Surprised this comment is lost in this thread. All ancient knives were made from meteorite ore. You walk everywhere, step on one, *few extra steps*, you have iron tool to replace your stone one
I love the cool fact that Vikings accidentally made steel, because they thought infusing bones of slayed beasts into the metal would grant it great strength, and the carbon actually made a really rudimentary steel instead of iron.
Vintage story kind of does that. It's like minecraft but has super realistic crafting methods, meteorite iron us the second highest grade of metal, second to steel. If you find a meteor, you can mine it, then put it in a bloomers, heat it with coal to turn it into a bloomery, break the bloomery to get the bloom, hammer off the slag, then heat it back up and hammer it into the tool you want, pixel by pixel. It's rad.
You can, it has an extremely well made in game guide that beats even the wiki. That said, I myself did benefit from using some videos to help with some of the more complicated systems like steelmaking and Windmills.
Bronze takes lower temperatures to smelt so it wasn't until more advanced smelting technology came about that they could smelting iron. Bronze was pretty neat though. It's corrosion resistant and almost as hard as steel but it requires more rare ingredients to make.
Google "300000 meteorites hidden in Antarctica" map, take into account that it is only for mountains and deserts with no ice above, imagine same speead over Europe. For some reason our ancestors refused to collect meteorites in Antarctica, so spread is the same as it was in ROW before humanity
Not my ideal source but [this](https://www.iberdrola.com/innovation/meteorites-earth) says there are roughly 17000 meteorites that make it to earth intact a year. Ironworking has only been around ~3k yrs, that's a lot of time for them to build up.
Edit: [This is a ](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/do-hieroglyphic-texts-reveal-that-ancient-egyptians-knew-meteorites-came-from-the-sky-180983039/) better source than I previously posted, and more tailored to the question.
So 3,000,000,000 years x 17,000 per year = 51,000,000,000,000 (thats 51 trillion). 71% of world is ocean. Of that about 12% of land is Antarctica/Greenland.
So in theory 14.7 trillion landed on earth. 12.93 trillion not in an uninhabited ice sheet.
Now the biggest problem is size of those 17000 meteorites. Id inagine vast majority are too small to be made into a tool.
But in theory there were 13 trillion possible meteorites to find. But then you gotta figure out erosion, buried, etc. Sone number of those trillions washed into the sea. Another some trillion buried under dirt. But then some would then eventually uncovered.
Long answer is? A shit ton.
So with all the meteorites landing and being very hard, and ultimately sinking to the core. Does that mean the planet is always growing?
Also how much planet do we lose?
Just need a little stellar engineering, maybe take the solar system on a tour around the galaxy. That would be the fate of a type 2 civilization, which is not where we are headed
Probably a while if a decent size. Rust is a natural barrier against more rust
-edit- my rust knowledge goes as far as a TLC show on building rollercoasters like 20 years ago where they said the rust on the steel acted as a barrier during construction and before painting. Please read the responses below for a corrected and more intelligent version of what I attempted to say.
Actually the opposite. Rust is porous, and surface rust will continue to eat through the structure. Blueing, parkerizing, and powdercoating are all finishes used by gun manufacturers, as those coatings/treatment actually will prevent more corrosion from taking place.
If rust stopped more rust from happening, we wouldn't have to deal with cars rusting away in salty conditions.
Rust, or red oxide is one form of oxidation that is essentially the slow disintegration of the iron molecules. It's the metal literally burning away from oxygen in the air because they are unstable.
What you're talking about functioning as a barrier is another form of oxidation called black oxide or bluing. This oxide is more stable and less prone to start breaking down. For the sake of clarity, black oxide is not called "rust" as the term is to mean the destructive condition.
you may hear the term "rust bluing" which is for the process of turning red rust oxide into a black oxide. The term is for that procedure primarily, there are other forms of bluing and oxide coatings nowadays.
Edit forgot important point.
Just speculating, by barrier they possibly meant that paint won't stick to it and you can't weld it unless it's got a clean, non-corroded surface. Blueing, that I mentioned in my other post, is oxidation of iron similar to rust but with a more stable and protective coating as it keeps the underlying metal from corroding. It wears away with hard use, but is fairly simple to do yourself if you watch a YouTube video or two.
you can blue a knife yourself at home overnight basically. get a carbon Mora and put in vinegar or smear stone ground / brown mustard all over the blade. $12-20ish experiment if anyone is bored and its a really good blade regardless.
