8 ms·
A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)
- ifh-hn 8mo agoI first heard about this in a Graham Hancock book. Found it a fascinating example of an attempt to encode a date that far distant future generations might understand (provided it survives).
- spartanatreyu 8mo agoGraham Hancock the fraud?
- ifh-hn 8mo agoI think author and journalist is how he presents himself. Or pseudo-scientist according to Wikipedia. But yes Graham Hancock.
- DougN7 8mo agoThat was an excellent rabbit hole to go down while eating lunch :)
- aebtebeten 8mo agoFor a hypothesis concerning the precession of the equinoxes and religious pantheons, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38761574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38761574
- GrowingSideways 8mo ago[flagged]
- tzs 8mo agoYou are confusing the thing with the category of the thing. Religion the category is only a few hundred years old. The things that fall under that category go back at least as far as Neanderthal times.
- maebert 8mo agocf. "The Map is not the Territory"
- testaccount28 8mo agoit's an interesting point, and i don't think it can be resolved quite so neatly. to the people building such monuments, or writing such texts, the activity may have been closer to what we now refer to as "history" or "natural philosophy" (or even "civic infrastructure"). the fact that _now_, we have independent traditions referred to by those terms, and so categorize the ancient practices under "religion" is quite confusing, and it may be productive to make the distinction clear. for a modern example, suppose we build a skyscraper in such a way that it lines up with, or reflects the setting sun on the solstice. we would regard this as "architecture", not "religion". i would be quite offended if, some thousand years from now, the aesthetic decision is dismissed as primitive superstition.
- Aloisius 8mo ago> i would be quite offended if, some thousand years from now, the aesthetic decision is dismissed as primitive superstition. Why? I can't imagine being offended if people today, ignorant of the true motivations, dismissed it as primitive superstition, let alone a thousand years from now when I'm long dead.
- testaccount28 8mo agolook on my works, ye mighty, and dismiss them as mere superstition. did the use of the word "offended" trigger this comment? fine, then i would not take offense. my point is this: i prefer to be remembered by a future that feels it can learn something from the past. it would be sad to me to find out that the people of tomorrow do not regard my contributions.
- Aloisius 8mo agoThe conceptualization of religion as a category, is actually quite a bit older. The idea that it was created recently was, well, created recently.[1] Casadio details it going back thousands of years across cultures.[2] [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concept-religion/index.html https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concept-religion/index.ht... [2] https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9780191045882_A29773173/preview-9780191045882_A29773173.pdf#page=52 https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9780191045882_A29773...
- MarcelOlsz 8mo agoWhat?
- GrowingSideways 8mo ago[dead]
- tzs 8mo agoWikipedia says similar [1]: > The concept of "religion" was formed in the 16th and 17th centuries. Sacred texts like the Bible, the Quran, and others did not have a word or even a concept of religion in the original languages and neither did the people or the cultures in which these sacred texts were written That said, GrowingSideways is mistaken. He is confusing the thing with the category of the thing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_religion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_religion
- toasterlovin 8mo ago> or even a concept of religion in the original languages IMO this and the sources it cites are wrong. A huge chunk of the Old Testament is about how God had to keep sending prophets to tell the Israelites to stop worshipping other deities. So while they may not have had a single word that was equivalent to 'religion,' they clearly possessed the same concept. They would just use the phrase "worshipping other gods."
- adrian_b 8mo agoIndeed. There are many texts written in the Greek or Roman antiquity that compare the religions of various nations known to them, i.e. which compare their beliefs about their "gods" and their methods for worshiping or for praying. There are entire books written about such subjects, e.g. "De natura deorum" ("The nature of gods") by Cicero. The ancient people usually did not have a precise word with the definite meaning that "religion" has today, mainly because religious practices were intermingled with most of their daily activities, so there was not a very clear separation between religion and other things. For example, a treatise on agriculture, besides explaining how to prepare the soil and how to select the seeds for sowing, would also give the text of a prayer that should address a certain god before or after the sowing, so that it will be successful. Similarly for any other activities where divine help was believed to be necessary. Nevertheless, they had the concept of religion and they were able to distinguish things that were related to gods from unrelated things.
