I was there once. Some old white dude in flip flops told me about how 1) aliens made this with cold lasers (because no burn marks on the rock/they aren’t melted) and/or gave humans the technology to make it, 2) he’s psychic and has prophetic dreams - particularly he predicted a bunch of natural disasters, he said.
Either way, yep those rocks fit together really tightly; it’s neat.
Lol, I was about to comment that it was aliens but your holiday dude beat me to it. Maybe you met Graham Hanremoved?
I’ve never seen a rock stacked on another rock that DID allow a piece of paper to be slipped between them.
Have you seen a rock that weighed over 100 tons sit on another rock and not have space for a piece of paper along its full length?
As long as both rocks are relatively flat on the connected faces, in most cases no. A piece of paper is, what, 8 inches wide on its second shortest axis? For two “relatively” flat pieces of rock, your going to have multiple places where a small segment juts out. Those are the segments that will support all the weight of the rock, and a heavier rock will have more/thicker supporting segments. Both of those factors combined, especially on rocks as heavy as these, would lead me to expect not being able to stick a fairly large piece of paper between them. Something much thinner, like a sticky note, would be significanly easier to fit through those gaps. But a standard piece of notebook paper would not be able to fit through the gaps on my window hinges, and they are by no means sealed.
Dont bring logic into this discussion about alien space lasers.
What about beside them? To the adjacent set of stacked rocks.
Saw a documentary on the construction technique a while back. It’s not as hard as it seams, but it is a shit ton of work. I’m not sure who worked harder, the guy chiseling on a rock all day every day, or the people feeding that guy that just chisels on a rock all damn day.
It’s not as hard as it seams […]
I see what you did there.
A lot of things are possible when you have a population that is deeply socialized to believe completely in the cause, and/or has few viable economic options, and/or is literally compelled to do the work. We also have a lot of survivorship bias as the we only see the stuff that was done so well as to stand the test of time. In the early days of Egyptology for example, they would sometimes realize (or learn from the locals because the locals knew best) that the big heap of rubble over there in the desert was actually a pyramid where somebody half-assed it with mud bricks instead of the giant limestone slabs from Giza.
One theory is that the final step was that they mixed acid mine drainage with mud and applied that before setting the rock in place. This “dissolved” the minute bumps resulting in a perfect fit.
Easy! Just lay the first one. Measure the contour. Get your chisel out and start chiseling. Dry fit, chisel some more. Repeat a thousand times. Move on to the next rock. Once done for the first rock just repeat for the next rock layer. Except this time you gotta fit two sides, then lift the rock and dry fit again until it fits. Try non undercuts.
Seriously, I think a good way to do it is to have many men stand on the rock over sharp sands and just wiggle the rock until it grinds the rocks below and itself onto no motion at all.
I wonder if the odd earthquake, over time, grinds the mismatched surfaces a bit too.
I assume its only the hardest of granites. LOL.
