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This highly corroborates Charles C Mann's book 1491: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus https://en.m.wikipedi

This highly corroborates Charles C Mann's book 1491: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the... From wikipedia: The book presents recent research findings in different fields that suggest human populations in the Western Hemisphere—that is, the indigenous peoples of the Americas—were more numerous, had arrived earlier, were more sophisticated culturally, and controlled and shaped the natural landscape to a greater extent than scholars had previously thought.

XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
1491 and 1493 were very enjoyable. I'm having less fun with The Wizard and the Prophet
52-6F-62 9y ago
This is not my field of expertise, but why wouldn't we just run LIDAR scans of as much of the earth's surface as possible? Is it prohibitively expensive at this point? Is the computation [relatively] expensive? Is there a sound reason we don't race to do more? I get the feeling this kind of data could inspire generations of new archaeologists and historians. There are also some pseudo-archeological and pseudo-historical claims that might be put to rest (or less likely, cause a revolution in human self-knowledge). Eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_pyramid_claims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_pyramid_claims I would also love to see plots like Cahokia (and others like it) scanned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia
- wjnc 9y ago
  A few hints from the article: 810 sq miles mapped, a three year project and lidar flying by helicopter. Another giveaway is the search for MH370. In some dimensions Earth is still huge!
  - baron816 9y ago
    I wonder how much city life biases us to think the planet is smaller than it is. Perhaps it explains fears of overpopulation.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - acjohnson55 9y ago
      To me, fears of overpopulation have less to do with how much of the earth serves as living space, but how much human activity currently impacts nearly every corner of the planet. I think it's plausible that we can lessen human impact without actually decreasing population. Not sure it's likely, though.
      - mirimir 9y ago
        I recall a letter to Science from the mid 70s, rebutting The Limits to Growth. I have tried to find it more-or-less lately, with no luck. As I recall, its author argued that the Earth could support well over 10^8 people in Trantor style. He assumed unlimited energy from fusion, and substantial food synthesis. Only humans, pets, crops, livestock, and requisite insects and microorganisms would survive. The planetary surface would support a building ~16 km high. At that height, the surface would be in thermal equilibrium at ~1500°C. But hey, if that were doable, why not just build space habitat's?
        PoachedSausage 9y ago
        Because it is cheaper and easier to build stuff down here. Space habitats require thinking in terms of systems, dealing with inputs and outputs. Humans haven't mastered systems thinking yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
        mirimir 9y ago
        I guess. I've been reading Banks' Culture series ;)
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    For scale, the Amazon jungle is a couple million square miles.
  - 52-6F-62 9y ago
    I guess I'll just have to study up on the tech. IIRC there was a fairly quick LIDAR demo put on by a team at MIT that scanned the campus and surrounding areas in a relatively brief amount of time using a drone, I think. My ignorance on the subject of LIDAR has me wondering why we can't use a faster traveling vehicle, or would it be possible to do perform scans with something like a fleet of balloons that stream the data back vs one static device.
    - ahi 9y ago
      Some rudimentary googling, MIT campus is 168 acres or .26 sq miles. So the 810 sq miles in 3 years is still pretty impressive.
      - mygo 9y ago
        MIT also has wifi. And power outlets.
    - zo1 9y ago
      LIDAR data requires precise location-information of the scanning-device, otherwise the data you collect is at best useless, and at-most wildly skewed. This is because all the points are in-reference to the location of the device. A faster traveling vehicle inherently means less-accurate location measurements.
      - nitrogen 9y ago
        Can SLAM be applied in this case?
        zo1 9y ago
        It definitely can, though accuracy would always be a big concern. IIRC, the Google self-driving car used LIDAR. Though their localization algorithms included many sensors, with the LIDAR data was just one of them.
- Dangeranger 9y ago