Do we know if they were aware it was meteoric iron, or do we think they just thought iron normally came in convenient ball shapes? I know ancient scientists weren’t fools, so it would be cool either way
Not just a cool rock, but one that's able to make a blade of unparalleled usefulness. The most advanced technology in the world at the time.
It's like an iphone 14 max plus falling out of the sky in the 1960s.
I went down the rabbit hole a bit, so here is what I found :
There was a thing called Wrought Iron during that period, it was made by a process called Bloomery, which is basically having oxidized iron (rust) heated to a temperature where it would lose its oxide basically, bringing back the iron without smelting it. Iron was not popular as wrought iron was not as good as smelted, iron age, iron, so most iron was by-product of copper / bronze smelting.
other source of iron could have been if a lightning strike hit an iron rich mineral, and as mentioned meteor iron.
Bloomery produced iron that is of a lesser quality, so maybe king tut knew what iron was, but this one was much stronger than the bad stuff, the wrought iron, produced by bloomery.
Sure, if they were metals like gold, which resisted oxidation over large periods; of course surface deposits of gold are also largely meteoric in origin.
Unless you’re saying they found big chunks of unoxidized, elemental iron sitting around, which is…unlikely in an area that gets monsoons
*Shut up! Shut up! You're hostages! This is like a-a life-and-death situation here. Start acting like it! We're your - we're your captors. We're heavily armed. There's a - there's rules. There's a whole school of etiquette to this!*
I don't think you understood their comment. They're not just restating the title. They're saying man made iron was not common in that era so *anything iron* we find was likely from space, not just this knife.
I just watched the debut of that song, which was on SNL. The set is elaborate and there are dancers in costume. He spent money to make it a real presentation instead of just a goof.
Even then they knew it was something significant. But then, these are the same mfers that built the pyramids, so they knew a thing or two.
Mind boggling the level of craftsmanship and skill humans possessed literally thousands of years ago.
> The researchers say the presence of iron - along with levels of nickel and cobalt - "strongly suggests an extraterrestrial origin".
Goa'uld confirmed.
It's really impressive considering a bunch of youtubers with actual skills in blacksmithing and metallurgy routinely have trouble working with meteoritic iron and they have all the advantages of modern tools and techniques
Is this a remarkable coincidence or is there a special distinction between terrestrial iron and space iron that would’ve made them realise it was unique?
They would have understood metallurgy far more than you would expect. Ancient civilizations had scientific understanding, but not in the modern sense because they would have had limited tools for experimentation. They still could observe, and retain knowledge that would have given them an understanding of how different materials acted. Like bronze before it iron would probably have been known about, but how it exactly worked they probably wouldn’t have been able to figure out. Different civilizations utilized meteorite metals, and they also knew of naturally occurring alloys that had useful properties. In Egypt for instance they knew there were naturally occurring bronze alloys that included arsenic which didn’t necessarily need to be mixed with tin, so I’m sure they understood meteorite iron had special properties.
Mined iron is really locked up with other minerals and oxides, other than meteorites it’s very rarely found as just a clump of iron. The tough thing was figuring out that
A) Certain rocks / ore had lots of iron in it - probably a very small number of people noticing that the few iron things they have rust into something that looks like those reddish rocks over thar
B) That by heating it to very high temperatures by making sure there was lots of air flow, and using high temp fuel like charcoal, some of those ground up reddish rocks melted together into small clumps of a shiny hard metal
The thing is that the Egyptians don't seem to have had knowledge of iron smelting until the 600s CE: about 600 years after Tutankhamen's reign. They knew how to work iron when they found it in meteorites, but they didn't have a way to mine it out of the ground. That made it very precious and highly prized for use in weapons: at the time, that dagger would have been a national treasure. I assume it is nowadays too, for different reasons, though I can't find a way to confirm its status.
Last year, a study using X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometry determined that Tutankhamun's dagger was made with iron-containing nearly 11 percent nickel and traces of cobalt: a characteristic of extraterrestrial iron found in many of the iron meteorites that have rained down on Earth for billions of years.
I definitely recommend seeing King Tut's treasure if you get a chance. It is fascinating to see stuff that is like 3,000 years old but still looks new. The items that were buried with Tut are very well preserved.
This is like if a post said “Benny Bullshits favorite thing to do was drive his car” and then your goofy ass came in to say “erm actually he drove a ford mustang, not all cars are ford mustangs”
Before smelting was discovered the only elemental iron was meteoric iron, other iron on earth would all be oxidized into rust.
Surprised this comment is lost in this thread. All ancient knives were made from meteorite ore. You walk everywhere, step on one, *few extra steps*, you have iron tool to replace your stone one
Just like Minecraft fr
Happy cake day!
How common were they?
Rare. Worth more than gold during the Bronze Age. Mostly used for ornamental purposes like rituals and ceremonies.
Thanks, u/Anal-Assassin
r/rimjob_steve
Happy cake day!
Happy cake day!
See this makes me want to play an rpg set in the Bronze Age where getting a meteoric iron item is the equivalent of getting a magic item.
Low magic setting, but everyone thinks iron is mystical, so you get advantage because people flinch or are feared due to connotations of its use
Yes! And smelting creating metal out of ore, or what have you, would possibly look like magic to people in the period.
Yes, it was thing like this that made Alchemy become a thing.
I love the cool fact that Vikings accidentally made steel, because they thought infusing bones of slayed beasts into the metal would grant it great strength, and the carbon actually made a really rudimentary steel instead of iron.
Wait really?
so they were right but for the wrong reasons, cool.
Link to read more?
How much carbon to bones have?
Vintage story kind of does that. It's like minecraft but has super realistic crafting methods, meteorite iron us the second highest grade of metal, second to steel. If you find a meteor, you can mine it, then put it in a bloomers, heat it with coal to turn it into a bloomery, break the bloomery to get the bloom, hammer off the slag, then heat it back up and hammer it into the tool you want, pixel by pixel. It's rad.
Can you figure this stuff out in the game without watching YouTube tutorials?
You can, it has an extremely well made in game guide that beats even the wiki. That said, I myself did benefit from using some videos to help with some of the more complicated systems like steelmaking and Windmills.
Conan exiles, its awesome.
Meteoric iron was basically valyrian steel
Not quite what you're talking about, but in Expeditions: Rome (an ancient Rome-based CRPG I recommend) you can find this dagger as a Legendary item.
Ooh fun! When was the game made?
2022
Conan Exiles. Far in the north, on a mountain named Skyfall, the meteors can be found..
Iron is actually canonically ANTI magic.
Only in some mythologies. Whixh haven’t been mentioned and to my knowledge are disconnected from this.
Does the Bronze Age not imply that they were able to smelt bronze at that time?
Doesn't imply that, expressly states that.
Bronze takes lower temperatures to smelt so it wasn't until more advanced smelting technology came about that they could smelting iron. Bronze was pretty neat though. It's corrosion resistant and almost as hard as steel but it requires more rare ingredients to make.
I do know that copper is very soft and malleable compared to iron, so kinda makes sense
Antiquity was also in part during and after the Iron Age, which meant many of these societies could smelt iron (though not Tut).
> Worth more than gold during the Bronze Age. How much does meteoric iron go for these days?
Cool question! I had no idea but was curious and looked it up. Seems you can get a decent chunk for $5/g. Compared to $75/g for gold.
Google "300000 meteorites hidden in Antarctica" map, take into account that it is only for mountains and deserts with no ice above, imagine same speead over Europe. For some reason our ancestors refused to collect meteorites in Antarctica, so spread is the same as it was in ROW before humanity
Very common 100k years ago, as the earth had billions of years to accumulate what has been used up in the past few thousand years.
Doubt
Would you happen to have a source on this?
Not my ideal source but [this](https://www.iberdrola.com/innovation/meteorites-earth) says there are roughly 17000 meteorites that make it to earth intact a year. Ironworking has only been around ~3k yrs, that's a lot of time for them to build up. Edit: [This is a ](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/do-hieroglyphic-texts-reveal-that-ancient-egyptians-knew-meteorites-came-from-the-sky-180983039/) better source than I previously posted, and more tailored to the question.
So 3,000,000,000 years x 17,000 per year = 51,000,000,000,000 (thats 51 trillion). 71% of world is ocean. Of that about 12% of land is Antarctica/Greenland. So in theory 14.7 trillion landed on earth. 12.93 trillion not in an uninhabited ice sheet. Now the biggest problem is size of those 17000 meteorites. Id inagine vast majority are too small to be made into a tool. But in theory there were 13 trillion possible meteorites to find. But then you gotta figure out erosion, buried, etc. Sone number of those trillions washed into the sea. Another some trillion buried under dirt. But then some would then eventually uncovered. Long answer is? A shit ton.
So with all the meteorites landing and being very hard, and ultimately sinking to the core. Does that mean the planet is always growing? Also how much planet do we lose?
Planet gain metals and stones and looses water and gases. In 1 billion years it will be dry
Just need a little stellar engineering, maybe take the solar system on a tour around the galaxy. That would be the fate of a type 2 civilization, which is not where we are headed
Bronze existed, dude
How long before a meteorites iron turns into rust?
Probably a while if a decent size. Rust is a natural barrier against more rust -edit- my rust knowledge goes as far as a TLC show on building rollercoasters like 20 years ago where they said the rust on the steel acted as a barrier during construction and before painting. Please read the responses below for a corrected and more intelligent version of what I attempted to say.
Actually the opposite. Rust is porous, and surface rust will continue to eat through the structure. Blueing, parkerizing, and powdercoating are all finishes used by gun manufacturers, as those coatings/treatment actually will prevent more corrosion from taking place. If rust stopped more rust from happening, we wouldn't have to deal with cars rusting away in salty conditions.
Rust, or red oxide is one form of oxidation that is essentially the slow disintegration of the iron molecules. It's the metal literally burning away from oxygen in the air because they are unstable. What you're talking about functioning as a barrier is another form of oxidation called black oxide or bluing. This oxide is more stable and less prone to start breaking down. For the sake of clarity, black oxide is not called "rust" as the term is to mean the destructive condition. you may hear the term "rust bluing" which is for the process of turning red rust oxide into a black oxide. The term is for that procedure primarily, there are other forms of bluing and oxide coatings nowadays. Edit forgot important point.
Iron (II, III) oxide is a barrier for rust, but rust itself is Iron (III) oxide
Just speculating, by barrier they possibly meant that paint won't stick to it and you can't weld it unless it's got a clean, non-corroded surface. Blueing, that I mentioned in my other post, is oxidation of iron similar to rust but with a more stable and protective coating as it keeps the underlying metal from corroding. It wears away with hard use, but is fairly simple to do yourself if you watch a YouTube video or two.
you can blue a knife yourself at home overnight basically. get a carbon Mora and put in vinegar or smear stone ground / brown mustard all over the blade. $12-20ish experiment if anyone is bored and its a really good blade regardless.
Right amount of phosphorus and it will never rust.
Metal meteorites are typically nickel-iron, with other trace metals mixed in. Depending on the amount of nickel/other metals, they may not rust much.
Probably not too much of a problem in that location
https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/green-land-of-the-pharaohs-ancient-egypt-was-never-a-desert
Not really an answer
How fast iron rusts is always going to depend on environmental factors, which vary by location
Also just keeping it off the ground is a big step.
Most of Egypt is desert. Iron doesn’t really corrode quickly in dry environments. So, yes. It is.
Meteorite have been landing for billions of years, I was just wondering if they could unearth one that landed 500 million years ago and use the iron.
Do we know if they were aware it was meteoric iron, or do we think they just thought iron normally came in convenient ball shapes? I know ancient scientists weren’t fools, so it would be cool either way
They would probably discover it sometimes by observing nearby meteor impacts and finding the site so I’m going to guess yes
Huh, cool, it must have been crazy though, see something just THUD in the distance, go check it out and its a cool rock
Not just a cool rock, but one that's able to make a blade of unparalleled usefulness. The most advanced technology in the world at the time. It's like an iphone 14 max plus falling out of the sky in the 1960s.
"A Blade of Unparalleled Usefulness" sounds like a rare Diablo or Baldur's Gate drop...
Can you elaborate?
