These standing stones are enormous and made of solid granite.
When you're near them, they are genuinely impressive and imposing,
the sort of thing that makes you wonder how ancient people ever managed to raise them up,
and to place them so precisely that they act as an astronomical calendar.
These particular stones don't make you wonder that, though.
Because these are the Georgia Guidestones, in the USA,
and they were put up in 1980 by modern people with modern equipment.
They are not a theme park fiberglass replica, though,
they're more than a hundred tons of rock and they are built to last.
Inscribed on them in eight languages are
what seem to be rules for a future post-apocalyptic civilisation,
the sort of thing that maybe seemed like a reasonable way
to send a message to the far distant future
in an era when the Cold War was looking dicey
and Ronald Reagan's finger was very close to the nuclear button.
The person or people who paid for these stones stayed anonymous,
so no-one knows if they were actually intending to troll conspiracy theorists.
Maybe they really were just hoping to create a modern Stonehenge,
something that could be taken as a set of principles
for the world's population to follow as we recovered after an apocalypse.
This might seem like a reasonable purchase, even altruistic from a certain perspective,
if you're the sort of person who writes a story in your head that says,
yes, I'll be dead in a nuclear fireball, but if civilization survives,
perhaps someone will come across these, perhaps some language will have survived,
perhaps I will have influenced the entire path of a civilization to come.
It'd take a lot of money and a lot of ego,
but then, it was America in the 1980s,
so perhaps we should just be surprised that there aren't more stones like this all over the place.
Imagine a dozen different monuments, all with different rules,
and all being followed by a different group of survivors.
I don't normally speculate like this in videos,
but these stones inspire some pretty good stories.
And some pretty bad ones, too.
Because like I said, if you wanted to inflame conspiracy theorists?
Building a modern Stongehenge, that acts as an astronomical calendar,
with ten commandments inscribed upon it,
one of which says that you should "guide reproduction wisely",
and another says that it'd be a really good idea
to have a world population under 10% of what it currently is,
and doing all that while hiding your identity?
Yes, I can see why that might make people with a slightly tenuous grasp on reality a bit angry.
All the best secret societies, after all,
do put up giant monuments advertising their goals for the world.
Maybe someday we will know the real reasons behind these stones:
but until then there's a rule of thumb called Occam's Razor.
The simplest solution tends to be the correct one.
And a rich person who saw Stonehenge and thought "I want one of those"
is a pretty simple solution.
♪ [a faint recording of the US Marine Band playing "Nearer, My God, To Thee"] ♪