  LiDAR collection is pretty dense from a data perspective. When I was working with helicopter collection teams we would regularly collect 1TB of point data per day at around 120 points per square meter. Based on the density of the canopy in Central America, the teams are probably using a density greater than that, and are using "multiple return" depth mapping so that they can see through the forest. Processing LiDAR data is also quite expensive in terms of the hardware required and expertise of the people needed to correct the data back at the office. Typically LiDAR processing workstations have around 128-256 GB of RAM and a large RAID array of SSDs to quickly perform corrections interactively. After the initial correction, most of the data is thrown out or "filtered" down to just the points of interest to save on space. Since it's quite easy to end up with hundreds of TBs worth of point data within a few months of collection. If the team is using colorized LiDAR, orthographic, and oblique images then that can take up even more space. So the short answer to why more of the world hasn't been mapped with LiDAR techniques is money, time, and storage space. But with self driving cars now making LiDAR more prevalent, and storage space becoming more affordable every year, mapping whole regions with LiDAR is a more reasonable task. NOTE: One of my former jobs was working with aerial LiDAR collection teams to manage the data and processing of the collected assets. This was around 2012 so some of the numbers may have changed since then.
  - bradneuberg 9y ago
    Perhaps neural networks can help with filtering and segmenting the point clouds as well?
  - 52-6F-62 9y ago
    Thanks, this is the kind of information I was curious about receiving in a concise digest. So ultimately it sounds like I have to wait a decade or so before we can really proliferate, and to speed it up need a few more eccentric billionaires to get into funding some cool projects. I'll use your information as jumping points to find out more.
    - Dangeranger 9y ago
      My hopes lie with the open sourcing of in-vehicle processing hardware and software that is being used within self driving cars. As of today my understanding is much of that is part of the "secret sauce" of companies like Waymo and others. If it were possible to apply kinematic geo-correction along with point filtering and feature detection during collection then a lot of the "heavy" data could be reduced down to what is just needed for human verification. If you want to start your investigation with existing projects you could have a look at what the United Kingdom is doing with their government LiDAR data sets[0][1]. [0] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/environment-agency-uncovers-landscape-with-laser-mapping https://www.gov.uk/government/news/environment-agency-uncove... [1] http://vterrain.org/Locations/uk/ http://vterrain.org/Locations/uk/
- Avshalom 9y ago
  In addition to what everyone else has said: even if we did we wouldn't necessarily know what to look for. I have a friend who's PHD is trying to figure out what ancient dams look like in order to find sites of ancient agriculture. But that's the thing "what does a 500 year old dam look like" is a lifetime worth of study and is only just now possible. "Just scan the fuck out of it and look for wierd stuff" is the dream but at the moment (as the other comments point out) we can't just scan everything but ALSO we don't know what's wierd.
- nyolfen 9y ago
  > In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
  - moh_maya 9y ago
    for those (like me) wondering where this wonderful passage is excerpted from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science ""On Exactitude in Science" or "On Rigor in Science" (the original Spanish-language title is "Del rigor en la ciencia") is a one-paragraph short story by Jorge Luis Borges, about the map-territory relation, written in the form of a literary forgery."
DubiousPusher 9y ago
I'm reading this now and it's excellent. It has the important characteristic so many popular revisionist histories lack, restraint. Later day American archaeology practically oozes with opportunities to speculate. Actual physical discoveries beg to be contextualized by our modern imaginations. Mann does visit some of these tangents of the imagination but he is also very careful to bracket these with explanations of what is known for a fact and what is not.
- jcranmer 9y ago
  Mann does pick the most optimistic ranges of estimates to try to paint a particular narrative, but he is also very frank that he is doing that, and he repeats this fact several times throughout the book. It would be wonderful if more books were willing to do that sort of guarding to emphasize how much the evidence really supports the thesis. Considering that pre-Columbian America tends to get the short-end of the stick in history, I'm willing to tolerate the constant pushing on the narrative to help emphasize that the popular view of pre-Columbian American is more often incorrect to correct.
NelsonMinar 9y ago
1491 is great. It's twelve years old now; I keep waiting for a similar book updated with new scholarship. Things are changing fast.
DrScump 9y ago
Please use desktop (not mobile) links here, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_A...
FabHK 9y ago
> Charles C Mann's book 1491 That's not the guy though putting forward the claim that Chinese admiral Zheng He made it all the way to America?

XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago

1491 and 1493 were very enjoyable. I'm having less fun with The Wizard and the Prophet

52-6F-62 9y ago

This is not my field of expertise, but why wouldn't we just run LIDAR scans of as much of the earth's surface as possible? Is it prohibitively expensive at this point? Is the computation [relatively] expensive? Is there a sound reason we don't race to do more? I get the feeling this kind of data could inspire generations of new archaeologists and historians. There are also some pseudo-archeological and pseudo-historical claims that might be put to rest (or less likely, cause a revolution in human self-knowledge). Eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_pyramid_claims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_pyramid_claims I would also love to see plots like Cahokia (and others like it) scanned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia

wjnc 9y ago
A few hints from the article: 810 sq miles mapped, a three year project and lidar flying by helicopter. Another giveaway is the search for MH370. In some dimensions Earth is still huge!
- baron816 9y ago
  I wonder how much city life biases us to think the planet is smaller than it is. Perhaps it explains fears of overpopulation.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - acjohnson55 9y ago
    To me, fears of overpopulation have less to do with how much of the earth serves as living space, but how much human activity currently impacts nearly every corner of the planet. I think it's plausible that we can lessen human impact without actually decreasing population. Not sure it's likely, though.
    - mirimir 9y ago
      I recall a letter to Science from the mid 70s, rebutting The Limits to Growth. I have tried to find it more-or-less lately, with no luck. As I recall, its author argued that the Earth could support well over 10^8 people in Trantor style. He assumed unlimited energy from fusion, and substantial food synthesis. Only humans, pets, crops, livestock, and requisite insects and microorganisms would survive. The planetary surface would support a building ~16 km high. At that height, the surface would be in thermal equilibrium at ~1500°C. But hey, if that were doable, why not just build space habitat's?
      - PoachedSausage 9y ago
        Because it is cheaper and easier to build stuff down here. Space habitats require thinking in terms of systems, dealing with inputs and outputs. Humans haven't mastered systems thinking yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
        mirimir 9y ago
        I guess. I've been reading Banks' Culture series ;)
- maxerickson 9y ago
  For scale, the Amazon jungle is a couple million square miles.
- 52-6F-62 9y ago
  I guess I'll just have to study up on the tech. IIRC there was a fairly quick LIDAR demo put on by a team at MIT that scanned the campus and surrounding areas in a relatively brief amount of time using a drone, I think. My ignorance on the subject of LIDAR has me wondering why we can't use a faster traveling vehicle, or would it be possible to do perform scans with something like a fleet of balloons that stream the data back vs one static device.
  - ahi 9y ago
    Some rudimentary googling, MIT campus is 168 acres or .26 sq miles. So the 810 sq miles in 3 years is still pretty impressive.
    - mygo 9y ago
      MIT also has wifi. And power outlets.
  - zo1 9y ago
    LIDAR data requires precise location-information of the scanning-device, otherwise the data you collect is at best useless, and at-most wildly skewed. This is because all the points are in-reference to the location of the device. A faster traveling vehicle inherently means less-accurate location measurements.
    - nitrogen 9y ago
      Can SLAM be applied in this case?
      - zo1 9y ago
        It definitely can, though accuracy would always be a big concern. IIRC, the Google self-driving car used LIDAR. Though their localization algorithms included many sensors, with the LIDAR data was just one of them.
Dangeranger 9y ago
