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PhD student finds lost city in Mexico jungle
- OgsyedIE 2y agoThis link: https://i.redd.it/gm8273jvjrk71.jpg https://i.redd.it/gm8273jvjrk71.jpg is an map (outdated though, it dates to 2019 AFAIK) of how much of the Earth's surface has been mapped by google street view. Is there a similar map product that shows how much of the Earth's surface has yet to be surveyed with lidar (or a suitable equivalent)? I would assume that areas with zero vegetation can be covered by satellite imagery but it is possible that the resolution is poor (for example, SRTM had a 30m resolution).
- ipdashc 2y agoThat map, while interesting, seems entirely subjective - the whole appearance of the map can be determined by the thickness that you set the street view lines to, no?
- bee_rider 2y agoI guess you just lose the ability to distinguish between areas past some density, right? What would be a good way to improve it… maybe apply some filter, Lanzcos or whatever?
- AlotOfReading 2y agoThe technical term is "viewshed analysis", what areas are visible from a given set of points. Any competent GIS system will have ways to do it, but peakfinder.com works pretty well as a more visually interesting demo.
- perihelions 2y agoThat doesn't appear to be the same problem?
- AlotOfReading 2y agoGuess I didn't read the parent closely enough. Thought it was asking what the best way to figure out the actual coverage without arbitrarily increasing line width as you zoom out.
- columbus567 2y agoImagine putting that on a resume for a postdoc - discovered lost Mayan city
- potato3732842 2y agoFlock will hire him as a consultant when they develop their upcoming "fine people for unpermitted garden sheds" service. (joking, but sadly not joking)
- SoftTalker 2y agoCities and counties have been using traditional aerial photography for that for a long time now.
- vips7L 2y agoI have friends who work in InsuranceTech and they use satellite images of houses when someone apply for home owners insurance. They've said it flags people with trampolines all the time.
- SoftTalker 2y agoMy insurance company asked about that when I got the policy, I said Yes we have one and it was not an issue. Perhaps they are charging me a higher premium, but not enough that I noticed. Though we no longer have it, so perhaps I should mention that next time I meet with my agent.
- jll29 2y agoI was going to say: that's a thesis result sorted - check.
- 77pt77 2y agoIt's going to get as common as > New exoplanet discovered Very soon. And therefore unworthy of barely being mentioned.
- 2y ago
- advisedwang 2y agoOnce again, the sensationalized "discovery" of a "lost" by people that fly over with lidar and never talk to the locals. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/did-recent-expedition-really-discover-lost-city-honduras-180954559/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/did-recent-expedit...
- OgsyedIE 2y agoWhat is the proportion of villages where surveying the locals will lead to documenting an abandoned city that is otherwise only known to the locals? If only 2% of villages have an undiscovered profitable heritage, then 98% of surveys will show no results, which makes it difficult for anthropological surveys to compete with lidar for grant funding, especially when lidar is still new enough to seem "sexy" and "sci-fi".
- dylan604 2y agoThrow in some AI processing of the LIDAR data, and watch those funding dollars flood in!!
- AlotOfReading 2y agoTo put into context how few funding dollars there are in archaeology, the NEH currently has $800k available for archaeological field research proposals. That's the largest "funding agency" pool for generic field research. This same funding agency that doesn't directly fund computer research also has $2.5M available for proposals specifically targeted to starting collaborations researching AI alignment. They have another $3.5M for the actual collaborations themselves, and an additional $2.2M for AI work that "contributes to scholarly research in the humanities".
- mitthrowaway2 2y agoCan the locals draw a map of these lost cities? Or are they just aware that there are many lost cities, but without knowing exactly where they are? And for that matter, if the locals did know the specifics but weren't spreading that knowledge, then it still can constitute a discovery. "Discovery" can mean revealing knowledge that was previously known to insiders, eg. if I say "I discovered an underground smuggling ring and reported it to the police", you probably wouldn't argue that "you didn't discover anything; the smugglers already knew about it".
- alberth 2y agoLidar has been finding a lot of lost cities. Not discounting this finding. It's just becoming more common.
