – was created in the 70’s using computers whose digital IQ is dwarfed so hard as to be invisible by the processor in my wristwatch lends me to believe that we are overextending ourselves in the technology area and forgetting one really simple fact: When Kennedy said “do this in ten years with this much money” we did it. When who ever it was that had the temple of Jupiter built said “I want these huge freaking rocks over there now, and square” it happened.
Ingenuity and creation are being overtaken by a belief that if the computer says it can’t be done, it simply can’t be done. This is regardless of the fact that it has, in fact, been done… and done really well by people with absolutely nothing in the way of help or guidance from anything or anyone other than the person who said “Hmmm… 1,000 ton stone moved three miles? Let’s try this.”
I don’t really know where I am going with this. All I know is that in my learning of the history of human creation there has been a slowing of the process of coming up with things that haven’t been done yet: feats of ingenuity and creativeness that simply boggle the mind and this has been happening with inverse proportion to the amount of technology that people use in their lives, and in the process of creation.
Again, don’t get me wrong, humans build great things all the time, but I guarantee that three thousand years from now no-one is going to be staring up at theBurj Dubai and marveling that we were able to build a building a half-mile tall.
Oh, and the best part about the trilithon? There was another stone, twice the size of the others, ready to be moved that mysteriously never got finished:
