 Have you ever been in a big city and seen a beautiful stone building from the 1800s, standing in stark contrast to the modern concrete and steel edifices surrounding it? How could people that didn't have access to modern building equipment, materials, and engineering know-how put up these buildings? Could people with access to literal horse power do this? Maybe they didn't. Maybe history as we know it is all wrong and a worldwide civilization has been systematically removed from our textbooks, leaving just a few tantalizing clues in their exquisite buildings. Did their Tartarian Empire exist, running on its free energy and advanced knowledge? No, it didn't. This is the Low-Tech Podcast. Hello and welcome, I'm Scott Johnson from the Low-Technology Institute, your host for podcast number 69 on April 7th, 2023, coming to you from the Low-Tech recording booth. Thanks for joining us. Today, we're using the Tartarian Empire as a foil to talk about buildings made to withstand the test of time. And don't forget to follow us on Twitter. Our handle is at low underscore techno. Like us on Facebook. Find us on Instagram, subscribe to us on YouTube, and check out our website, lowtechinstitute.org. There you can find both of our podcasts as well as information about joining and supporting the Institute and its research. Some distributors put ads on podcasts. Unless you hear me doing the ad, someone else is making money on that advertising. While all of our podcast videos and other information is given freely, they do take resources to make. If you're in a position to help support our work and be part of this community, please consider becoming a monthly supporter for as little as $3 a month through our Patreon page, patreon.com, slash lowtechinstitute. And here at the top, I want to give a special shout out and big thank you to Mickey, who heard my frustration about dropping timbers in the last podcast and reached out to volunteer. We spent two days working out the kinks in the stand of trees, where we're taking timbers out for our build. It was a huge help. If you're interested in volunteering, please be in touch. And thanks again, Mickey. Okay, let's settle in for a story time. Once upon a time, a vast empire emanated from North Central Asia to cover the globe with its influence. Maybe you've heard of the Tartars? These are the heirs to the Tartarian Empire, or however you say it. This civilization's heartland was the now rugged terrain east of the Ural Mountains. Even hundreds or thousands of years ago, they had sophisticated technology and engineered projects. They were able to capture energy out of seemingly thin air, pulling electricity out of what is called the ether. They used this essentially unlimited power and know-how to conquer much of the world. And where they ruled, peace and prosperity followed. They erected beautiful, long-lasting buildings throughout their empire. And then, catastrophe. The empire collapsed in a cataclysm called the Great Mud Flood, where many feet of mud spread to cover the world, burying the old order. This is often referred to as the Great Reset. Following this disaster, new powers rose, and jealous of the Tartarian Empire, they sought to systemically blot out the previous world order from history and memory. The First and Second World Wars were not, as we have been taught in school, land disputes at the height of global imperialism, no, no. They were the attempts of the new powers to destroy evidence of the Tartarian buildings through bombing campaigns designed to look like a war. Or maybe the erasure started with Napoleon. Regardless, the systematic blotting out of Tartaria is nearly complete. All that remains of the Tartarian Empire are surviving buildings scattered throughout the world. These buildings look out of place compared to the brutalist style of concrete and steel. They are almost all built of stone, with spires, which are really radio and energy receivers, columns, domes, and what would usually be called classical features. The US capital, most state capitals, many banks and government buildings are really just repurposed Tartarian buildings. Of course, this is a conspiracy theory. None of what I just described has any support in historical facts or documentation. A lot of the background here comes from Zach Mortis' piece in Bloomberg from 2021, linked in the show notes. Tartaria survives in part because it's rhetorically impossible to prove a negative. So knowing can prove that Tartaria didn't exist as a global empire, well, you know, short of a time machine, but great claims cannot be substantiated without greater evidence. So let's look at a smattering of their strongest points, at least according to the Tartarian Empire enthusiasts. I'm not going to spend the rest of the time debunking it, but let's look at the top five. So first of all, the origins of this theory go all the way back to the 90s. That's 1990s, not 1890s. At that time, Russian nationalists reeling from the collapse of the Soviet Union created the idea of a grand civilization predating and surpassing pre-modern Europe and China. This idea was debunked by Russian scholars, but it resurfaced around 2016 on the internet, and just like the internet, Tartaria had grown to be worldwide. If indeed there had been a worldwide empire, there would be surviving folktales among the Tartars or their neighbors that would survive even a systematic campaign of repression. Heck, kids still sing Ring Around the Rosie in reference to the 1665 plague of London. We'd see something mentioning Tartaria before 1990 period. We don't, because it didn't exist. One of their other chief arguments is that pre-industrial people didn't have the wherewithal to build these massive buildings, but in society after society across the ancient world, we see huge edifices built by people from all of the inhabited continents. Throughout the history of archaeology, there has been a racist trope to attribute massive architectural projects to long lost tribes of Israel, aliens, or folks other than those who are the descendants of the people who actually built them, because it was thought that these so-called primitive people could not have built such large structures, and of course there's huge air quotations around primitive there. Large structures in South America, for example, even have basket loads of differently colored earth packed together in a coherent way, which shows that they were indeed human-carried loads. There's a project in France to rebuild a medieval castle with period tools and techniques. You can actually watch an English language series with archaeologists working on it called Secrets of the Castle from the BBC. It's on YouTube. It's definitely worth checking out if you're curious about how people built all this stuff by hand. It's important to understand that pre-industrial labor was cheap, and throwing thousands of people at projects over