“The Grand Canyon is hundreds of years old.” “I’m pretty sure it’s millions of years old.” …later… “I looked it up, it is hundreds of millions of years old. So we’re both right.” - King of the Hill
Why do conspiracy idiots always throw in Egypt into everything? Is it the only country they ever heard of?
Its just the coolest ancient civilization. They had spaceships (pyramids) and furries (sphinx) also Jewish slaves are pretty cool.
When you’re too dumb to realize any of the many differences between what these photos show.
Where can I apply for a position to be a “they”. Sounds like a really fun career.
According to most of these people: visiting a synagogue would be the first step
Step 1: get ambiguous
I mean everyone knows the all spark is hidden there, no wonder it’s a mining site. I think op is on to something…
I like how the text weasels around having to mention the name of “The famous explorer and former director of the USGS”. The Egyptians are a nice touch too.
Wouldn’t want you to be able to easily google it and find out he (correctly) attributed the hieroglyphics to the native americans, now would we?
They don’t even exist. There are no glyphs in the Grand Canyon.
It’s right to say there are no Egyptian hieroglyphs, and nothing to be labeled as writing iirc. However, there’s ancient art all over the canyon. It’s all from peoples who have lived there.
I was genuinely surprised that an explainer article like this exists. :)
I always forget looking up whether there isn’t a couple decades of relevant backstory to the post before writing comments here.
Thankfully, when it comes to archaeology, there is no shortage of archaeologists getting pissed at this sort of bullshit that denigrates their field and their work.
On top of that, it’s gotten armchair experts to damage important sites to “prove” aliens were there or whatever.
If you’re interested, this is one of my most cherished books. I got it in college for a class and I’ve re-read it several times. The author of it actually frequents the group I get most of these posts from, so I got to tell him how much it’s meant to me over the years. I highly recommend it.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/91340.Frauds_Myths_and_Mysteries
Bought it.
I enjoyed Al Franken’s book, “Lies: And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.” Your post reminded me of it. Similarly formative in spotting bullshit.
Sounds interesting, thanks!
Thank God the conspiracy nuts don’t read and aren’t good at history or else they might have used some regional native tribes as the source for their special artifacts. The only things they know of as “old” are ancient Egypt and Atlantis.
To be fair, they also think Egyptian artifacts are Atlantian in origin. Obviously the primitive Egyptian empire couldn’t possible come up with the concept of things like “stacking rocks” or “smoothing stone with sand” on their own. They needed some mystical forgotten society with no traces to do it for them.
These conspiracies are always racist. They say the cultures in the area were incapable of learning for themselves. They needed the white Atlantian society to teach them everything. It was popularized by Nazis and it’s pretty clear what the beliefs of its proponents are.
Well, surely both of those ancient civilisations had teleportation technology
I mean, where are these civilizations today? Damning evidence if you ask me.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing.
Unbeknownst to many, the Grand Canyon is where Gene Roddenberry dug up the Dilithium crystals to run the Enterprise ships on, I mean: how else did he film those scenes? There was no CGI in the 70s!
60s. And based on the restorations of TOS that I hate so much, they did have CG in the 60s.
(Apart from anything else, those restorations didn’t take into account that the lighting and the makeup were designed for snowy 1960s TVs in both color and black and white. I don’t need to see Shatner’s lipstick and the seams around Spock’s ears.)
This is actually why I got the remaster on DVD instead of blu-ray.
Pardon my typo, 60s indeed!
I just like to bitch about the restorations because they piss me off.
Restoration should restore, not remake it, agreed.
To be fair, when you’re an idiot, the concept of time is hard to comprehend.
Miners WISH they had deposits the size of the grand canyon.
Imagine the tailings storage facility, lmao. I know, it’s the Great Salt Lake! That explains the high metal content from the windblown sands as it dries out
The tailings pile would have snow caps.
Or take up several valleys.
Or be kilometers in size and 30 m high
Or make me want to throw up.
You can reclaim TSFs, though. It is certainly not easy, but it is doable.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YpF-SE3AwEo
This rec is coming up on 15 years old, and is the top of the TSF. The sides of it date to the 90s or earlier, and look pretty good. Trees were about 20 ft or more tall on the sides the last time I was there. The top is shoulder height.
The primary issues related to the cost of placing a cover that is thick enough to entomb the tailings (assuming they have metal leaching potential) that plant roots won’t compromise. The other problem is geotechnical stability issues if you use trees to revegetate, as their roots can go deeper or you get blow down that creates a hole in the reclamation cover, creating an erosion channel over time.
That’s video made me want to throw up also. It’s the unnatural hole in the ground, what was taken out, and where it is now.
Digging is fun. If I had more money, I might hire a fleet of trucks and dig a big hole just cause. Did it as a kid in the sandbox, why not as an adult? And, if you fill it back up nice and smooth it out, it’s like it was never there. But if you take out all the carbon, and send it off to be burned, does it really matter an iota of fuck if they plant some trees after?
I mean I guess fixing the landscape is better than leaving a big hole in the ground. Should have just left it alone.
Oh I’m with you on the prevention side; especially with oil sands - it’s a marginal product at best with huge env. Damage.
For reference, they don’t backfill because it’s stupid expensive and the operation wouldn’t be profitable. You would also likely have major subsidence issues.
Don’t give them ideas.
Or actually, do. It creates more fodder for the community.
I heard an ancient order extracted the copper from the Grand Canyon in 1645, but there was nowhere to store that much. So they buried it in what we call “copper mines” all over the world. Using forgotten old world technology. Really these are just ancient caches to keep the copper market under control. The order would unearth new caches every few years. All this was discovered by our founding fathers and the locations were recorded in the declaration of independence by Benjamin Franklin. The secret was well kept for years and only shared only within the elite order of Free Masons, called the The Coppers. Just to distract you from the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table.
They keep trying to tell me that Lemmy isn’t reddit…
That’s clearly where unicorns live. And pixies. And leprechauns. Everyone knows that.
Erosion
I totally read that as Eurovision, and I could absolutely not figure out how that ties in to this.
Other than the vague “big bad gubbmint thinks you’re too stupid for their SECRETS” vibe, I almost find this old school X-Files type insanity sort of adorable. They don’t wanna hurt people, they just want a more interesting world
They do more damage than you think. They teach people to think that there are conspiracies by scientists to hide information from them. That leads to thinks like antivax beliefs and climate change denial. It’s a subtle insidiousness, but it needs to be beaten. People need to be able to understand that it just doesn’t happen.
Banal conspiracy theories are often “gateway drugs” to much more insidious ones…
