3 ms·
Whilst being aware that the civilization in question ended significantly before European arrival in South America, I have two questions that hopefully someone s
by gabriel666smith 2mo ago
Whilst being aware that the civilization in question ended significantly before European arrival in South America, I have two questions that hopefully someone smart here can help with:
1. The spread of disease (smallpox specifically) being fast enough that most European sources describe a relatively uninhabited Amazon strikes me as potentially interesting. This means that contact and trade was happening between locales. We know that part is true from many sources, but:
A) Can we roughly model the spread of smallpox by looking for (for example) populated areas mentioned in one European source that are unmentioned, or mentioned as empty, by another source that would have likely crossed paths with that civ?
B) Can this tell us anything about trade routes and volume? Can we make any inferences about pop density, even very weak inferences, which might help us know where to look for stronger evidence? It does seem like each European discovery historically revises the estimated population(s) upwards.
2. LiDAR is awesome. Maybe not in the Amazon - in less foliage-dense places - is it being combined with, for example, an EMF (or some other kind of more granular lightweight detection system) - strapped to a drone?
It feels like once we see something interesting on LiDAR, sending a swarm of lightweight drones with some kind of metal detector sellotaped to the underside is quite a quick way to get interesting information. I don’t know a lot about radio waves, so I don’t know if there’s a suitably lightweight detector for this purpose.
- defrost 2mo ago> some kind of metal detector sellotaped to the underside Been a thing since the 1970s, physics dictates dimensions though - you can go wrap or dangle: * https://csegrecorder.com/articles/view/the-megatem-fixed-wing-transient-em-system-applied-to-mineral-exploration https://csegrecorder.com/articles/view/the-megatem-fixed-win... * https://cseg.ca/airborne-electromagnetic-systems-state-of-the-art-and-future-directions/ https://cseg.ca/airborne-electromagnetic-systems-state-of-th... * https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/disciplines/geophysics/airborne-electromagnetics https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/disciplines/geophysi...
- Cthulhu_ 2mo agoI've seen the 'dangle' type in action in the Netherlands last year (I was on the island of Texel for vacation); they were doing a project of mapping underground water if I recall correctly. Really interesting stuff. Would be neat if this could be automated and scaled up, I'm sure most of the world is as of yet unmapped with these kinds of detectors. Same with under the ocean.
- gabriel666smith 2mo agoAwesome, thanks for these. I wonder if you couldn’t distribute heavier parts across a swarm - perhaps separating the sender and receiver(s) - running the wave at an angle (or many angles simultaneously) to the surface. The sources mention mostly aircraft, rather than drones, and human pilots aren’t as good as drones at flying in extremely tight formations, which might allow (if the tech allows in the first place!) parts to be distributed to work around pesky laws of flight.
- Symmetry 2mo agoBetween the Mason-Dixon line and the opposite latitude in Brazil it was more Malaria, Yellow Fever, and other mosquito born diseases rather than smallpox that did most of the killing. Malaria alone is responsible for about 5% of all human deaths through history, compared to something like 1% for smallpox.
- gabriel666smith 2mo agoAh, interesting - no idea about mosquito range, or if disease can transmit between mosquitoes, but probably puts a cork in that idea. Thanks!