Speaker 1: Okay, let's dive right in. I want you to imagine
something for a moment. Picture an ancient city, a place
where the line between just static art and actual life
seemed almost non existent. You're talking about roads, exactly, ancient
roads not just famous for its beauty, but according to
some old accounts, it was apparently filled with these huge
statues bronze or stone that could supposedly just well get
up and walk around.
Speaker 2: It sounds completely fantastical, doesn't it pure myth?
Speaker 1: It does, But then you look the sources. We actually
have the poet Pindar way back in the fifth century BC.
Speaker 2: A respected source.
Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely, And he wrote that Rhodes was decorated with
statues that literally came to life, like living, moving creatures.
He wasn't like describing some kind of one off miracle.
It sounds more like he was talking about functional things,
objects that moved.
Speaker 2: On their own autonomously.
Speaker 1: Right. And if you take Pindar seriously, even for a second,
it forces you to ask some pretty deep questions technologistly speaking,
and philosophically too. Yeah, if you start with something lifeless
like marble or these huge sheets of bronze, and then
something or maybe someone gives it autonomy, gives it motion,
maybe even I don't know, decision making. Are we talking
magic here or is this sophisticated engineering?
Speaker 2: Could these actually be sort of historical nods to advanced
robotics way back then, two and a half thousand years
before we even had microprocessors.
Speaker 1: That's the big mystery we want to unpack today. And
the sources we're looking at they suggest something even wilder.
They hint that the know how to build these kinds
of things, these self moving automatons, It wasn't necessarily something
that Greeks figured out all on their own, step by step.
Speaker 2: Right. The more controversial angle we're exploring is this idea
that the technology was shared or maybe just given given
by who, by advanced beings what the ancients called the gods,
but interpreted here as potentially extraterrestrial visitors, beings who didn't
just have fancy ways to travel, but also like really
advancean's knowledge of metallurgy, physics, and complex automation.
Speaker 1: It sounds like pure sci fi. It's easy to just
dismiss it all as mythology.
Speaker 2: Of course, until you bump into actual physical evidence stuff
that just completely messes with our standard timeline of ancient.
Speaker 1: Tech artifacts that show people back then could do things well,
things our history books say they shouldn't have been able
to do.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, And the classic example, the one everyone points to,
is the antikather mechanism.
Speaker 1: Ah. Yes, that thing is mind blowing.
Speaker 2: It really is. When you look at this incredibly complex
analog computer found in a shipwreck, it just forces you
to rethink what the ancient Greeks were capable of. It's
not just intricate. We're talking dozens of tiny, precisely made
bronze gears interlocking perfectly. Some are less than a centimeter across.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't just doing simple math, was it not
at all?
Speaker 2: It had a differential gear system. I mean, that's sophisticated stuff.
It could model the complex orbits of the Sun, the Moon,
the planets they knew. It could even predict eclipses accurately and.
Speaker 1: Track things like the Olympic cycle right the four year
period exactly.
Speaker 2: And that level of technology calculating these complex astronomical cycles,
encoding that into hardware, it just seems about fifteen hundred
years too early. It feels like something from the Renaissance,
not ancient Greece.
Speaker 1: The kind of engineering needed to mill those gears so precisely,
including that differential gear which lets you add and subtract rotation.
It shows they could do incredibly complex mechanical.
Speaker 2: Work, It really does. And the leap from an advanced
calculator like that, even an autonomous one, to basic automation,
maybe even robotics, suddenly doesn't seem quite so enormous, does it?
Speaker 1: Not as big as you'd think.
Speaker 2: So if these advanced beings had the knowledge to share
the tech behind the anti Cathera device, the argument goes,
then it's logical they probably had the ability to create
much more complex things too, maybe even humanoid robots.
Speaker 1: Okay, so that's our mission today. Then we're taking these
ancient stories, walk statues, mechanical servants, and we're going to
really impact them. Look at the details.
Speaker 2: Compare them to what we're trying to do right now
with modern engineering, things like self replicating AI, humanoid robots
getting ready for Mars.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we want to explore this idea. Are we inventing
AI from scratch today or is it possible we're actually
just remembering, rediscovering knowledge that might have been around on
Earth a long long time ago.
