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Cold war satellite images reveal unknown Roman forts
- getwiththeprog 3y agoOr see the original article at https://phys.org/news/2023-10-spy-satellites-reveal-hundreds-undiscovered.html https://phys.org/news/2023-10-spy-satellites-reveal-hundreds...
- jksmith 3y agoWell, looks like Pythagoras was common knowledge by that time.
- kevmo 3y agoWould be interesting to read a more technical analysis about the software/code used to analyze all these images.
- my12parsecs 3y agoI thought the declassification of US government documents was 25 years. Or I guess there's an exemption when it comes to military intelligence? I wonder where and when the data was collected.
- consp 3y agoMaybe it's just analog to digital conversion. Some stuff only gets used for research after some digitization project since it's not really searchable on a more global scale otherwise. Could be completely wrong here of course.
- Arainach 3y agoWhat do you mean by "where and when the data was collected"? As the article says, the photos are from the 60s and 70s in Iraq and Syria. The source of the photos was the CORONA and HEXAGON satellites: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/wall-or-a-road-a-remote-sensingbased-investigation-of-fortifications-on-romes-eastern-frontier/8FE59FB0D5476EA329614EEC6DC414FD https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/wa... The journal article cites its sources which you can use to understand more: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00934690.2020.1713285 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00934690.2020.1... The data has been available for quite a while, but available is different from usable: > While challenges involved in spatially correcting these unusual panoramic film images has long served as a stumbling block to researchers, an online tool called “Sunspot” now offers a straightforward process for efficient and accurate orthorectification of CORONA, helping to unlock the potential of this historical imagery for global-scale archaeological prospection. With these new opportunities come significant new challenges in how best to search through large imagery datasets like that offered by CORONA.
- my12parsecs 3y agoYou're right I should've looked more closely, but I was just wondering about what it said towards the end of the article about U2 spy photographs and what's becoming declassified.
- jjulius 3y ago> After 25 years, declassification review is automatic with nine narrow exceptions that allow information to remain as classified. At 50 years, there are two exceptions, and classifications beyond 75 years require special permission.[0] The nine exemptions can be found at the Justice Department's website[1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declassification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declassification [1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/open/declassification/declassification-faq https://www.justice.gov/archives/open/declassification/decla...
- blincoln 3y agoThe journal article is much more interesting than the Guardian article, IMO. Thank you for sharing the link.
- acheron 3y agoWhy HN users insist on submitting Guardian articles is beyond me.
- pyrale 3y agoThe amount of available documents has skyrocketed in recent past, especially for present-day history, and they're not always easily usable. For instance, if your interested in the Stalin administration, there are millions of orders, notes, studies and transmissions stored in boxes somewhere. If you were a historian in that time period, studying new documents, a lifetime would only let you see a very tiny fraction of existing sources. Remember these movies where a small-firm lawyer is hammered with tons of document boxes in a discovery process against a big corporation? Well, historians are like that, but they have less money and they don't know how many boxes there are. Also they have to look for the boxes themselves rather than them being delivered at their office. In older, well-studied fields there are few boxes, they are already referenced, and historians have a chance to see everything over their career. In more recent, less studied fields, there are countless unopened boxes.
- quacked 3y agoI'm not a big proponent of LLM proliferation, but I was thinking that mass review of tons of scanned documents might be exactly the sort of thing they're really useful for. Given an AI that hasn't been ruthlessly tuned to be as politically neutral as possible, you could have a huge database and query it in plain English like "were there any documents that made overt reference to extremely corrupt behavior?"
- Fiahil 3y agoTo answer a query, your LLM needs to "read" the documents first. The context window will not be big enough for this, so you have to fine tune the model. Problem is, you need to cross-check with the reference material in case it's subject to hallucinations.
- quacked 3y agoOh, I was thinking that the cross-checking is the point. You'd use the LLM as a "hazily thinking search function" to narrow your examination of old documents, not as a replacement for reading the documents. I don't know what to do about the context window, though.
- dboreham 3y ago> 25 years If that was true we'd have all the Kennedy assassination docs.
- aftbit 3y agoThey're probably exempted under: >25X7 – reveal information that would impair the current ability of U.S. government officials to protect the President, Vice President, and other protectees for whom protection services, in the interest of national security, are authorized;
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoWhich you have to trust them about, because nobody can verify that. Basically back to step one: they tell you what they want.
- mcpackieh 3y agoMaybe it's this one: > (6) reveal information, including foreign government information, that would cause serious harm to relations between the United States and a foreign government, or to ongoing diplomatic activities of the United States;
- ourmandave 3y agoLike that scene from the JFK movie where Donald Sutherland's character is going through a long check list of all the things the secret service would have done. Like, snipers on roof tops, planning the route so there's no slow downs, etc.
- scarecrowbob 3y agoNot that you're incorrect but in addition to withholding documentation, sometimes they just destroy it, too. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nsa/DOCUMENT/940228.htm https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nsa/DOCUMENT/940228.htm " In August 1974, the Joint Chiefs of Staff destroyed all the minutes and transcripts of their meetings going back to 1947, and in 1978 essentially stopped keeping any such records. Only 30 pages of notes have survived, much to the dismay of military historians and scholars of the Cold War." So, like, we will never get the discussions around, say, them using smallpox against North Korea.
- anonu 3y agoMakes me wonder how much information and insights can be gleaned from data that's just out there in the public domain. Can generative AI help with data-mining and extracting interesting and new things like this?
- anonu 3y agoThe Eastern front of the Roman Empire is full of surprises. One fact that always impresses me is that one of the largest hippodromes in the Roman Empire is found in modern-day Tyr, in the South of Lebanon. The entire region is dotted with Roman presence.
