Ancient Sumerian texts claim that some kings ruled for hundreds or even thousands of years—clearly impossible by normal human standards. This project explores a deliberately speculative idea: what if those reign lengths reflected relativistic time dilation rather than literal lifespans?
Focusing on the city of Kish, the analysis treats the city as a hypothetical spacecraft traveling at near-relativistic speeds. Using standard physics formulas, Monte Carlo simulations, and galactic models, the study estimates the velocity such a craft would require, how far it could have traveled, and how many Sun-like stars would lie within that range.
To do this quickly and interactively, GitHub Copilot was used to generate and evolve Python code for simulations, star-count models, and Drake-equation calculations. The results show that even extremely rare technological civilizations could, in principle, exist in large numbers when millions of stars are considered—highlighting the famous Fermi paradox.
The project is not a historical claim or a serious extraterrestrial hypothesis. Rather, it is an educational demonstration of how physics, astronomy, probability, and AI-assisted coding can be combined to explore bold “what if?” questions and deepen intuition about scale, uncertainty, and scientific modeling.
“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
— Albert Einstein
Code, Data, and Extended Documentation
The full computational materials for this project—including data files, Jupyter notebooks, generated results, LaTeX source files, and supporting documentation—are publicly available in the following GitHub repository: Crimson-Reason/Sumerian-Kings
An expanded version of this weblog post, containing additional technical detail and background discussion, is available as a separate document: Documentation/Fun with Sumerian Kings List with GitHub Copilot.docx. Phrasly.AI gave it a score of 15% AI and 85 % Human generated content.
For transparency and reproducibility, a consolidated record of the author’s interactions with GitHub Copilot during the development of this work is also provided: Documentation/Combined_Session_Summary_Analysis_20251230.docx