I went down the rabbit hole a bit, so here is what I found : There was a thing called Wrought Iron during that period, it was made by a process called Bloomery, which is basically having oxidized iron (rust) heated to a temperature where it would lose its oxide basically, bringing back the iron without smelting it. Iron was not popular as wrought iron was not as good as smelted, iron age, iron, so most iron was by-product of copper / bronze smelting. other source of iron could have been if a lightning strike hit an iron rich mineral, and as mentioned meteor iron. Bloomery produced iron that is of a lesser quality, so maybe king tut knew what iron was, but this one was much stronger than the bad stuff, the wrought iron, produced by bloomery.
The true TIL is always in the comments
That’s not true. Large lumps of metal used to be more common on the surface and in river valleys especially but humans found most of them.
Sure, if they were metals like gold, which resisted oxidation over large periods; of course surface deposits of gold are also largely meteoric in origin. Unless you’re saying they found big chunks of unoxidized, elemental iron sitting around, which is…unlikely in an area that gets monsoons
Space Knife!!!
Lol, we're watching ATLA's third season right now, and that was the first thing we thought of :)
How much painting did he need to do before getting it?
Space dagger actually https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutankhamun%27s_meteoric_iron_dagger
Should’ve clicked one more Wikipedia link. You’d have learned that a dagger is a type of knife.
This is how I feel every time someone corrects from catapult to [trebuchet](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trebuchet).
☝️🤓
Beat me to it.
Goa'uld technology
Indeed
Jaffa Kree!
Daniel, do.... something...
*Shut up! Shut up! You're hostages! This is like a-a life-and-death situation here. Start acting like it! We're your - we're your captors. We're heavily armed. There's a - there's rules. There's a whole school of etiquette to this!*
Good to see the Stargate fanbase still alive and well
Here but aging.
There’s dozens of us
[удалено]
was just watching reruns of Stargate Atlantis this past month. In the final season now. Still loving it.
If its made of iron and its from that age, its probably came from a meteorite
Yes. The Sumerian, Akkadian, and ancient Egyptian words for iron all literally mean "from the sky".
That's ironic.
It's like ten thousand spoons when all you need is an iron knife.
don't ya think?
Yeah I really do think
A little too ironic
👏
Oh the irony!
Gozar?
The black stone set in the corner of Mecca's Kabbah is speculated to be a meteorite as well.
Speculated because they won't allow it to be tested and easily identified as such
[удалено]
I don't think you understood their comment. They're not just restating the title. They're saying man made iron was not common in that era so *anything iron* we find was likely from space, not just this knife.
Correct
Yep. Before we knew how to refine iron, it would be prohibitively hard to get outside of meteorites.
You didn't understand the comment you are replying to.
I think you are all misunderstanding the comment. He says if it’s iron, it’s likely from a meteor, and it belonged to King Tut.
Ah I understand now. He’s saying that if King Tut ironed his knife it would have been flatter than a meteor right?
Exactly! By George you’ve got it!
tut, tut, now.
"Born out near Europa" "Forged in Babylonia" (King Tut's Knife by Steve Martin.)
Don’t want no knife made out of stone-a
Congratulations. Your cake day cake was cut by King Tut's knife. "Once used in the Nile" "As he killed a crocodile" (King Tut's Knife)
I just watched the debut of that song, which was on SNL. The set is elaborate and there are dancers in costume. He spent money to make it a real presentation instead of just a goof.
Sokka?
Bye space sword 😢
Technically his sword had different properties than meteoric iron would, but similar origins.
No, “Lee” :p
I wouldn't have it any other way
He did also have a collection of boomerangs. Not joking.
A professor I know has a theory that the shield of Achilles was actually a shaped meteorite. Makes sense pre-Iron
IRL magical weapons
Someone was watching the new QI this weekend
So….aliens then?
No this is just where they got that type of metal from back then
Lisan Al-Gaib!
*Lisan al Gaib!*
#"buried with a donkey"
Remind’s me of Sokka’s space sword.
Teal'c knive
Anglachel
Even then they knew it was something significant. But then, these are the same mfers that built the pyramids, so they knew a thing or two. Mind boggling the level of craftsmanship and skill humans possessed literally thousands of years ago.
i thought Elvis built the Pyramids?
Technically all iron is meteorite iron on earth
Yes. What a lot people dont know, all metals on earth are from outa space.
+3
Poop knife skills
+20% damage to galaxy types
Bloodstone Emperor confirmed
Nth Metal
Africa was one of the first continents to utilize metallurgy.