- akshay326 8mo ago> There is an angle for doubt, for sorrow, for hate, for joy, for contemplation, and for devotion. I’m so intrigued - what was going on inside Hansen's brain?
- Liquix 8mo agoMakes sense when talking about human postures and emotions. Victory/elation/worship corresponds to extending the arms above the head or in a "V" shape, sorrow/grief corresponds to dropping to the knees and holding the head in the hands, etc. These associations seem to persist despite language barriers and great spans of time.
- myrdynEmbrys 8mo agoYou solved the riddle good sir! Walking along the millennia, viewing the night's glorious celestial panorama, the registrations on the floor, you'll have successfully circumnavigated the long now, as well the total integral of your own life.
- vedmakk 8mo agoThis is the kind of stuff I love about ancient architecture. It seems they were full of such clever things (or maybe only the few constructions which survived until today). Its nice to see that some people still care about creating such thoughtful art for modern constructions. It seems that most building of our time are just optimized for fast and efficient construction. I hope there are many more out there, so that Earth's Graham Hancock of the year 16000 has something to explore on his/her ayahuasca trip.
- dylan604 8mo agoWhen you had no electricity to produce light pollution, when you have no TV, printing press, or any other thing to distract your attention, you had plenty of time to look at the night sky. When that also means you didn't have a way to have a shared calendar, you paid more attention to the sky to know when the seasons were changing. When the changing of seasons were key into surviving, you gave it a lot of importance. It's hard to put that into perspective when we can just look at an app to see the specific time/date of astronomical events well into the future.
- praveen9920 8mo agoHaving something built IRL would at least inspire a few to actually be interested in astronomy or star gazing.
- sneak 8mo agoThe buildings then were also optimized for fast and efficient construction. Those buildings are, of course, gone now.
- creshal 8mo agoA few pharaos remain only known for being so poor architects that their hastily built temples needed renovations after only 2-3 generations.
- calibas 8mo agoSounds like it's about the precession of the equinoxes and the new "Age of Aquarius".
- throw0101a 8mo agoMore: > Due to the precession of the equinoxes (as well as the stars' proper motions), the role of North Star has passed from one star to another in the remote past, and will pass in the remote future. In 3000 BC, the faint star Thuban in the constellation Draco was the North Star, aligning within 0.1° distance from the celestial pole, the closest of any of the visible pole stars.[8][9] However, at magnitude 3.67 (fourth magnitude) it is only one-fifth as bright as Polaris, and today it is invisible in light-polluted urban skies. > During the 1st millennium BC, Beta Ursae Minoris (Kochab) was the bright star closest to the celestial pole, but it was never close enough to be taken as marking the pole, and the Greek navigator Pytheas in ca. 320 BC described the celestial pole as devoid of stars.[6][10] In the Roman era, the celestial pole was about equally distant between Polaris and Kochab. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_star https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_star * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_pole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_pole
- heresie-dabord 8mo ago"Milankovitch cycles describe the collective effects of changes in the Earth's movements on its climate over thousands of years. The phenomenon is named after the Serbian geophysicist and astronomer Milutin Milanković. [...] variations in eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession combined to result in cyclical variations in the intra-annual and latitudinal distribution of solar radiation at the Earth's surface, and that this orbital forcing strongly influenced the Earth's climatic patterns. The Earth's rotation around its axis, and revolution around the Sun, evolve over time due to gravitational interactions with other bodies in the Solar System. The variations are complex, but a few cycles are dominant." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
- kraig911 8mo agoI loved this. I wish I had the ability to do the same innocuous deep dive into a easter egg in code - but I fear it would never be discovered at this rate of which AI is generating similar stuff. But much like this article maybe there's a time and place.
- lalos 8mo ago> Having this one fixed point in the sky is the foundation of all celestial navigation. Only in the northern hemisphere.