- Bayart 3y agoThe area was heavily urbanised before Rome was around, it stands to reason that it remained relevant throughout the Roman Empire (to the point of being the Roman Empire after the slow collapse of the Western administration).
- euroderf 3y agoSuch that Constantinople was more or less the center of "Western Civ" for, like, a thousand years.
- maximinus_thrax 3y agoDo you mean Constantinople was the center of civilization such as a thousand years? Or was it identical to a thousand years?
- Intralexical 3y agoNever fear; the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary can help you out: > like, adverb > 2. used in very informal speech to show that what you are saying may not be exactly right but is nearly so Pedantry is neither clever nor educational.
- maximinus_thrax 3y ago> Pedantry is neither clever nor educational. What about irony?
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- WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago> In addition, many of the likely Roman forts we have documented in this study have already been destroyed by recent urban or agricultural development, and countless others are under extreme threat How many of them are now destroyed due to US bombing?
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- WhereIsTheTruth 3y agoI wanted to point out how this article chose to ignore that fact But people have very small and selective memory it seems, war torn countries, bombing + destruction/looting by local terrorist groups https://www.wmf.org/blog/impact-war-syrias-archaeological-sites-and-damage-prevention-efforts https://www.wmf.org/blog/impact-war-syrias-archaeological-si... https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/race-save-syrias-archaeological-treasures-180958097/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/race-save-syrias-arch... https://www.ucf.edu/news/war-rages-archaeologist-uses-satellites-protect-ancient-sites-syria-iraq/ https://www.ucf.edu/news/war-rages-archaeologist-uses-satell...
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- empath-nirvana 3y agoIn general, ruins in the middle of the desert don't tend to be bombing targets. The vast majority of them will have been destroyed by construction or farms.
- selimthegrim 3y agoThe Plain of Jars would like a word.
- nologic01 3y agoIf you (like me) wondered why go back decades to what is pressumably lower quality imagery than what is available today, here is the spoiler: > They (cold war era) “preserve a high-resolution, stereo perspective on a landscape that has been severely impacted by modern-day land-use change”
- morkalork 3y agoHow did they get the stereo perspective, did they use a delay between photos from the same satellite so there was enough time for it to travel?
- sigmar 3y ago>The first CORONA satellites had a single camera, but a two-camera system was quickly implemented.[40] The front camera was tilted 15° aft, and the rear camera tilted 15° forward, so that a stereoscopic image could be obtained https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORONA_(satellite)#Cameras https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORONA_(satellite)#Cameras
- _whiteCaps_ 3y agoAnd then you can view them with something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereoscope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereoscope
- ska 3y agoThere are different ways to do it, that's one of them. A lot of the techniques were first used with airplanes, then later with satellites. Lots of overlap because planes allowed for easier localization and better resolution, especially earlier on in remote sensing.
- 13of40 3y agoI've done this from a plane before and got some very epic 3D images. I think Mt. Rainier at sunset was one of the best. So yeah, the easy way if your camera is on a moving platform, is take a shot, count three aligators, then take another shot.
- znpy 3y agoThe quality of those images (from 50-60 years ago) really makes me wonder what level of quality/detail can satellite imagery reach (particularly us government spy satellites).
- mannyv 3y agoIn the 90s it was said they could read a license plate. It's probably better by now.
- jtwaleson 3y agoFrom satellites? I find that hard to believe, I always thought that the atmospheric distortion significantly limits the resolution of the images.
- selectodude 3y agoThat picture that Donald Trump tweeted out of the failed Iranian rocket launch seemed sharp enough to make out license plates. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1167493371973255170 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/11674933719732551...
- jtwaleson 3y agoThat structure seems really large. But it’s really sharp and I’d say within an order of magnitude of reading license plates. Doesn’t seem like a stretch to think they can go to higher resolutions.
- justrealist 3y agoThis seems like maybe 10cm resolution. Close but not there.
- mannyv 3y agoThat's why it was classified. Belief is irrelevant. You can lookup keyhole imagery from the old days. Keyhole was the original codename for them.
- araes 3y agoI had a difficult time placing these sites (even with the Tigris-Euphrates) in a larger world context (like, "how large is this area?", and "relative to all Roman area"). So, I made a graphic that may be mildly helpful. [1] Based on a quick check, these best I could find was the fort at Circesium (known as the "farthest fortress" (φρούριον ἔσχατον) of the Romans), which apparently existed by 256 AD. [2] However, the Roman Empire was basically over by 256 AD, and was in the process of splitting into West-East (Crisis of the Third Century[3]) and had likely already formed the breakaway Palmyrene Empire [4] ruled over by Zenobia. All locations have therefore been placed on a map of the Palmyrene Empire (circa 271 AD) relative to Palmyra, Jerusalem, Petra, Cyprus, and similar well known locations. Map was made using the last Figure image from [5], the Palmyrene Empire Map from [6] and a Distort to 3-pt Edessa, Nisibis, and Zenobia. [1] https://i.imgur.com/dMZiloA.png https://i.imgur.com/dMZiloA.png (map I made) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circesium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circesium [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Third_Century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Third_Century [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmyrene_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmyrene_Empire [5] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/wall-or-a-road-a-remote-sensingbased-investigation-of-fortifications-on-romes-eastern-frontier/8FE59FB0D5476EA329614EEC6DC414FD#figures https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/wa... [6] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Empire_of_Palmyra.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Empire_o...
- nextaccountic 3y ago> [1] https://i.imgur.com/dMZiloA.png https://i.imgur.com/dMZiloA.png (map I made) what means the red thing in this map? it's not in the legend
- araes 3y agoFor the red dots, see my comment below @hammock The red square region is an image artifact of the overlay process. If you check the paper linked, there's a legend in the original image, which was then copied over to the combined image. I also discuss the image combining process a bit in the same comment.
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