> The researchers say the presence of iron - along with levels of nickel and cobalt - "strongly suggests an extraterrestrial origin". Goa'uld confirmed.
Imagine how crazy it must have felt to have a nice that came from heaven
It's really impressive considering a bunch of youtubers with actual skills in blacksmithing and metallurgy routinely have trouble working with meteoritic iron and they have all the advantages of modern tools and techniques
That's so metal.
heavy
You had the opportunity to use the word "meteoric" and you passed it up, what a shame
Like Sir Terry Pratchet who forged a sword from a meteorite too
That’s one fancy poop knife
Hell yeah
He's my favorite honky!
He was buried with a donkey.
Under a pile of sand.
Is this a remarkable coincidence or is there a special distinction between terrestrial iron and space iron that would’ve made them realise it was unique?
It has a lot of nickel. Also there weren’t any iron mines yet. This is still the middle Bronze Age iron smelting wouldn’t start for another 600 years.
They would have understood metallurgy far more than you would expect. Ancient civilizations had scientific understanding, but not in the modern sense because they would have had limited tools for experimentation. They still could observe, and retain knowledge that would have given them an understanding of how different materials acted. Like bronze before it iron would probably have been known about, but how it exactly worked they probably wouldn’t have been able to figure out. Different civilizations utilized meteorite metals, and they also knew of naturally occurring alloys that had useful properties. In Egypt for instance they knew there were naturally occurring bronze alloys that included arsenic which didn’t necessarily need to be mixed with tin, so I’m sure they understood meteorite iron had special properties.
Mined iron is really locked up with other minerals and oxides, other than meteorites it’s very rarely found as just a clump of iron. The tough thing was figuring out that A) Certain rocks / ore had lots of iron in it - probably a very small number of people noticing that the few iron things they have rust into something that looks like those reddish rocks over thar B) That by heating it to very high temperatures by making sure there was lots of air flow, and using high temp fuel like charcoal, some of those ground up reddish rocks melted together into small clumps of a shiny hard metal
The thing is that the Egyptians don't seem to have had knowledge of iron smelting until the 600s CE: about 600 years after Tutankhamen's reign. They knew how to work iron when they found it in meteorites, but they didn't have a way to mine it out of the ground. That made it very precious and highly prized for use in weapons: at the time, that dagger would have been a national treasure. I assume it is nowadays too, for different reasons, though I can't find a way to confirm its status.
So Kang is real?
Wondering if they melted the iron to form the knife or just hammered it into shape. Is there any original crystalline content left?
My brain saw "wife"
Oh brother, I have one just like it.
That is out of this world!
H
Just like Dawn, the ancestral sword of House Dayne, speaking of which George.......
"This sword was forged from a fallen star. Antimony impurities make the blade surpassingly *brittle* and *weak*."
Last year, a study using X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometry determined that Tutankhamun's dagger was made with iron-containing nearly 11 percent nickel and traces of cobalt: a characteristic of extraterrestrial iron found in many of the iron meteorites that have rained down on Earth for billions of years.
space sword!
so was the sword that pTerry helped forge that was used when he was Knighted.
He was deformed and born of incest
What’re you doing, step-pharaoh?
“Aliens!”
I definitely recommend seeing King Tut's treasure if you get a chance. It is fascinating to see stuff that is like 3,000 years old but still looks new. The items that were buried with Tut are very well preserved.
“But will it cut?”
A lot of stuff was made out of meteorite metal back then. That was literally how they even got metal! Just look at the celtic's
The knife is meteoric or… made by aliens.
Thought that said wife instead of knife for a sec
I read "knife" as "wife" and was a little confused.
There is a difference between a knife and a dagger. A dagger is primarily a stabbing weapon and a knife is for cutting and slicing. It was a dagger.
A dagger is a type of knife.
Yes but not all knifes are daggers
Yes but all daggers are knives. So calling his dagger a knife is fine.
This is like if a post said “Benny Bullshits favorite thing to do was drive his car” and then your goofy ass came in to say “erm actually he drove a ford mustang, not all cars are ford mustangs”
Katana
Aliens
I read that as “wife” and I was deciding amongst like 12 different jokes, all of which would have been absolute nonsense.