- kevinpet 8mo agoNot even in the northern hemisphere. Celestial navigation is about shooting altitudes for known bright stars. At least three ideally five. This could include Polaris, but it doesn't need to. Source: watched some old training videos about celestial navigation after reading Fate is the Hunter a while back.
- ProllyInfamous 8mo agoDuring DEF CON XX, I got bored/overwhelmed (it was not my first year attending) — so I decided to rent a car and visit Hoover Dam (this was before the bypass bridge was completed). I drove through the desert 100mph+, in my own little HST jaunt, searching for nothing but concrete's high water mark. The statues in OP's article are absolutely beautiful examples of Art Deco / 1930s Americana (my local post office was built then, too, and has eaglettes of similar [but smaller] design). I had no idea they were out there until stumbling upon them, and they definitely leave a lasting impression of our forefather's imposing presence. America, fuck yeah! Wish I had then-known about this "clock," which is definitely hidden in plain sight. Wish we had similarly-lavish federal budgets, today. But worth visiting, both article, statues & dam.
- hakkoru 8mo agoHeh, a group of friends and I also visited the Hoover Dam while we were in Vegas for DEF CON one year. Was a really cool experience for sure.
- ProllyInfamous 8mo agoI actually went to get away from some friends, whom were presenting that year (they needed prep time — and I needed escape). Top 10 memories made by myself out at Hoover Dam, watching as the bypass got completed (that is another incredible feat of engineering). Definitely a cool experience, and I'm glad I did. My last year attending DEF CON me and a Hadoop buddy (nobodies) just walked up onto a stage [during a terrible presentation] and started drinking whiskey with the ESL speaker (again: nobodies) — predicting we'd get banned from attending (but didn't — nobody cared... audience appreciated the break from hard-to-understandings).
- giraffe_lady 8mo agoIn the extremely interesting book about water, cadillac desert, there is a great discussion with a scholar of some kind, I think an archeologist, about the large western US dams and the future. The gist is that the reservoirs will eventually silt up and disappear, but the dams will remain for thousands of years. The silted lakes will preserve clear evidence of their construction in the geologic record of these regions. We will quite plausibly be known as the dam builder civilization, as these artifacts could very easily outlast the memory of what we call ourselves. It is fitting to embellish them in this way.
- avhception 8mo agoHaha, I clicked without reading the URL. Then I read the "01931" in the text, immediately looked at the URL and of course it was longnow.org. Brought a smile to my face.
- antonvs 8mo agoI find it a bit silly. When we refer to 70 CE or 500 CE we don’t add zeros in front.
- sponnath 8mo agoIt's not silly when you consider what longnow stands for. They look at "now" on a 20,000 year scale so the extra zero is just emphasizing that 01931 is still the "long now".
- antonvs 8mo agoIt’s so arbitrary. We have at least a few hundred million years before Earth is entirely uninhabitable. Why not use 000001931, then? Not ambitious enough, I guess. Our written history already goes back over 6,000 years. We can actually understand what people back then wrote. We don’t need unbroken year numbering, or leading zeros, to understand that. The calendar has been reset and changed multiple times. It seems like a mis-focus on something that doesn’t really matter.
- avhception 8mo agoI don't see it as a serious attempt to create a better way to write down the year. To me, it's a whimsical attempt to give the reader a little pause to think about long time periods, which is what this project is all about. That makes me smile and remember that I'm just a small spec of dust, not to be taken too seriously in the grand scheme of things. I like it.
- timc3 8mo agoAs a European it took me a few seconds to parse. Nonsense formatting.
- kazinator 8mo ago[flagged]
- ofalkaed 8mo agoIt is a convention of The Long Now Foundation to get people to think of time in terms of 10k years instead of a lifetime at best. It goes hand in hand with their 10k year clock. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now
- kazinator 8mo ago> 10k year clock a.k.a. cuckoo clock
- zamadatix 8mo agoI think they are speaking to, not ignorant of, this.
- antonvs 8mo agoYes. It’s an artistic choice, about as meaningful as the Hoover artist’s claim that, “There is an angle for doubt, for sorrow, for hate, for joy, for contemplation, and for devotion.” Both have a meaningful denotation in the mind of the creator, but don’t necessarily resonate with others.
