@ cascade9 - Thanks for your well-considered input. The single jar which may or may not have been a single electro-chemical cell (and not as it is called, a "battery") can be found here -- The Bagdhad "Battery" ---

Also I don't see 12 stones per hour each day and night as a significant obstacle when we may be talking about anywhere from 20,000 to 30,000 workers. Since the project site is so huge 12 teams could easily work without bumping into each other, each placing one stone per hour.... or 24 teams placing one stone every two hours, or even 48 teams placing one every four hours and so on. We simply are not acquainted with workforces of this size with this much dedication. It was, after all, for the "Glory of God", historically a powerful motivator for work and sacrifice.

While you likely deserve a rest I recommend not falling asleep on the job since though it is decidedly true that Men are subject to human foibles of ego and agenda, Science never stops but grinds on slowly and inexorably. There is a fairly well-publicized case in the last decade of some fair-haired boy (whose name escapes me atm) who caved to the pressure and manufactured supporting (but false) evidence. It took less than 5 years to discover the falsehood and utterly ruin this man's career forever and remove his infractions from causing any further harm. It has also served as an object lesson in how fast communication has changed things since the Piltdown Hoax took decades to rectify.

So yes, some dogma does exist, but not for long at all. Science is, by design, self-correcting and fools are not long suffered and commonly dealt with quite harshly.... less harshly that the Inquisition dealt with "heretics", but sufficient to heal the wound.

In short, don't throw the baby out with the wash water.

My understanding is that in curved space, a right triangle drawn on an apparently flat piece of paper would violate Pythagoras's theorem. Curved space is weird.

However, if that proves false, we can draw a right triangle on the surface of a sphere. The surface is two dimensional. (Yes, I know it has nothing to do with your original point.)

We know that many animals do have a much greater strength to weight ratio.
It has been seen that animals can jump evolutionary steps in a matter of years rather than thousands.

What if ??.... at one time humans had strength similar to the orangutan's might to weight ratio? How long would it have taken to build the ancient monuments?

We find these buildings all over the globe too.

Actually how we perceive a sphere depends completely on what we mean and each case is different, mathematically. A sphere, not a ball, can be one or two dimensional, and as a ball, three dimensional. Of course if we draw a right triangle, or what we view as a right triangle, on such a surface, mathematically we must compensate for the curvature which is obviously different from flat space 2 dimensional. You are correct that has nothing to do with my point other than even in such odd or hypothetical conditions Math still works as long as all factors are considered, and it works correctly every time.

As long as we agree everything we can know is conditional at the very least in that it exists in this Universe and not some other Universe, it is till meaningful and important to recognize that there are Absolutes, just conditional absolutes. What it takes to describe a thing accurately is most often more than simple words. That doesn't mean it takes a Math genius to grasp things, just recognition of levels of understanding. In our day to day lives it matters little if the Earth revolves around the Sun or vice versa. Beyond that simple concern it matters a great deal.

there were maybe giants.

But they didn't: we can get a very good idea of musculature from looking at bones. And I've already explained why early civilisations used large stones (sigh).

Hoax or reality, we'll never know.

Just where do you get an idea like that? Anyone who perpetrates a hoax becomes a target by those that would disprove the data, whether just for personal gain (or even hatred or jealousy of the individual) or just for the love of Truth. We are talking about Science here, not Myth, where all data is subject to reproduction and scrutiny with falsification being a formal and required tenet of any hypothesis or theory. There have been a few, but very few, active attempts at hoax, most often because the promoter was exactly that, a promoter convinced of his conclusion before he even began to explore, such as Piltdown Man.

Because that hoax took place at the beginning of the 20th Century, when communication and transportation was vastly slower it took 42 years to formally discredit in 1953. These days anything even missing a dotted "i" is exposed in a year or two, at worst... often in mere months. Naturally, far fewer people are even tempted to try to perpetrate a hoax anymore. Thankfully real researchers are on the opposite end of the spectrum and even willing to take great risks, including that of Death, for honest Truth, like Madame Marie Curie.

Incidentally the idea of "giants" of which you speak was ancient man's explanation for huge (usually dinosaur) fossilized bones since they had no paleontologists nor even a clue about real forensic study. We've learned a few things in the following millennia.

Watching the PBS channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJTWai6xKM4

"Secrets of the Dead The Lost Gardens of Babylon ", nice documentary.

cover up ...
http://www.snopes.com/media/notnews/giantcoverup.asp

Thanks for that link, rokytnji, cool show and I think it can give important perspective to this thread. About 32 minutes in this lovely lady archaeologist/code-breaker views the remains of an aquaduct. I can provide a link for some screenshots of it if anyone needs but the important issue is one of scale and creativity, of what really is amazing technology and not wild imaginations of atomic wars, electrically lighted cities and such. Each block of the roughly 2,000,000 that made up this particular section of aquaduct is nearly a meter on each side. It would take quite a number of men to lift just one by hand and I doubt many on LQ could even imagine carving a single one, let alone 2 million of them.

