[HN Gopher] PhD student finds lost city in Mexico jungle
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PhD student finds lost city in Mexico jungle
Author : janpot
Score : 96 points
Date : 2024-10-29 19:04 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| OgsyedIE wrote:
| This link: 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| (outdated though, it dates to 2019 AFAIK) of how much of the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 wrote:
| That 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 wrote:
| I 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?
| columbus567 wrote:
| Imagine putting that on a resume for a postdoc
|
| - discovered lost Mayan city
| jll29 wrote:
| I was going to say: that's a thesis result sorted - check.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Flock will hire him as a consultant when they develop their
| upcoming "fine people for unpermitted garden sheds" service.
|
| (joking, but sadly not joking)
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Cities and counties have been using traditional aerial
| photography for that for a long time now.
| vips7L wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| My 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.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| It's going to get as common as
|
| > New exoplanet discovered
|
| Very soon.
|
| And therefore unworthy of barely being mentioned.
| amelius wrote:
| I was imagining what Indiana Jones would look like in this day
| and age.
| advisedwang wrote:
| Once 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-expedit...
| OgsyedIE wrote:
| What 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 wrote:
| Throw in some AI processing of the LIDAR data, and watch
| those funding dollars flood in!!
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Can 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".
| romwell wrote:
| _> "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"._
|
| Just wanted to say how much I'm enjoying this point.
|
| Newspaper Headline:
|
| _Discoverer of Underground Smuggling Ring Proven a Fraud:
| Ring Leader Says He Discovered It First "_
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Wow archaeology should be rife for disruption if you can just
| go around and ask locals. Seems like anyone with gumption could
| be the next great scientist.
|
| Or maybe one of those locals could be. I wonder what stops
| them?
| 77pt77 wrote:
| Locals lie.
|
| Like a lot!
|
| They even pretend to be able to read ancient
| languages/scripts when in reality that are just making stuff
| up.
| lupusreal wrote:
| This, but unironically.
|
| > _Or maybe one of those locals could be. I wonder what stops
| them?_
|
| They're living their lives, rarely becoming academics in the
| relevant field, assuming that local rock ruin is known to
| somebody outside of their community, or if not, then assuming
| nobody cares anyway.
|
| You can probably find a lot of undocumented ancient stuff by
| asking shepherds in areas known to be territory of ancient
| poorly documented civilizations.
| empath75 wrote:
| "Discovery" probably isn't the right word, but the important
| part isn't knowing that something is there, the important part
| is telling the rest of the world about it.
| dang wrote:
| I appreciate the link but your comment isn't in keeping with
| the site guidelines, which include:
|
| " _Don 't be snarky._"
|
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._"
|
| If you wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the
| intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
| alberth wrote:
| Lidar has been finding a lot of lost cities.
|
| Not discounting this finding. It's just becoming more common.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| National 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/
| Hikikomori wrote:
| That drivel got a second season?
| dylan604 wrote:
| "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
| jeffwask wrote:
| The first 10 are all SEO and AI junk now.
| bee_rider wrote:
| > "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 wrote:
| We 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 wrote:
| At 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."
| notahacker wrote:
| Page 16 of Google search results: the final frontier.
|
| _starts sketching out a funding application for a mission to
| explore page 17_
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| One wonders what other mysteries are waiting to be uncovered
| amid the dark depths of Google search results ...
| pessimizer wrote:
| Since the 16th page of a google search is usually the end of
| the third repetition of the first four pages of a google
| search, he'd probably already missed it three times...
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis
| superxpro12 wrote:
| Is "love" really the right descriptor here? The implications
| are truly depressing.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yes, 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 wrote:
| No need to get depressed about an idea with zero evidence.
| keybored wrote:
| Considering what terrible stewards of the the Earth and of
| each other we are, _depressing_ is also a wrong descriptor.
| melling wrote:
| That 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.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| The oldest city that we've found to date was buried -
| intentionally - under a mound of earth.
|
| There could be dozens of these sites
|
| Lidar the planet
| jfactorial wrote:
| Dinosaurs lived on Earth for about 100,000,000 years, at least
| 50 times as long as our species. Perhaps some dinosaurs were
| the most advanced species our planet has ever seen.
|
| https://pbfcomics.com/comics/dinosaur-meteors/
| lupusreal wrote:
| Sadly there's basically zero chance of that. We don't find
| dinosaur pottery sherds or cola bottles embedded in
| sedimentary rock anywhere.
| digging wrote:
| They lived so long ago, my understanding is such artifacts
| would be extremely unlikely to survive. We also haven't
| looked in that many places at that depth.
|
| I mean it's still quite unlikely though.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| If bones survived, some advanced remnants would also
| survive, I would expect.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I read a stat (maybe not true?) that we've only found
| around one dinosaur fossil for each 10,000 years that they
| existed. Maybe we just haven't found peak dino society yet-
|
| if you broke humanity down into one archaeological find per
| 10k years you probably wouldn't think we had much of a
| society either.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Maybe not full-blown technology, but a lot of New World
| philosophy, art, and mathematics, and history were destroyed by
| the Europeans or otherwise lost to time. Maybe even medicines
| that we don't know about. They didn't have electric computers
| though.
| shrubble wrote:
| The conquistadors praised Tenochtitlan, viewing it as an
| advanced city equal to the Spanish cities of the time.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| The floating city would've almost certainly been a marvel in
| its own right.
| Oarch wrote:
| _Sighs and resets the 'Days since we discovered a lost city using
| LiDAR' counter back to zero._
| bkandel wrote:
| How 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.
| baq wrote:
| Page 16 of google.
|
| He might have been the first person to see those datasets
| except the ones who published them.
| dang wrote:
| Ok, we've taken the accident out of the title above.
| Animats wrote:
| _" 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/3P6MX7bbl0Y5SSnvJW...
| muststopmyths wrote:
| It 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.
| Animats wrote:
| We can look forward to the Instagram video, "With machete and
| weed-whacker".
| ghssds wrote:
| How 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!
| chrisbrandow wrote:
| for 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 wrote:
| I'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."
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(page generated 2024-10-29 23:00 UTC)