- bregma 8mo agoI just look at it and think someone can't even count to 010 in octal.
- GavinMcG 8mo agoWhy do you imagine that =1931 wouldn’t be equally confusing in some future decamillenium? Arabic numerals have only been around for (charitably) 0.12 decamillenia. Sorry, =.12 decamillenia.
- eddieh 8mo agoerror: invalid digit '9' in octal constant
- krisoft 8mo agoBut is the star map there? This article seems to imply that it got demolished in 2022: https://www.oskarjwhansen.org/news/save-the-star-map https://www.oskarjwhansen.org/news/save-the-star-map If so that is somewhat ironic. A message intended to communicate a date to thousands of years into the future got demolished a mere 86 years after its creation due to a drainage issue and a contract dispute.
- joezydeco 8mo agoIt's in pieces, evidenced here: https://www.oskarjwhansen.org/news/save-the-star-map-december-2023-update https://www.oskarjwhansen.org/news/save-the-star-map-decembe...
- Tylast 8mo agoAt a loss for words. :|
- wegwerf0815 8mo ago[dead]
- rburhum 8mo agoThat is a crime of humanity. Terrible!
- echelon 8mo agoThis is horrible! I always wanted to visit this. :(
- ofalkaed 8mo agoIt is currently under reconstruction, it sounds like much of it was beyond salvage and has to be remade but it is difficult to find much info on this, bits and pieces strewn about the web. The project was resumed in 2023 and the BOR stated they were still committed to reconstructing the star map. In 2024 they completed the new underlayment and I have yet to find anything from 2025 other than that Monument plaza is still closed to the public.
- breckinloggins 8mo agoI somehow doubt there is any future version of me that regrets joining The Long Now Foundation, and work like this is the main reason why. If you're in SF you should pay them a visit and buy a coffee at The Interval; I think you'll find it worth the trip.
- krisoft 8mo agoI have once created a pendant to my friends’ wedding following a similar idea. A silver disk engraved one one side with the position of the planets and major moons at the moment of the ceremony. Fun thing is that the Galilean moons orbit fast enough that you can even read the intended minute. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIpFTPOIP60/ https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIpFTPOIP60/
- BrandonY 8mo agoThat's so cool! Is there a calculator somewhere that can convert to/from dates and solar system position charts?
- mkesper 8mo agoPositions at a given time could be simulated in e.g. Celestia (and then projected). The other direction, I don't know.
- krisoft 8mo agoTo calculate the orbital positions i used the skyfield python library. https://rhodesmill.org/skyfield/ https://rhodesmill.org/skyfield/ They have a very handy example right on the landing page how one can calculate the positions and angles of a planet from a date. The inverse was a bit trickier. But I also implemented a script which could “solve” a given picture backwards and give us a date. I believe i used binary search to narrow the date down first for the planet with the slowest period, and then refined the date around that timestamp using the position of the planet one faster. That way the estimate got more and more accurate and i didn’t need to brute force search a large time interval. (I applied the assumption that the date to be found is within half a saturn year from our current date, but if that assumption were incorrect it would have resulted in a solver failure during the refinement and thus detected.)
- gus_massa 8mo agoIf you have a blog post with a few more technical details, it may be a nice submission for HN. (Do you have a few photos of the intermediate steps to share?) Some ideas/questions: How is it painted? Is it laser cut or by hand? Did you designed it? How did you do the calculations? Does Saturn have rings? Where is the cutoff? (No Neptune/Uranus/Fobos/Deimos/...) Have you tried to give a different size to each planet? PS: I showed the video to my older daughter that is interested in astronomy and she likes it.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- flomo 8mo agoThanks for this, at one point I tried to google this monument and didn't find much.
- maximgeorge 8mo ago[dead]
- peter303 8mo agoThe precession circle is 144 arc degrees sin 23.5. In an 80 year lifespan precession would move the rotation pole about .44 arc degrees or the diameter of the full moon. Any long lived astronomical observatory in ancient times would have noticed this.