Speaker 2: Could the blueprint for AI have been here all along,
maybe hidden in myths, maybe in technology that got left behind.
That's what we're diving into.
Speaker 1: All right, let's zoom in on Greece first, treat some
of these myths almost like technical case studies, and we
absolutely have to start with Hephaestus, the blacksmith god, the
ultimate divine engineer.
Speaker 2: Hefasis is the perfect example. He's the tech guy of
the gods in Greek stories, and he wasn't just some
abstract figure. He's linked to real places, real activities. The
sources mentioned the island of Lemnos, where you can still
find the ruins of a city named Hefestio after.
Speaker 1: Him, the god of metallergy, and the stories say he
fell from the sky right, got injured, which maybe forced
him to rely more on his inventions exactly.
Speaker 2: That's the narrative. And what's really fascinating is how his
workshop is described. It doesn't sound like some magical mythical forge.
It sounds well futuristic, like a modern fabrication lab.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The descriptions have him surrounded by these automated robots,
and they weren't just statues, they were actively moving working.
Speaker 2: The source of say He just like flips a switch
and these machines bustle around doing all the sort of
the hard busy work for him.
Speaker 1: Think about that automation freeing up the creator.
Speaker 2: It's exactly the same reason we build robots today, isn't
it to handle the mundane, the repetitive, the physically demanding
stuff so the engineers, the designers can focus on the
bigger picture. Hiphustus wasn't swinging the hammer for every little thing.
He had mechanical helpers.
Speaker 1: It sets a clear ancient precedent, whether you see Hifoxis
as a god or maybe an advanced being using tools,
using robots to say energy for more complex tasks.
Speaker 2: It's a logical, practical concept. But Hefestus's most famous creation, Tailos,
that takes automation out of the workshop and puts it
into a completely different league, a defensive one.
Speaker 1: Tailos you could argue he's the first fully autonomous security
robot in recorded history.
Speaker 2: Definitely, Talos is like the peak of ancient robotic security concepts.
A giant man made entirely of bronze, huge scale, incredible complexity,
and his job was clear protect crete, snop invaders, stop
unauthorized ships, from landing.
Speaker 1: And he wasn't just standing there like a scarecrow. He
was mobile, a sentinel patrolling the whole coastline.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fully autonomous, and his abilities as described are just
chillingly advanced for the time.
Speaker 1: He could supposedly spot ships approaching from far away, like
some kind of early warning system, right, yeah, maybe advanced optics,
maybe something else entirely.
Speaker 2: Some form of detection. Yeah, and once he identified a threat,
he'd hurl these enormous boulders down from the cliffs.
Speaker 1: But the craziest part is the heat thing.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, the thermal weapon. The sources say he could
basically superheat himself, release this heat and just incinerate ship's
cruise anything that got too close.
Speaker 1: How would people in the bronze age even describe that?
A giant metal man throwing rocks and getting incredibly hot
sounds like the best description they could managed for some
kind of advanced.
Speaker 2: Defensive tech exactly, And the sources get even more specific.
They talk about Tailo's having this single vein running from
his neck to his ankle, filled with icor the blood
of the gods, and it was sealed with a bronze
nail or plug.
Speaker 1: Okay, so what's the interpretation there.
Speaker 2: Well, the ancient astronaut theory suggests that this vein and
plug could be a mythological description of a crucial internal system,
maybe a power cond it, a fuel line for that
heat weapon, or even a cooling system. If this thing
generated immense heat, it would need something sophisticated to stop
it from melting down, a regulation systems precisely. So, was
tellus just a myth or was it a description of
a sophisticated autonomous piece of military hardware.
Speaker 1: The functions described they really lean towards the machine idea.
Speaker 2: And it's interesting how the myth says he was defeated
right by removing the plug, letting the equord drain out.
Speaker 1: Yes, that doesn't sound like killing a person. It sounds
like disabling a machine, like draining the coolant or the
hydraulic fluid, or cutting the power. It makes the whole
system shut down. The detail there really strengthens the idea
that it was an engineered object. It really does. And
this idea creating artificial life or movement. It wasn't just
a Greek thing, was it not?
Speaker 2: At all? That's what makes this so compelling. You find
similar concepts all over the ancient world. It suggests maybe
a common origin for the idea, or like some sources
claim shared knowledge from.
Speaker 1: Somewhere else right outside Greece. The core idea giving life
to inert matter is there, but the myth is described
are different, which is interesting for comparison.
Speaker 2: Take the Golum from Jewish tradition described.
Speaker 1: In the Tumud made of clay, right, a.
Speaker 2: Clay figure brought to life by putting a fixed spell
or maybe a coded instruction like the word emet truth
into its mouth. The focus there is on symbolic input
like a command.
Speaker 1: Okay, and India.
Speaker 2: In India, you've got the Lokapanati, an ancient Sanskrit text
fifth century BC, again talking about spirit movement machines.
Speaker 1: Spirit movement machines, again using mystical language to describe what
might just be mechanics they couldn't explain.
Speaker 2: Possibly using the vocabulary they had for an effect mechanical
motion automation whose cause was maybe beyond their understanding at
the time.
Speaker 1: But the Chinese account from the Lias that one seems
incredibly detailed, almost technical.
Speaker 2: Oh. The Leezy story is phenomenal. Written by the philosopher
Layuku supposedly in the fourth century BC, though some dating
is debated. If the core story is that old, it
potentially rewrites the history of complex robotics entirely.
Speaker 1: Tell us about it.
Speaker 2: It describes as brilliant engineer Yan Shi, and he presents
this absolutely unbelievable gift to Ca Mu of the Zoo dynasty,
and we're talking maybe three thousand years ago, if the
internal dating is right. The gift was an automaton, a
life sized mechanical person designed to look like a courtier.
It performed astoundingly well, according to the text it's saying, beautifully,
moved with perfect human grace, did complex dances. Kingmu, the
whole court, they were just mesmerized. It looked and acted
completely human until the machine did something maybe a little
too human, or perhaps something programmed in as a feature.
It winked at the ladies of the court, started flirting shamelessly. Yes,
and this display of inappropriate robot behavior really angered Kingmu.
He thought maybe it was a real person in disguise
trying to trick him.
Speaker 1: That detail, the flirting, Why even build that in unless
you're trying to create something not just functional but convincingly social.
An early AI test.
Speaker 2: Maybe it makes you wonder. So the King, furious and suspicious,
ordered on She to take the automaton apart right there
to prove it wasn't real.
Speaker 1: He did.
Speaker 2: He did, and this is where it gets really interesting,
almost like an engineer's report. As Yon she removed the parts,
the text explicitly links the components to specific functions like
what okay. So when he took out what was described
as the heart, the automaton couldn't speak anymore. When he
removed the kidneys, it couldn't see, and when he took
out the liver, it stopped being able to walk.
Speaker 1: Wow, that's incredibly specific. Heart for speech, kidneys for site,
liver for movement.
Speaker 2: So we have to look at this through that technological lens.
The sources suggest was Yon she literally talking about biological
organs or was he using the only words he had
human anatomy to describe complex internal system like metaphors exactly.
The argument is maybe these weren't organs, but different batteries
or different power sources or control modules powering different aspects
of the robots.
Speaker 1: So the heart wasn't biological, it was maybe the power
supply or processor for the.
Speaker 2: Voice system could be the kidneys for site, maybe the
power or controller for optical sensors, the liver for walking,
probably the main motor control unit, or perhaps the central
hydraulic pump if it used hydraulics.
Speaker 1: It makes you think about how they would have understood
complex machines back then. We know today that if the
power supplied to, say, your vision system fails, the robot
goes blind. Maybe the kidney was just that the power
source for vision.
Speaker 2: The story suggests they were already grappling with concepts like
complex programming, power distribution, mechanical movement, sensors, integrating multiple systems,
the exact same challenges engineers face today building robots.
Speaker 1: And the big question hangs, there was this incredible device
something they developed themselves, or was it inspired by or
maybe even built by those alleged advanced visitors the gods.
