
Researchers Made 25-Ton Boulders They Can Move by Hand - mcenedella
https://gizmodo.com/researchers-made-25-ton-boulders-they-can-move-by-hand-1834106230
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drchewbacca
This guy seems to be way ahead of MIT on this one. He moved a barn (which
wasn't a specially 3D printed shape) 300 ft on his own.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K7q20VzwVs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K7q20VzwVs)

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scarejunba
This man is a legend. He should publish, damn. I wonder what knowledge only
exists in the minds of people who just thought to solve their own problems.

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gpm
Don't you see that youtube video, he _did_ publish.

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scarejunba
Right, I hear your point, but we have a interdisciplinary discovery problem.
No one studying the history of the Moai saw it.

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saalweachter
Once it goes viral ;-)

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dsfyu404ed
As someone who's spent plenty of time moving machines with pry bars and
rollers I content it's not the shape of the boulders but the flat and level
floor that really enables this feat.

In order to move something of a given weight against earth's gravity you need
to expend a certain amount of energy to do that work. There is no way of
getting around that because physics. While few people could theoretically move
a boulder up a hill it would be very, very challenging to do without
additional sources of energy.

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foxhop
Yup. Now look at the rock walls of New England which snake up hillsides and
mountains. A crazy amount of energy was needed.

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dmckeon
[https://www.thespectrum.com/story/life/family/2015/04/05/sto...](https://www.thespectrum.com/story/life/family/2015/04/05/stone-
walls-pervasive-northeast/25328109/)

> In 1871 the U.S. Department of Agriculture published a “Statistics of Fences
> In the United States.” At that time, it noted that in New England and New
> York State alone, there were 252,539 miles of stone walls, enough to circle
> the globe ten times, and to build all the pyramids of Egypt times one
> hundred. It has been calculated that such an effort would have required an
> army of 15,000 workers 243 years to accomplish.

When you are trying to harvest crops on a series of glacial moraines, stones
dropped by glaciers and brought to the surface by each winter's freeze/thaw
cycles are the most reliable annual crop. :-)

In spring, after thaw, but before the ground is dry enough to till and plant,
some levers, a ground level sledge or "stone boat", and draft animal(s) to
pull it will get the stones to the edge of the field. Making a more tidy "dry"
or unmortared stone wall from them is optional.

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jfoutz
CEMEX has been doing very clever things for a long time. I love the random
distribution of cement trucks they maintained in the 90's do deal with the
complexity of delivering cement.
[https://www.wired.com/1997/07/cemex-2/](https://www.wired.com/1997/07/cemex-2/)

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exabrial
Check out who funded the project ;)

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rounce
Perhaps, you could just tell us?

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wavefunction
Cemex funded/contributed to this MIT project which you would have learned from
reading the article we're supposedly commenting on

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zxcvbn4038
There is no denying that this is cool and there are definitely modern day
applications. However there is also no evidence that ancient people did this.
There are plenty of ancient structures constructed of massive stones without
beveled edges. Ten years ago there were a couple of guys who figured out how
to use giant kites to move large blocks of stone, said that was one way the
Egyptians could have built the pyramids. Great, but only problem with that is
there are no records of the Egyptians building giant kites, so again kinda
cool and probably a great source of fail videos, but probably not what ancient
people did.

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mattnewport
Yeah, this is neat but not a good explanation for how ancient stones were
moved, many of which do not have shapes particularly conducive to rolling,
including the moai of Easter Island. The article also talks about using
varying densities of concrete to control the center of gravity which wouldn't
really have been an option when carving from rock.

It's hard to see how this technique would apply to the very rectangular 800
tonne trilithons at Baalbek or the 1000 tonne statue at the Ramesseum, or even
the 70 tonne underground sarcophagi at Saqqara.

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palisade
The ancient Egyptians dug canals from the Nile all the way up to the base of
the pyramids they were in the process of building. Then they built rafts that
they ferried the stones from the quarries all the way to the build sites. Just
in case anyone was wondering. Happy Easter!

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tboughen
The shape of the boulders reminds me of these:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacsayhuamán](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacsayhuamán)

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cmroanirgo
I think their design was such that it was supposed to. However there is the
fundamental difference in that there are no curved edges in the Sacsahuayman
blocks, which are straight edged.

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matt_morgan
Precisely varied density in building materials feels like it would not have
been available to ancient builders.

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lazyjones
None of the boulders in the video are even close to 25 tons...

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Filligree
I can see this working on a perfectly flat surface, but the real world isn't
flat. There's still some explanation left to do.

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kaffeemitsahne
> _How were giant ancient structures like Stonehenge, or the towering Moai
> heads on Easter Island, assembled at a time when cranes and trucks were
> still hundreds of years away?_

Prehistoric people had ropes and they also had poles. I'm always baffled by
this reluctance to admit that they simply used cranes, levers, and similar
technology.

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empath75
Not all prehistoric groups had all basic technology. There was no use of the
wheel in the America’s for example.

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esotericn
Something doesn't add up to me.

The structures here basically exploit moments in order to move them. But
there's nothing giving them stability once they are 'static'. Surely the end
piece of the bridge could just fall over if you stood on the edge of it?

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popopje
They're using locking blocks at the ends to stabilise things

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Stratoscope
The original site has more photos and details:

[http://www.matterdesignstudio.com/#/walking-
assembly/](http://www.matterdesignstudio.com/#/walking-assembly/)

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ThinkBeat
Well I them rock the boulders and they balance.

As ar as I can see they never actually move the boulders.

For this to have any relevance the bolders would need to be dragged / pushed /
towed into place

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trevyn
There is a video of them moving; it’s a rock, rotate 180, rock, rotate 180,
etc. sequence.

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lstroud
How do they account for uneven ground and a softer surface? I would think that
weight would sink in the soil slightly and be too heavy to push out of the
depression.

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exabrial
Ok but how did they get the smaller "keystones" in? Can't tell from the video

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Someone
I think that isn’t a smaller stone, but a similarly sized one with a notch
that fits the hole that must be filled to make the structure rigid.

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c3534l
Finally, a way to move all these boulders I have up to my 5 storey walk-up.

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tinus_hn
Just in time for Easter!