- accrual 8mo ago> Marking in the terrazzo floor of Monument Plaza showing the location of Vega, which will be our North Star in roughly 12,000 years. (Photo by Alexander Rose) I wonder if some content creator 12K years from now will transport to Earth and stream the North Star from this position for likes/views. If that's even a thing then...
- antonvs 8mo ago> transport to Earth They’ll almost certainly still be on Earth. Fundamental physics is unlikely to change in the next 12,000 years.
- ummonk 8mo agoMany Hindus celebrated Malay Sankranti a week ago. It was originally meant to coincide with winter solstice but because the Hindu dates are based on the position of the Sun against the background stars (as viewed from the Earth), precession over the last ~1700 years has driven it out of sync with the tropical calendar.
- ljsprague 8mo ago>It is likely that at least major portions of the Hoover Dam will still be in place hundreds of thousands of years from now. Kinda sus of this.
- u1hcw9nx 8mo agoIt can be hard to recognize the heaps of dirt on the riverbanks. The internet claims the Hoover Dam could last 10,000 years, but I don't believe that for a second. Dams are not permanent structures without maintenance. If they are holding back water or if water is flowing through them, they will eventually erode and their foundations will collapse. Because the main structure lacks rebar , it will last longer than most modern structures, but it won't last nearly as long as 2,000-year-old Roman structures made with volcanic ash and lime because it uses Portland cement. There is bigger and more immediate problem. Hoover Dam ends with siltation long before concrete erodes. The Colorado River carries massive amounts of sediment. Eventually, the lake behind the dam will fill with mud, turning the dam into a giant waterfall. Once water starts flowing over the top of a arch-gravity dam rather than through controlled pipes, scouring at the base will undermine the foundation.
- carlcortright 8mo agoAnd to think we're all here building b2b SaaS
- fc417fc802 8mo agoThose ad impressions won't optimize themselves!
- NetMageSCW 8mo agoMy wife has bought a few of these for significant dates as gifts: https://thestarposter.com/ https://thestarposter.com/
- mockbuild 8mo ago3.82 plein d’impressement: a series of cordialities
- lisp2240 8mo agoDestruction of art is the only crime I think should receive the death penalty. You’re making the world darker for everyone.
- dang 8mo agoDiscussed at the time (of the article): A 26,000-Year Astronomical Monument Hidden in Plain Sight - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19124698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19124698 - Feb 2019 (57 comments)
- zehagray 8mo agoThe fact is; this kind of knowledge are mostly pursued by people called "lunatics" and this is taking science held back in fringe cases. But sometimes lunatics are right too
- anentropic 8mo agoCould plate tectonics conceivably throw off the alignment of this monument within the ~10ky timescales involved?
- staplung 8mo agoNot really. The axis of the earth's rotation is not affected by plate tectonics and the star map is recording where the earth's northern axis is pointing as precession slowly moves it around a circle. The star map could certainly move around or get broken up by plate tectonics over that timescale but it's not really aligned with anything in a meaningful way so that doesn't matter. The stars themselves will move - relative to us - and eventually some of them will disappear but nothing much is expected on that front for much longer than 10ky timeframes.
- laszlojamf 8mo agoSlightly off topic, but it's interesting to see the same phrase "the long now" pop up in different contexts independently and mean very different things: https://www.epsilontheory.com/the-long-now/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/the-long-now/ Both are pretty obscure references for now, but I can easily imagine a world where they both become widely known in separate groups. Like the word "legacy" has hilariously different connotations for software engineers as compared to _everyone else_
- interleave 8mo agoRelated: Huge fan of Long Now here. Asking "How would you build a 10k year clock?" is one of my favorite ways to get to know people, say, at parties. With a few seconds to mull it over, so far EVERYONE has had at least one strong, novel and leftfield idea that I had not heard or thought of before. My favorites included: A mirror on the moon, bio-engineered crops and the Pyramids of Gizeh.