LiDAR collection is pretty dense from a data perspective. When I was working with helicopter collection teams we would regularly collect 1TB of point data per day at around 120 points per square meter. Based on the density of the canopy in Central America, the teams are probably using a density greater than that, and are using "multiple return" depth mapping so that they can see through the forest. Processing LiDAR data is also quite expensive in terms of the hardware required and expertise of the people needed to correct the data back at the office. Typically LiDAR processing workstations have around 128-256 GB of RAM and a large RAID array of SSDs to quickly perform corrections interactively. After the initial correction, most of the data is thrown out or "filtered" down to just the points of interest to save on space. Since it's quite easy to end up with hundreds of TBs worth of point data within a few months of collection. If the team is using colorized LiDAR, orthographic, and oblique images then that can take up even more space. So the short answer to why more of the world hasn't been mapped with LiDAR techniques is money, time, and storage space. But with self driving cars now making LiDAR more prevalent, and storage space becoming more affordable every year, mapping whole regions with LiDAR is a more reasonable task. NOTE: One of my former jobs was working with aerial LiDAR collection teams to manage the data and processing of the collected assets. This was around 2012 so some of the numbers may have changed since then.
- bradneuberg 9y ago
  Perhaps neural networks can help with filtering and segmenting the point clouds as well?
- 52-6F-62 9y ago
  Thanks, this is the kind of information I was curious about receiving in a concise digest. So ultimately it sounds like I have to wait a decade or so before we can really proliferate, and to speed it up need a few more eccentric billionaires to get into funding some cool projects. I'll use your information as jumping points to find out more.
  - Dangeranger 9y ago
    My hopes lie with the open sourcing of in-vehicle processing hardware and software that is being used within self driving cars. As of today my understanding is much of that is part of the "secret sauce" of companies like Waymo and others. If it were possible to apply kinematic geo-correction along with point filtering and feature detection during collection then a lot of the "heavy" data could be reduced down to what is just needed for human verification. If you want to start your investigation with existing projects you could have a look at what the United Kingdom is doing with their government LiDAR data sets[0][1]. [0] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/environment-agency-uncovers-landscape-with-laser-mapping https://www.gov.uk/government/news/environment-agency-uncove... [1] http://vterrain.org/Locations/uk/ http://vterrain.org/Locations/uk/
Avshalom 9y ago
In addition to what everyone else has said: even if we did we wouldn't necessarily know what to look for. I have a friend who's PHD is trying to figure out what ancient dams look like in order to find sites of ancient agriculture. But that's the thing "what does a 500 year old dam look like" is a lifetime worth of study and is only just now possible. "Just scan the fuck out of it and look for wierd stuff" is the dream but at the moment (as the other comments point out) we can't just scan everything but ALSO we don't know what's wierd.
nyolfen 9y ago
> In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
- moh_maya 9y ago
  for those (like me) wondering where this wonderful passage is excerpted from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science ""On Exactitude in Science" or "On Rigor in Science" (the original Spanish-language title is "Del rigor en la ciencia") is a one-paragraph short story by Jorge Luis Borges, about the map-territory relation, written in the form of a literary forgery."

DubiousPusher 9y ago

I'm reading this now and it's excellent. It has the important characteristic so many popular revisionist histories lack, restraint. Later day American archaeology practically oozes with opportunities to speculate. Actual physical discoveries beg to be contextualized by our modern imaginations. Mann does visit some of these tangents of the imagination but he is also very careful to bracket these with explanations of what is known for a fact and what is not.

jcranmer 9y ago
Mann does pick the most optimistic ranges of estimates to try to paint a particular narrative, but he is also very frank that he is doing that, and he repeats this fact several times throughout the book. It would be wonderful if more books were willing to do that sort of guarding to emphasize how much the evidence really supports the thesis. Considering that pre-Columbian America tends to get the short-end of the stick in history, I'm willing to tolerate the constant pushing on the narrative to help emphasize that the popular view of pre-Columbian American is more often incorrect to correct.

NelsonMinar 9y ago

1491 is great. It's twelve years old now; I keep waiting for a similar book updated with new scholarship. Things are changing fast.

DrScump 9y ago

Please use desktop (not mobile) links here, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_A...

FabHK 9y ago

> Charles C Mann's book 1491 That's not the guy though putting forward the claim that Chinese admiral Zheng He made it all the way to America?