Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015

polymathwannabe

This thread is intended to provide a space for 'crazy' ideas. Ideas that spontaneously come to mind (and feel great), ideas you long wanted to tell but never found the place and time for and also for ideas you think should be obvious and simple - but nobody ever mentions them.

This thread itself is such an idea. Or rather the tangent of such an idea which I post below as a seed for this thread.

Rules for this thread:

Each crazy idea goes into its own top level comment and may be commented there.
Voting should be based primarily on how original the idea is.
Meta discussion of the thread should go to the top level comment intended for that purpose.

If this should become a regular thread I suggest the following :

Use "Crazy Ideas Thread" in the title.
Copy the rules.
Add the tag "crazy_idea".
Create a top-level comment saying 'Discussion of this thread goes here; all other top-level comments should be ideas or similar'
Add a second top-level comment with an initial crazy idea to start participation.

This thread itself is such an idea. Or rather the tangent of such an idea which I post below as a seed for this thread.

Rules for this thread:

Each crazy idea goes into its own top level comment and may be commented there.
Voting should be based primarily on how original the idea is.
Meta discussion of the thread should go to the top level comment intended for that purpose.

If this should become a regular thread I suggest the following :

Use "Crazy Ideas Thread" in the title.
Copy the rules.
Add the tag "crazy_idea".
Create a top-level comment saying 'Discussion of this thread goes here; all other top-level comments should be ideas or similar'
Add a second top-level comment with an initial crazy idea to start participation.

Somebody should explore if Stonehenge, Carnac stones, and other megalithic formations were banking and payment systems.

More recently, in the isle of Yap, they used big Rai stones as money.

Many megalithic buildings are tombs, places of worship, or served as calendars, but many big stones aligned in open spaces have no conclusive explanation.

I suggest they could have been a way of storing value and were used for payments too. There is evidence that there was trade across the European continent and into the middle east in those times (~6000 BC). Central marketplaces where they raised the stones and met to trade could have been a use case. The stones obviously stayed there, with a consensus of who owned them, and the next season of trade they would use them as money again.

To move huge stones and align them takes a lot of time and effort, but greed may be a strong incentive to have built those formations.

Good money is easy to transfer. Those huge stones aren't easy to transfer.

0Lumifer11y

I don't understand the mechanics of using giant stones as a store of value or a payment method. Do you mean they were used as a ledger or sorts?

-1gjm11y

If you can have a stable consensus of who owns which (or how many) stones, why bother transporting the enormous stones across the country at all? What's the purpose of setting them up in formation rather than just having a big pile? (To make it easier to spot if one has been stolen? But if you've got someone watching the stones then it surely can't be much extra effort for them to count them every day.) [EDITED to add: Hi, downvoters! I see this is at -2. I honestly can't see what's wrong with it, so if this comment was downvoted on its merits rather than because I said something elsewhere that disagrees with your politics, please let me know what was wrong so I can improve. Thanks.]

12

Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015

12

12

12

Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015

12

12