Speaker 2: The sheer level of functionality described movement, speech, site, even
social interaction like flirting, suggests system integration that is just
staggering for the fourth century BC.
Speaker 1: And that level of integration getting all these complex systems
to work together smoothly, that's precisely where modern robotics is
pushing boundaries. Today. We've gone from these ancient stories of
giants and flirtatious machines to a very real, very expensive,
modern effort to build advanced humanoid.
Speaker 2: Robots, and often for similar reasons. Funnily enough, think about
Tailo's garden crete. Now, think about why we build robots today.
Often it's for exploration and work in places too dangerous
are difficult for humans, like space exactly, deep space travel,
colonizing other planets. Sending humans first is incredibly risky, slow
and expensive. It just makes more sense to send autonomous
robots ahead as pioneers, which is.
Speaker 1: What NASA has been doing for decades, right, starting with
remote controlled rovers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, look at the Mars rovers like opportunity. We send
instructions from Earth, it carries them out autonomously, millions of
miles away, looking for minerals, signs of past water, evidence
of life.
Speaker 1: It's the ultimate remote worker. But we're moving beyond just
rovers now we are.
Speaker 2: We've got the humanoid ROBINOT two up on the International
Space Station actually working side by side with astronauts helping
with tasks.
Speaker 1: And then there's Valkyrie, the super robot.
Speaker 2: Valkyrie is the next big step, designed specifically for tasks
like setting up habitats on other planets, preparing power systems,
basically getting things ready for humans to arrive on places
like Mars. It's built to use human tools in complex,
unstructured environments.
Speaker 1: It has the dexterity, the size.
Speaker 2: Right, and the key insight here connecting back to the
ancient astronaut theory is simple logic. If we are investing
billions to use humanoid robots like Valkyrie for the dangerous
prep work of exploring and settling other worlds, then.
Speaker 1: It makes perfect sense that any truly advanced extraterrestrial civilization
traveling across stars will be doing the same thing probably
did it long ago.
Speaker 2: Valkyrie is, in a way, the modern Telos sent ahead
to prepare and secure a future frontier, but this time
it's our frontier on Mars.
Speaker 1: But for these robots to be really effective, especially in
unknown places like Ma, they need more than just strength
and the ability to move around. They need senses right.
They need to understand what they're touching, what they're.
Speaker 2: Interacting with, almost like a human does. And that brings
us to some really cutting edge work happening right now,
like doctor Veronica Santo's at UCLA's Biomechatronics Lab what are
they working on. They're tackling one of the toughest challenges.
Giving robots a sophisticated sense of touch, the ability to
feel texture, hardness, temperature and react appropriately. It's crucial for
delicate manipulation tasks.
Speaker 1: How do they do that?
Speaker 2: It's pretty amazing They've built this artificial finger test bed.
It's incredibly censor rich, very dexterous. It doesn't just measure
pressure like simpler sensors. It measures multiple things at once,
like vibration for texture, internal fluid pressure, to map how
four spreads across the fingertip, how the artificial skin deforms
when it squeezes something, and temperature too.
Speaker 1: In all that data gets fed into an AI exactly.
Speaker 2: The AI processes all these different sins three inputs together
to build a really detailed picture of whatever the finger
is touching.
Speaker 1: So it can figure things out.
Speaker 2: Yeah. For instance, just by measuring tiny changes in electrical
resistance as the fingerpad squishes, it can instantly tell if
it's touching soft foam or hard glass. That kind of
fine sensory discrimination is vital.
Speaker 1: And that links directly back to space exploration, right. Yeah,
giving these humanoid robots the ability to work precisely in
alien environments where we can't easily go.
Speaker 2: It spans the whole range, from better prosthetic limbs for
humans right here on Earth to robots that can build
habitats on Mars. But the moment you give a machine
sophisticated senses the ability to react to its physical world,
you slam right into that huge philosophical wall consciousness, emotion,
Exactly can a robot really feel anything? Can it have emotions?
We barely understand human emotion completely? How can we define
it well enough to recreate it artificially?
Speaker 1: It's a massive hurdle, a paradox almost, Yeah, how do
you program something you can't fully? Fine?
