There’s one factor to explain this coincidence that is not referenced here and I couldn’t find it mentioned on the SSC post either: polar motion.
As a recap, latitude is the angle between a given point (like the tip of the Pyramid) and the Equator. The Equator is the points at the surface that are equidistant from both poles. And the poles are the points where the rotation axis intersects the surface. They’re the points the Earth rotates around, sort of.
Well, it turns out that the axis of rotation is not fixed with respect to the surface. This is independent of plate tectonics, the fact that some parts of the surface move with regards to each other. The Earth’s surface could be perfectly immovable and we could still have polar motion. The scale of the motion is that, per Wikipedia, it has moved 20m since 1900, and recently the direction has changed from 80 degrees west towards the Prime Meridian.
To illustrate this, imagine that some cosmic force made the exact point where I’m currently sitting writing this comment be a pole. That is, the Earth revolves around this very point in my bedroom. (I guess it’s a good thing I’m snuggling under a blanket.) Then the Equator would be this line between the brighter and darker parts of the map (I used the nearest airport, São Paulo-Congonhas, as the pole); it runs somewhere near San Diego, just barely includes all of Great Britain and Antarctica, and crosses Egypt suspiciously close to the Pyramids. They’re actually 209 km from it on the opposite hemisphere as me, so their latitude would be just shy of negative two degrees.
Now, of course at the time the aliens Khufu’s slaves built the Pyramids the North Pole was somewhere fairly close to its present location, and not in tropical South America. But it’d be very unlikely if it was at precisely its current location! (Or wherever it was at the time when the version of WGS84 Google Maps uses was made.) And since the pole can move 20m in 1.2 centuries, it could have moved way more than the size of the base of the pyramid, which measures just over 200m, since the 26th century BCE.
Hi, I’m Bruno from Brazil. I have been involved with stuff in the Lesswrongosphere since 2016. While I was in the US, I participated in the New Hampshire and Boston LW meetup groups, with occasional presence in SSC and EA meetups. I volunteered at EAG Boston 2017 and attended EAG London later that year. I did the CFAR workshop of February 2017 and hung out at the subsequent alumni reunion. After having to move back to Brazil I joined the São Paulo LW and EA groups and tried, unsuccessfully, to host a book club to read RAZ over the course of 2018. (We made it as far as mid-February, I think.)
I became convinced of the need to sort out the AI alignment problem after first reading RAZ. I knew I needed to level up on lots of basic subjects before I could venture into doing AI safety research. Because doing so could also have instrumental value to my goal of leaving Brazil for good, I studied at a Web development bootcamp and have been teaching there for a year now; I feel this has given me the confidence to acquire new tech skills.
I intend to start posting here in order to clarify my ideas, solve my confusion and eventually join the ranks of the AI safety researchers. My more immediate goal is to be able to live somewhere other than Brazil while doing some sort of relevant work (even if it is just self-study or something not directly related to AI safety that still allows me to study on the side, like my current gig here does).