- HenryBemis 2y agoI've been watching the Ancient Apocalypse (S2) on Netflix and I had similar thoughts on discoveries. With drones and lidars we can discover so many of these villages/towns/cities, but the challenge would be to actually send boots on the ground and excavate into getting meaningful data/findings. At the same time, the baddies (grave robbers, looters, etc.) can use the same tech and beat us to the game.
- alberth 2y agoNational Geographic even created a TV show 5-years ago specifically on this topic. "Lost Cities with Albert Lin" (2019) It's an 11-episode show where they use Lidar in each episode to find lost cities. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10366494/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10366494/
- Hikikomori 2y agoThat drivel got a second season?
- a2l3aQ 2y agoThat you Flint?
- Hikikomori 2y agoNobody has a more appropriate name than that man.
- dylan604 2y ago“I was on something like page 16 of Google search " whoa, I had no idea there were that many pages in a google search. that's some serious googlefu to get that kind of a result. I guess it definitely says something about the researcher too to continue on that deep. I'm expecting that comment to have been hyperbolic though
- bee_rider 2y ago> “I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organisation for environmental monitoring,” explains Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane university in the US. Oh, I thought he’s just gotten lost deep in the jungle (presumably looking for the free pizza that was left over from the undergrads’ seminar). But wow, 16’th page of Google, that really is uncharted territory.
- kyle-rb 2y agoWe shouldn't be rushing to explore space when we haven't even explored our own planet's ocean, or page 16 of google search results.
- melling 2y agoAt last count, we had 8 billion people on the planet. I think it’ll be fine if some people do space while others work on oceans. Must admit this is the most overused excuse I’ve ever heard in my life. “Hey, let’s all work on this one problem and ignore every other problem.”
- soupfordummies 2y agoLol I think they were just having a laugh
- churchill 2y agoBut, who's going to end world hunger though? /s
- notahacker 2y agoPage 16 of Google search results: the final frontier. starts sketching out a funding application for a mission to explore page 17
- zeristor 2y ago"There be dragons!"
- SoftTalker 2y agoI love the idea that there might have been fully technological civilizations of humans on earth that have been totally lost to time. I know that the Maya were not that, but go back 10,000 years maybe, who knows?
- matthewdgreen 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis
- superxpro12 2y agoIs "love" really the right descriptor here? The implications are truly depressing.
- SoftTalker 2y agoYes, it would be a sobering reminder on how essentially powerless we are in the face of global calamity. You see this recognized in religions and in pre-technological societies, but few of us in the modern era do.
- ks2048 2y agoNo need to get depressed about an idea with zero evidence.
- keybored 2y agoConsidering what terrible stewards of the the Earth and of each other we are, depressing is also a wrong descriptor.
- melling 2y agoThat means we squandered almost 10,000 years of human history before humans became an advanced civilization. We could have invented flight, discovered antibiotics, etc five thousand years ago.
- bee_rider 2y ago
- Oarch 2y agoSighs and resets the 'Days since we discovered a lost city using LiDAR' counter back to zero.
- bkandel 2y agoHow is this by accident? He was specifically looking for datasets for this purpose and found a good one, then loaded it into a program to find man-made structures.
- Animats 2y ago"It is just 15 minutes hike from a major road near Xpujil where mostly Maya people now live." And nobody sent a drone yet? The BBC has a jungle drone team.[1] [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3P6MX7bbl0Y5SSnvJWPM4PP/drones-in-the-jungle https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3P6MX7bbl0Y5SSnvJW...
- muststopmyths 2y agoIt won't be visible to the naked eye. Maya ruins like these are covered by centuries of overgrowth. Lidar scans can spot shapes buried under this overgrowth, but from the air it'll at best look like random hills of dirt. Maybe if there are structures comparable to Calakmul (which is close to Xpujil), you'll see some rocks on a tall hill.
- ghssds 2y agoHow many cities are lost every year? Can finding those cities help alleviate the housing crisis? Won't the inhabitants of those cities complain about disrupted postal service? I have so many questions!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- chrisbrandow 2y agofor a $500 plane ticket and a 4 hour drive, seems like someone has surely gone there by now, just to ground-truth this. Otherwise, seems like a fun (with plenty of risks, obvs) way of being "the first" to lay eyes on this.