Speaker 2: But maybe the sources hint we're looking at it the
wrong way. Think about the basics in biology? What is pain?
Speaker 1: Oh, a signal tells you something's wrong? Stop doing that?
Speaker 2: Right? A complex feedback mouminism for survival and learning. So
if a robot can tell the difference between sensory input
that's good for its systems, stable temperature, normal pressure, and
input that's extreme heat, crushing.
Speaker 1: Force, input that signals damage.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if it can register that bad input and learn
to avoid it, isn't that like the very first tiny
step towards developing preferences avoidance, maybe even a very basic
form of awareness.
Speaker 1: We're feeling a mechanical version of pain avoidance.
Speaker 2: And this is where the ancient astronaut theory comes back
with a really provocative idea. Maybe these interventions, these myths
were meant to prepare us for this moment, to show
us through stories like the Flirting robot, that we humans
these complex biological machines. Maybe we're not so different from
machines ourselves, just highly advanced organic self repairing ones self repairing.
Speaker 1: That leads to the next big idea, doesn't it the
ultimate machine?
Speaker 2: Taking that concept of the biological automaton even further, yes,
we arrive at maybe the most profound technological concept of all,
the self replicating machine. And incredibly, this concept might also
be reflected in some very ancient myths, specifically resurrection myths.
Speaker 1: Okay, now we're going to Egypt to Osiris.
Speaker 2: Osiris a central figure hugely important, sometimes depicted as a pharaoh,
and the imagery around him can be interpreted in very
technical ways. You often see him associated with that wing
disk symbol shown descending from the sky, which.
Speaker 1: Aat proponents often interpret as depicting some kind of vehicle, right,
an extraterrestrial craft.
Speaker 2: That's the interpretation. Yes, but the core Osiris myth is
about his death and rebirth. His jealous brother Seth kills him,
dismembers the body.
Speaker 1: Cuts him into fourteen pieces, scatters them all over Egypt exactly.
Speaker 2: But his wife Isis searches relentlessly, finds all the pieces
except one in most versions, and she manages to pull
him together again. She reassembles him, and then crucially, she
resurrects him, brings him back to life.
Speaker 1: So looking at that sequence, this memberment, careful reassembly, then reactivation.
Speaker 2: You have to ask the question the sources post is
it possible Osiris wasn't entirely biological? Could he have been
perhaps a highly advanced modular machine, a robot that needed
literal mechanical repair and then a power up sequence.
Speaker 1: That sounds like a huge leap from the myth? Is
there anything specific that supports that mechanical view?
Speaker 2: There is supporting symbolism, particularly in the pyramid text. Think
about the DJed pillar. It's a famous Egyptian symbol often
described as representing Osirus's spine or backbone, Okay. Now, Researchers
like William Henry have pointed out that when Osirius is
shown in his resurrected form, he's often depicted as this pillar,
and the d JED pillar itself looks remarkably like well,
like a modern day.
Speaker 1: Tesla coil tesla coil. Seriously, why is that significant?
Speaker 2: Because what does a tessel coil do? It transmits electrical energy,
often high frequency currents, wirelessly or through resonant coupling. So
if the DJed pillar is Asyrus's spine and it looks
like a power transmission device, maybe the myth is describing
the reactivation sequence, reassembling the parts, then connecting the central
power condo.
Speaker 1: It reassembly plus power up, like rebooting a machine precisely.
Speaker 2: And there's more. There's a specific carving at Abydos It
shows isis, but she's not just mourning or doing magic.
Her hand seems to be literally inserted into Osiris's back,
right near where the DJed pillar connects.
Speaker 1: Like she's fixing something, manipulating controls.
Speaker 2: It looks much more like an engineering task repair manipulation
than a purely religious ritual. It potentially transforms the myth
from spiritual resurrection into something like a technical manual for
repairing complex hardware.
Speaker 1: Wow. Okay, so this ancient idea modularity, repair, reassembly, it's
actually becoming reality now, isn't.
Speaker 2: It Only very recently? Yes? Think about that work done
in twenty fourteen at the University of Oslo, they developed
robots that could adapt their movement even after losing a limb.
They could figure out how to keep going despite damage.