- hopelite 8mo agoThe civilization that created that must have been a wonderful place and probably was taught how to create such things by aliens. Is sarcasm, but it may as well not be since that America is long dead and gone and has been replaced by an America that really needs to be renamed at this point.
- tim333 8mo agoI wonder if you can pin down other cycles in the sky to pinpoint how many years after the big bang? I guess the appearance of galaxies must change.
- aaronstreet 8mo agoI’m the author of the original posts on https://oskarjwhansen.org https://oskarjwhansen.org and can confirm that the Star Map restoration project finished near the end of 2025. I’d been planning to get an announcement post up this week but saw the HN attention and wanted to put fears to rest.
- aaronstreet 8mo agoAlso, since y’all seem interested, feel free to AMA.
- bergerjac 8mo ago“It is likely that at least major portions of the Hoover Dam will still be in place hundreds of thousands of years from now.” From the article itself, the Pyramids are only 12,000 years old. Every other Ancient Wonder has been destroyed. Essentially there’s a Major Cataclysm about every 10,000 years, and a ‘Minor’ one about every 5000 years (Burkle Crater impact being the most recent). How do you assume any parts of the Hoover Dam would be intact or even visible “hundreds of thousands of years from now”?
- aaronstreet 8mo agoThat quote actually comes from Zander Rose’s Long Now Foundation article, not from me or Oskar Hansen.
- BLACKCRAB 8mo ago[dead]
- gku 8mo agoThe 26,000-year cycle is also known as the Platonic Year.
- IG_Semmelweiss 8mo agois that the time it would require to complete 1 revolution, shown specifically in figure 1 of the article ? Also - wouldn't the north star(s) (polaris, deneb etc) also move, even if slightly, in that period of time as well ?
- staplung 8mo agoThe star map comes up at the end of Joan Didion's essay "At the Dam": """ I walked across the marble star map that traces a sidereal revolution of the equinox and fixes forever, the Reclamation man had told me, for all time and for all people who can read the stars, the date the dam was dedicated. The star map was, he had said, for when we were all gone and the dam was left. I had not though much of it when he said it, but I thought of it then, with the wind whining and the sun dropping behind a mesa with the finality of a sunset in space. Of course that was the image I had seen always, seen it without quite realizing what I saw, a dynamo finally free of man, splendid at last in its absolute isolation, transmitting power and releasing water to a world where no one is. """
- staplung 8mo agoI think the most likely end fate of the Hoover dam is that humans dismantle it. Eventually, Lake Mead will silt up enough to make the hydro plant useless (it will take centuries to silt up completely but silt will choke the plant long before that). De-silting the reservoir is not a realistic option. Hopefully, we'll have alternate means of power generation that nullify the dam's economic viability long before then but water supply and flood mitigation are other functions that need consideration. Silt will eventually destroy those functions as well however.
- rosefutures 8mo agoThanks for your interest in this piece, I am happy to hear that the restoration of this work has been completed! aaronstreet over at https://www.oskarjwhansen.org https://www.oskarjwhansen.org has been doing great work in documenting Hansen's work and Im sure will have an update on that soon. I am happy to answer any questions about this and if you want to see any of my other writing please take a look at: https://medium.com/@zander_longnow https://medium.com/@zander_longnow and https://www.rosefutures.com https://www.rosefutures.com
- MomsAVoxell 8mo agoI visited it the first time as a teenager in 1986 part-way through a driving tour from LA to Mexicali and Vegas and Tahoe and so on. I had a Sony Walkman and one of the 'trip tapes' I'd had packed for my family driving-tour vacation, was Eddy Jobson, Theme of Secrets. So his visceral strings and landscape arrangements were my personal soundtrack all the way to those crazy angel sculptures and beyond, to Death Valley and Vegas and all that jazz, until we got back to San Francisco, where I'd got his tape. The eternal nature of that spot really seemed feasible to me. Even if the water dried up completely, it'd still be somewhere, some time in the future, some people would meet .. and perhaps wonder just what it was all about, some tens of thousands of years ago.