a long period of time was entirely possible, especially in areas where agricultural cycles gave workers months off during some time of the year. Look at the well-documented building of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris or the Capitol building in Washington for examples. The great reset was supposed to have happened when mud covered the earth. Here's one that I can absolutely debunk personally. I'm an archaeologist. I have dug lots of holes in the ground in England, across the United States, Guatemala, and Mexico. If 6 to 10 feet of mud had covered the earth, there would have been a layer found around the world with this common event. We actually use other events like volcano eruptions or regional floods to put things in relative chronological order, but the fact that there is no such evidence of this across the world from not only my own experience, but many other documented examples, this suggests that the great mud flood didn't happen, period. They came on this idea, though, because they noticed that many of these large classical buildings have windows and doors below ground, thinking that, well, now today's ground is 6 to 8 feet taller because of this mud flood. This was done, though, because electric lights didn't exist when a lot of these buildings were made, and they needed as much natural light to get in as possible, especially in basements. There's a functional reason to have these passages enter below the grade. Another thing Tartarian apologists like to point to is the similarity of architectural features across various times and places. We also get this in archaeology. Usually people like to say something like, pyramids must have been built by aliens because pyramids have found all over the world where people were definitely not interacting. So there must have been someone or something, some overarching species that was bringing this pyramidal form to them. As with alien conspiracy theorists and Tartarian proponents, the answer is physics. If you take, for example, a handful of sand and pour it through a funnel onto a flat surface, it forms a pyramid. No aliens necessary. This is called the angle of repose, and it's a geological principle where different granular components will rest in pyramidal or cone shapes at a certain angle. It's inherently stable. Even if you build a big rectangular building over time, it would collapse into a pyramidal shape effectively. Similarly, the architects who were charged with designing these neoclassical buildings across the world in the late 1800s were all drawing from the same cannon, that is, classical Greek and Roman architecture updated through Renaissance and later engineering advances. Domes, which are often cited as textbook Tartarian architecture, is simply an arch set in rotation around itself. In other words, a dome is an easy way to put a roof over a big area with no internal supports. Again, physics provides the answer, no Tartarian conspiracy necessary. One semi-logical point about this otherwise kooky theory is the disjuncture between the modernist buildings and the classical ones in cities that have been around for a while. Part of the problem, especially in America, is that we build for short-term use. For structures, short-term can be measured on the decade scale. And so when there are a few buildings that have been built in such a way that they're sticking around for a couple hundred years, of course they look alien and disconnected from all the surrounding buildings, which are only a few decades old. The answer, though, is not to invent an entire worldwide empire with no other evidence, but to examine the cause of that disjuncture. Namely, short-sighted building, and that's really what I wanted to talk about today. Now, let's use a couple of examples to talk about this, and I'm going to pull for my own life, but you probably have had similar experiences. When I was 17, I went to Germany as an exchange student. The first place I lived was a tiny city called Gluckstadt, just north of Hamburg. I lived with a family who was involved in boat building. We lived in a house built in the 1600s. It had been in the family's possession for generations. The husband of the family had been born in the house. Now, contrast that with my family home in the US. On both sides of my family, I have carpenters. On my dad's side, they're still involved in building homes. The house I grew up in was built by my father and his family about 40 years ago, right before I was born. I still visit that house every time I go back to Bemidji, which is my hometown. The oldest house in the neighborhood was a farmhouse probably from the early 1900s. And yes, some of this has to do with the fact that Europe has a dense population and they've been in the same location for a long time. This means that there were no Europeans in Bemidji in 1600 to build a house that could still be around. I understand that. The Ojibwe, on whose land Bemidji is now built, built seasonal structures as their homes. Now, as much as I have sentimental feelings about the house I grew up in, I don't anticipate it will be around in the year 2423. But my experience in the US is not wildly different than the average. Most of us live in houses that are less than 100 years old. And they likely won't last another 100 years because developers would rather tear down small, cheaply built older homes to build new, larger, cheaply built modern homes. So just think about what the juxtaposition of these two models shows us. Buying a house in the US represents the largest purchase many of us will ever make. It causes a lot of labor and a lot of resources to be concentrated into one spot to build a house. And if the house only lasts 100 years or less, we have to get new resources and more labor to build another one just to house the same number of people. Now, to mention that the value of that original house is now lost, it's not passed on to the following generations. That German house from the 1600s, though it was built once probably at greater expense, it has lasted for over 400 years, housing easily hundreds of people. And during that time, with no more great outlay of resources or labor, it's significantly less expensive to retrofit an existed solid building with new amenities than to tear down and build something new. And think about this, if your house was inherited, you're not paying for it, meaning you can then save that money or use that money elsewhere. You don't have to pay to cause a new house to be built. So now let's think about where we sit in the construction industry today, and I'm talking about the mainstream construction industry. We design houses that are not truly energy efficient because they take for granted the fact that we can heat or air-condition spaces well into the future. So while they focus on insulation and sealing the inside space against outside heat and cold, they usually fail to