Then, consider that this aquaduct supported by 5 arches built from these stones carried a virtual river some 24 meters wide at a height of 10 meters above ground level in order to maintain the grade of something on the order of 1 meter per mile.... and they did this 500 years, perhaps as many as 12-15 generations before Rome rose. This is an astounding feat even to conceive let alone execute.

While it is far easier to imagine recreating this project with today's technology than for example the Pyramids, it is nevertheless by no means a trivial project even today. To be one of the arguably first to ever have been imagined and made real, such a project should fill each and every reader with some pride in our ancestors and the power of the human mind. This is utterly tangible, no wild imagination or lost technologies to consider just real get-ur-hands-dirty evidence in abundance, verifiable awesomeness.

I think it is because we are born into a world already in place that we take so much for granted and rarely consider what it takes to deliver water and remove waste and all the other things that civilization provides that we are more likely to go overboard when we imagine what it may have been like in ancient times. The difference in just 2 generations is amazing. I recall walking through the woods with my GrandFather and being amazed that he knew every tree by the shape of it's leaves or the character of it's bark. It took me quite some time to recognize that he grew up in a time when such knowledge was valuable and he was just as amazed that I didn't know these things as I was that he did. That was just the gulf between 2 generations. Trying to imagine the difference of what was valuable to know and how to work with it 500 generations ago just boggles my mind. I think it should affect everyone that way because we are and have always been creatures of our time.

This prooves my point about some people not capable or not wanting to search for real truth. You sound like propoganda victims who are blind to everything that could be possibility. Also myths are misunderstood reality. And aliens, God etc. is not insult to humanity! It is actually opposite! Long story short: You all can believe in your scientology god as much you want but those who seek truth understand that pyramids were built for a reason and the method used was secret. If it was not secret then we would see that beeing done again and again just to show world that it is not a secret. But why do you ignore visible proof? You are in USA! You can actually drive and visit https://www.youtube.com/results?sear...y=coral+castle and see for yourself that it is unique! Arguing over this is ridicilous. Some people do not care enough.

I think you misunderstand me or perhaps Science (vastly different from scientology btw) since you rather glibly seem to equate "real truth" and mere "possibility" even within one sentence above. I do disagree about the insult since requiring some manner of "divine intervention" tries to demote humans to unimaginitive, non-creative, unthinking plebs of protoplasm. Of course the method for building the pyramids was secret as this has always been the nature of Guilds and Corporations - Knowledge is Power and competition serves the public (users) not the business of creation (admins).

FWIW it (pyramid building with large, precisely cut and moved masonry) was done again and again not only several in Egypt but numerous other similar structures in many places around the world, since secrecy doesn't rule out other cultures evolving methodology with the one lasting material of ancient times - stone masonry. Some variation of Sticks and Stones is still with us to some degree today but Steel and Plastics have been added to the mix. Incidentally if God(s) or Aliens built Egypt's pyramids, why didn't they get it right all along? Google "Stepped" and "Bent" pyramids, the transitional early efforts.

I'm glad you linked The Coral Castle as it is a perfect example of how Truth can be stranger than Fiction, certainly a reality check on the knowledge and creativity of Man. Somehow I doubt you will actually sit through the entire video but here you can see how Coral Castle was actually done by one man. This is not mere propaganda as you like to put it as like all Science this can be duplicated and you can see it happen before your very eyes.

--- Coral Castle - The Real Secrets ---

My doubt that you will watch it comes from experiencing people who find Science an affront to Art and/or Mysticism. It is an affront to Mysticism but not to Art as Edgar imagined here, but then in his case his Art depends on a dark Romantic Era notion that fantasy is a requirement for Wonder and Mystery. This seems to have at least something in common with how you like to view the world, whereas i find reality far more fascinating and full of wonder than fantasy.

Edgar thought Science spoiled his fun. I don't see the need for Mumbo Jumbo over reality for imaginative fun. Speculation is fine, in fact wondrous, as long as it doesn't purport to be Truth. It is what it is.

We can also severely over-estimate the amount of labor required to do a project, if we severely under-estimate the technology that was used. For instance, we have found "unknown" objects which, if four of them are fastened around a block of some certain size, form a wheel around the outside. Now, that stone can be moved with vastly less effort than with the "wooden rollers beneath it" that we previously supposed. But, we've never seen a tomb-painting that illustrated the technique, so some archaeologists refuse to consider it.

Likewise, we haven't seen tomb-paintings (that I know of) which illustrate cranes or block-and-tackle. But once again these devices probably were known and could have been used. (A series of block-and-tackle devices, attached with hooks to a haulage-rope with loop knots tied into it, could be used with the aforesaid wheel-devices to move a huge stone block with only the effort of a few men.)

It bears repeating that ancient peoples, even though not possessed of the prime-mover technologies that we enjoy today (so far as we know ...), nevertheless were intelligent and ingenious human beings. They would have found creative ways to solve problems without presupposing "thousands of human slaves to use as so many million-monkeys ..." They were undoubtedly far more resourceful and ingenious than we like to think they were.