Burning Philosophical Questions

Every now and then my mind tries to tackle the bigger questions in life. Questions that don’t have exact answers. Some are humorous, some are disturbing. How I get off on these tangents I’ll never know. But did you ever wonder ….

• The Great Pyramid took about 20 years to build. A study calculated how many men would be needed daily to deliver “340 stones each day” and determined there were likely 1,200 people in the quarry and 2,000 transporting the stones, while others must have cut stones and set them into place. There were also cooks, cleaners, and caretakers for the equipment. Assuming one bowel movement per day, where did all of these people go to the bathroom every day?
• On a more sobering note, the Battle of Cannae (where Hannibal crushed the Romans) in 216 BC, the battle cost the lives of almost all of the Romans involved – nearly 90,000 — in one day. Even if the numbers are skewered a bit, what did that battlefield look like in the end? What happened to the bodies?
• Did toddler Jesus throw tantrums and curl up in a ball or scream for 10 minutes when he didn’t get his way? Did he write on Mary’s walls with mud or play fetch with a dog or yell at Joseph “Weave me awone!” ?
• The world now has an idea of the construction of Stonehenge:  the first phase around 3000 BC was little more than a circular bank and ditch with the main structure built of wood;  the second phase began about 2150 BC and continued for 150 years (when the first of the bluestones were moved into place);  then the early Bronze Age, between 2100 to 1500 BC, which brought the outer circle and trilithons (the ruins we see today). Fine. But how did they lay those humongous lintels (cross stones) across the tops of those pillars?
• The first person in history whose name we know is Kushim, an accountant from Mesopotamia from around 3200 BC, 33 centuries before Christ, who chiseled his name on a tablet. Who gave him his name? Did they have a name?

And a few still unanswered questions from my Cosmic Questions quest back in February of 2016:

• It is a fact that the closer you get to the speed of light, the more time slows down. So isn’t a moot point to drive faster, when you actually arrive at your destination later?

and ….

• If infinity is infinite, and we can see no end to it, how do we know it’s even there?

Whew! I feel so much better that I got all these questions out of my head ….