take advantage of passive heating and cooling options. In 50 years, when we don't have access to natural gas for heating, for example, your 2005 house will be very hard to heat unless you retrofit it with a geothermal or some other heat source. But if a house was built with a southern exposure and large windows opening onto a thermal mass to capture the sun's energy during the day to help regulate the temperature in the house, it would reduce the heating burden on that structure. Onnings and trees and overhangs can help block out the summer sun while using free cold air from a system like EarthTubes to help cool internal spaces in the summer. But because we don't feel the pinch of our future energy transition today, we are building in a short-sighted way. What will be comfortable now is the guiding principle not. How can we build something that will last 400 years and still be usable? If we were honest and serious about an energy transition, we would be using our fossil fuels to create systems that can run without them. One of the other things to consider is the materials we use. Although engineered materials often have great strength and flexibility of design, they may not be as available in the future. If you are relying on a certain material that is made of petrochemicals or is difficult to produce without huge amounts of energy, when you need to replace the original, it might no longer be available. And newer products are less time-tested. A stone foundation, for example, is a known quantity and when built properly can last for hundreds of years. A few years ago, we saw the collapse of a condo building in Miami, Florida because the rebar inside the concrete had corroded due to the high, least salty air. Although concrete has been around since Roman times, many of the different ways in which we have been using it have not been tested on the century scale. I know it seems a little strange to talk about buildings lasting hundreds of years, but that's how we have been raised and acculturated to think about buildings as only semi-permanent structures. And finally, I want to mention the fact that one part of building for the long term is aesthetic appeal. Making a building that is visually interesting and attractive helps its longevity because, well, some buildings are torn down because they were built cheaply and their materials are beginning to fail. A structure built to last might still be torn down because it's no longer considered desirable or attractive. For example, I think about a beautiful brick house in a suburb of Chicago where my in-laws used to live. This neighborhood had been built in the 20s, 30s, and 40s outside of Chicago and it had a mix of cheap and expensive houses for the time. Today, many of the cheaper houses have been torn down to make way for McMansions, but this one beautiful 1940s brick home has survived, or at least it was still there a few years ago last time I checked, and I'd like to think that's because it was built so well and so beautifully that it might survive longer than the stick frame neighboring houses from the same era. So, as you know, we're in the process of building and designing a structure. This is a pretty modest structure, so it won't have quite everything we would put in if we had the freedom of budget and building home flexibility. For example, we're not allowed to put in a lot of the passive solar features and things like that that I wanted to for a variety of reasons that I'm not going to get into today but we'll talk about it on another podcast. But we have been thinking about how this building will be seen in 100 years. Part of thinking about a structure's longevity is its ability to be retrofitted, so we're leaving many of the utilities accessible without tearing the structure apart. This means we may have exposed conduit to paint rather than burying it behind the plaster walls. It means leaving open raceways for future wire or utility runs. It also means thinking about materials that will last, and while we accept that some materials and surfaces have to be refinished occasionally, we want to make sure that those are made of easily obtainable replacement materials. So we're using wooden shingles and siding, which will be treated with linseed oil to help propel water with the understanding that the siding and roofing will at some point need to be replaced. But because we obtained the bored and batten siding and the shingles from local trees today, we anticipate that in 100 years the same materials can be obtained again. The interior walls will be finished with earth plaster dug on site or lime plaster, which could even theoretically be slaked and formed back into putty and reapplied to the wall if slaked lime wasn't available from another source in 100 years. By building with local materials and time-tested methods, our structure stands a good chance of being here as long as our own home, which was built in the 1850s, from bricks dug out of a pit on the edge of town. Yes, there is certainly a lot of compromise living in a home that was designed before what we would consider to be modern conveniences, but much can be done to retrofit a well-built home that is considerably less energy and labor intensive than just tearing it down and building something new that won't last half as long. We don't need to invent conspiracy theories to explain why well-built buildings can stand the test of time. We just need to start thinking differently about how we are building everyday structures so that it isn't just large governmental or organizational buildings that will still be here in 150 years. That's it for the week. The low-tech podcast is put out by the Low Technology Institute. The show is hosted and co-produced by me, Scott Johnson, and co-produced and edited by Hino Suzuki. This episode was recorded in the Low Tech Recording Room. Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, YouTube, and elsewhere. We hope you enjoyed this free podcast and if you'd like to join the community and help support the work we do, please consider going to patreon.com slash lowtechinstitute and signing up. Thanks to our forest-run land-stured level members, Sam Braun, Marilyn Scurron, and the Hamfuses for their support. The Low Technology Institute is a 501c3 research organization supported by members, grants, and underwriting. You can find out more information about the Low Technology Institute, membership, and underwriting at lowtechinstitute.org. Find us on social media and reach me directly at Scott at lowtechinstitute.org. Our intro music today was Robot Motivation off the album, Diplomatic Community, by the Polish Ambassador. That song is under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Like License, and this podcast is under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Like License, meaning you're free to use and share it as long as you give us credit. Thanks and take care.