# I Can't Possibly Know What That Meant

I'm interested in the pyramids, in a 'crackpot theory' sort of way. Talking to other people who are interested in the pyramids in a crackpot theory sort of way is annoying, because they're interested in something that's completely pointless to be interested in.

## "Did aliens do it?"

I don't care. They didn't, and claiming that they did feels a lot like denying the moon landing (Why are you so invested in proving that my people didn't do something cool?), but that's beside the point. No matter what mechanism was used to build them, you couldn't possibly know what it *meant* to the people who built their lives around the pyramids. The entire experience of being human at the time was so different from now, that even if it was aliens, you couldn't possibly know what humans thought of that, and that's the question that should burn for you. Of course, if it wasn't aliens, that's a question that becomes orders of magnitude more interesting, because it implies that whatever they thought about it, they cared a great deal more about it than anything that you care about.

## "Actually, they just [did an unfathomably labor-intensive process] to build them."

Many of the "non-crackpot" theories that answer the *how* are believable and satisfying. They could have built them using simple physics, it's true. That makes those theories even more insane than crackpot theories about the construction, because you're claiming that at some point the entire global economy was organized around building big, inert stone buildings, and then simultaneously brushing it off as not very interesting.

Do you think it's crazy that our global economy is entirely organized around building datacenters? Think investors have gone crazy? Lost their marbles? Then you should think it's even crazier to organize the entire global economy around making functionally-purposeless gold-tipped stone monoliths at a time when starvation was still a real problem. At least the datacenter contains an email machine. You couldn't possibly know why they did that.

Suppose we do a nuclear war. What do you think of a historian 2,000 years from now who concludes that all these datacenters must have been inert monoliths used for religious rituals? "Well, the consequences of this promising technology didn't go as well as some people expected, but to say that this is an inert building for religious rituals is far off. That guy couldn't possibly understand what it meant to us to build this."