- whartung 2y agoI'm guessing you've never actually been in "the jungle". It's not hospitable at all. The other thing is that that area of Mexico is just teeming with this stuff. There's just an untold boatload of "lost cities" in there. They can't dig and map the stuff they are working on, much less any of the numerous finds that have been made in the past 10-20 years. "Oh, yea, yay, another lost Mayan city. Woo hoo."
- AlotOfReading 2y agoA good chunk of Central America is like this. One person I know maintaining maps of historic Maya settlements was tracking thousands of known names, most of which were positionally located by rough distance estimates from some other coarsely located feature. Many didn't even have that, just a name in some historic document.
- stavros 2y agoThat's kind of like finding ancient stuff in Greece. You dig a hole, and there's some ancient pots and pans in there. It's gotten to the point where people who want to build houses just carry the ancient findings away in the night, because the antiquities service will otherwise deem your plot an archaeological site.
- EasyMark 2y agoThis type of thing happens in most countries. In the USA they actually have to hire bored archeologists to check things out as part of any contract from the federal government (and a lot of state governments) on anything that might have a hint of Native American relics.
- 2y ago
- cossatot 2y agoThe actual journal article is here (open access): https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/running-out-of-empty-space-environmental-lidar-and-the-crowded-ancient-landscape-of-campeche-mexico/FFDB435047017853F26CFC5D8804B08D https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/ru... Based on the images, I think that the largest structure is about here: 18.891548°N, -89.323622°E. But you can't see anything in google earth (otherwise why would he have had to traverse 16 pages of google search results).
- 0xbadcafebee 2y agoThrow a stone and you'll find a lost city in Mexico. Lost cities found so far: Acanceh, Aguada Fénix, Aké, Balamku, Balankanche, Becan, Bonampak, Calakmul, Chacchoben, Chactún, Chicanná, Chinkultic, Chichen Itza, Chunchucmil, Chunhuhub, Chunlimón, Coba, Comalcalco, Dzibanche, Dzibilchaltun, Edzna, Ekʼ Balam, Hormiguero, Izama, lIzapa, Jaina, Joljaʼ, Kabah, Kiuic, Kohunlich, Komchen, Labna, La Mar, Mayapan, Maní, Moral Reforma, Muyil, Ocomtún, Oxkintok, Palenque, Plan de Ayutla, Pomona, Punta Sur, Río Bec, San Gervasio, Sayil, Tamchen, Toniná, Tortuguero, Tulum, Uxmal, Uxul, Valeriana, Xcaret, Xelha, Xlapak, Xpuhil, Xtampak, Yaxchilan, Yaxuná, Yula, Yoʼokop.
- jacobolus 2y agoThe larger of these are definitely not "lost" (as in, local people who are the descendants of their inhabitants have known exactly where they are, continuously since they were abandoned as places to live a millennium ago), though most of them are in the middle of the jungle. Southern Mexico and Central America are incredibly beautiful though, and ancient ruins there are fascinating places to visit.
- dreamcompiler 2y agoTulum for example was never "lost." It sits directly on the coast and it was "found" by Europeans (from a ship!) in 1518. The local Maya people knew exactly where it was. Today the Maya still live in the area and they support their families by working in the tourist industry.
- devoutsalsa 2y agoCalakmul is so cool’s. So is the nearby volcano of the bats.
- karim79 2y agoPlease don't tell Graham Hancock[0]. He'll claim this as more proof for his ancient ice age civilisation (for which there is no evidence). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Hancock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Hancock
- pookha 2y agoSince we're going there...Graham Hancock's a philistine but I'd take his word over somebody like Flint Dibble. Dibble lied and pushed off bad information to win a debate and he did a disservice to himself and his peers. Many of whom work thankless jobs out on remote sites with no health insurance and for pitiful wages. They shouldn't be represented by a smug arrogant conman that passes off irrelevant studies on metallurgy, outright lies about ship wrecks and has to name drop and smear the civilians at any chance (I'd like to see that 15th century drawing of an island orthorectified like it's an image captured from a multispectural sensor Mr. Rogan) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1de_GHm63k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1de_GHm63k
- karim79 2y agoWow, thanks for this info. It's incredible how much weight podcasts such as these provide to people who are basically either liars or just plain incompetent.
- elphinstone 2y agoI wonder if tomb raiders and other artifact thieves are using the same methods and arriving faster.