> “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.
Only slightly less difficult than hunting down an obscure Reddit thread that is improperly red-black balanced 15 nodes in from the root and still 10 nodes away from the leaf.
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...
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).
This link: https://i.redd.it/gm8273jvjrk71.jpg is an map (outdated though, it dates to 2019 AFAIK) of how much of the Earth's surface has been mapped by google street view.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).
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?
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?
The 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.
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.
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.
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.
A 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
If dinosaurs had changed their environment as much as humans, there would probably be more than the occasional fortuitously preserved corpse or footprint to find.
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.
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.
An interesting theory (albeit likely sci-fi) is that on a long enough timescale, any existence of an advanced precursor society will have been lost by tectonic plates sliding down. But that's a timescale of hundreds of millions of years (apparently the earth is ~4.5 billion years old, human life that left traces of intelligence behind is a percentage of a percentage of that)
Considering that the seas were hundreds of feet lower, and most settlements are built on coasts and waterways for transport and food harvesting purposes, it is very likely that anything left before the last ice age was destroyed by rising seas and any remnants are far offshore.
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.
Most of the clocks we’re racing against are ones we invented in the last 200 or so years. So the other 9,800 years weren’t really squandered, the clock really wasn’t ticking so much back then.
Squandered implies it was somehow a meaningful loss, at least that’s how I interpreted it.
It was meaningless time. If we’d gotten to our current development level ~5000 years ago, we’d just be writing these same comments next to calendars that had their zero sent to ~7000 years ago.
We still wouldn’t be alive 5000 years ago. That part doesn’t change. I think you’re confusing yourself.
Half of Europeans that died during the great plague would’ve benefited, for example. Most people who were born in the past 150 years would still be alive.
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.
“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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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".
>"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"
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?
> 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.
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".
"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.
> “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.
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.
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.”
Lol I think they were just having a laugh
But, who's going to end world hunger though? /s
Page 16 of Google search results: the final frontier.
starts sketching out a funding application for a mission to explore page 17
"There be dragons!"
Only slightly less difficult than hunting down an obscure Reddit thread that is improperly red-black balanced 15 nodes in from the root and still 10 nodes away from the leaf.
Bitdiana Jones. 16th page of Google, that's dark, humid, full of snakes. Better bring a torch!
One wonders what other mysteries are waiting to be uncovered amid the dark depths of Google search results ...
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...
The actual journal article is here (open access): 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).
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).
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?
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?
The 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.
"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...
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.
We can look forward to the Instagram video, "With machete and weed-whacker".
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.
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."
A 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.
"4 hour drive" implies you can just drive into the jungle... that's not exactly how these things work.
Lidar has been finding a lot of lost cities.
Not discounting this finding. It's just becoming more common.
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.
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/
That drivel got a second season?
That you Flint?
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?
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/
Sadly there's basically zero chance of that. We don't find dinosaur pottery sherds or cola bottles embedded in sedimentary rock anywhere.
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.
If dinosaurs had changed their environment as much as humans, there would probably be more than the occasional fortuitously preserved corpse or footprint to find.
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.
If bones survived, some advanced remnants would also survive, I would expect.
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.
An interesting theory (albeit likely sci-fi) is that on a long enough timescale, any existence of an advanced precursor society will have been lost by tectonic plates sliding down. But that's a timescale of hundreds of millions of years (apparently the earth is ~4.5 billion years old, human life that left traces of intelligence behind is a percentage of a percentage of that)
Its the ocean plates that slide down when they hit the more buoyant continents. When continents hit they make the Himalayas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis
The conquistadors praised Tenochtitlan, viewing it as an advanced city equal to the Spanish cities of the time.
The floating city would've almost certainly been a marvel in its own right.
Considering that the seas were hundreds of feet lower, and most settlements are built on coasts and waterways for transport and food harvesting purposes, it is very likely that anything left before the last ice age was destroyed by rising seas and any remnants are far offshore.
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.
Most of the clocks we’re racing against are ones we invented in the last 200 or so years. So the other 9,800 years weren’t really squandered, the clock really wasn’t ticking so much back then.
That sort of makes absolutely no sense. Just killing time here? No one said anything about racing the clock.
Squandered implies it was somehow a meaningful loss, at least that’s how I interpreted it.
It was meaningless time. If we’d gotten to our current development level ~5000 years ago, we’d just be writing these same comments next to calendars that had their zero sent to ~7000 years ago.
We still wouldn’t be alive 5000 years ago. That part doesn’t change. I think you’re confusing yourself.
Half of Europeans that died during the great plague would’ve benefited, for example. Most people who were born in the past 150 years would still be alive.
let your imagination have a go at it.
Is "love" really the right descriptor here? The implications are truly depressing.
No need to get depressed about an idea with zero evidence.
Considering what terrible stewards of the the Earth and of each other we are, depressing is also a wrong descriptor.
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.
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
“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
The first 10 are all SEO and AI junk now.
you get an upvote
Sighs and resets the 'Days since we discovered a lost city using LiDAR' counter back to zero.
Imagine putting that on a resume for a postdoc
- discovered lost Mayan city
Flock will hire him as a consultant when they develop their upcoming "fine people for unpermitted garden sheds" service.
(joking, but sadly not joking)
Cities and counties have been using traditional aerial photography for that for a long time now.
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.
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.
I was imagining what Indiana Jones would look like in this day and age.
Juvy record for the train thing, working as a waiter in the city the detention center was in.
I was going to say: that's a thesis result sorted - check.
It's going to get as common as
> New exoplanet discovered
Very soon.
And therefore unworthy of barely being mentioned.
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.
Page 16 of google.
He might have been the first person to see those datasets except the ones who published them.
Ok, we've taken the accident out of the title above.
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!
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...
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.
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".
>"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"
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?
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.
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.
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".
Throw in some AI processing of the LIDAR data, and watch those funding dollars flood in!!
"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.