Speaker 1: But they went further than just adapting.
Speaker 2: Right they did. The really groundbreaking part was that these
robots could use an onboard three D printer to actually
fabricate a replacement limb and then attach it themselves self repair,
no humans needed.
Speaker 1: That is literally Osiris being pulled back together and switched
back on.
Speaker 2: But in a modern lab it's the same fundamental concept,
and that ability self repair, self sustenance. It leads directly
to the ultimate dream or maybe nightmare of advanced AI,
the self replicating machine, the kind needed to really explore
the cosmos.
Speaker 1: An idea formalized by John von Neumann back.
Speaker 2: In the forties, the von Neumann probe or seed machine.
The concept is both elegant and a bit terrifying. You
send out one initial machine, the seed. Its program is simple,
find raw materials on an asteroid, moon wherever, and use
those materials to build perfect copies of itself.
Speaker 1: So one becomes two to two becomes four exponential growth.
Speaker 2: Exactly in theory. These machines could explore and map the
entire galaxy, the entire universe, far faster and more comprehensively
than any mission carrying biological beings ever could.
Speaker 1: But just copying the physical machine isn't enough, is it?
For them to be truly useful explorers.
Speaker 2: That's the critical part. The replication has to include more
than just metal and circuits. Each new generation needs to
inherit the knowledge, the memories, the learning of the previous ones.
They need access to the entire accumulated library of data,
but also remain adaptable to new discoveries.
Speaker 1: It's like technological heredity passing down learned information.
Speaker 2: Right, and this brings us right back to that core
extraterrestrial claim. The argument is purely logical. Advanced civilizations operating
across interstellar distances probably wouldn't send fragile, slow, resource and
of biological crews on potentially million year journeys.
Speaker 1: They'd send machines.
Speaker 2: They'd almost certainly have developed and deployed self replicating, artificially
intelligent von Neumann probes long ago sent them out as
sentinels to scan, explore, report back, covering vast regions of
space efficiently.
Speaker 1: And the theorists connect this idea back to ancient Egypt too.
Speaker 2: They do. They point to some of the oldest Egyptian
creation myths, the ones talking about formless light beings emerging
from a primordial source sometimes called the island of the
Egg to create the world.
Speaker 1: Or civilization, light beings as robots.
Speaker 2: The interpretation is that maybe these weren't beings in a
spiritual sense, but perhaps highly advanced self replicating machines, maybe
energy based, maybe using specialized genetic codes or operating systems
brought from their home world. The machines arrived, first establish
a beachhead, set up the infrastructure, and then start the
expansion process.
Speaker 1: So the first visitors might not have been biological pilots
at all, but these incredibly resilient autonomous machines.
Speaker 2: It's a logical possibility grounded in the physics and engineering
challenges of interstellar travel. It flips the script on the
usual aliens and flying Saucer's image, So.
Speaker 1: Tracing this thread from Pindar's living statues on Roads, the
giant bronze guard Tallos, then the incredibly detailed Chinese automaton
that could flirt.
Speaker 2: All the way to our modern humanoid robots like Valkyrie
getting ready to do the same kinds of jobs preparations, security, exploration.
Speaker 1: But on Mars, it feels like this continuous story, this
drive to create artificial autonomous life, spans our entire recorded history.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, that fascination, maybe even that capability, seems embedded deep
within us, reflected in myths from all corners of the
ancient world, Greek, Jewish, Indian, Chinese, This constant push to
bridge the gap between inert matter and thinking, moving, perhaps
even feeling machines.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to the final thought for you, the listener,
Based on everything we've unpacked from these sources, is it
possible that what we're doing today, developing AI, building robots,
is it really invention? Or are we just somehow tapping
into knowledge that was already here on Earth thousands of years.
Speaker 2: Ago, Knowledge perhaps brought here may be deliberately shared, maybe
just observed by ancient travelers from elsewhere.
Speaker 1: Are we truly discovering artificial intelligence for the first time.
Speaker 2: Or is this whole incredible journey into machine learning and
autonomy actually an act of remembering, remembering a technological inheritance
we either lost, or perhaps one we were showing glimpses
of long long ago, something to definitely think about.