Thanks, this is the kind of information I was curious about receiving in a concise digest. So ultimately it sounds like I have to wait a decade or so before we can really proliferate, and to speed it up need a few more eccentric billionaires to get into funding some cool projects. I'll use your information as jumping points to find out more.
Maybe the technology will become accessable enough that everyone with a smart phone can start finding and destroying archaeological sites.
Well, username kind of checks out.
I like the tech because of its ability to prevent the destruction of archaeological sites while still allowing for discovery that would otherwise require an immense amount of digging and other labours.
You see overgrown mounds all over central america, and not all of them are volcanic. There's an immense amount of undiscovered history there.
Yeah i think we are heavily underestimating how quickly nature can retake cultivated land.
Definitely. It's a common sight in tropical countries to see modern buildings covered in random growth foliage (gutters, roofs, pavement cracks, window sills, etc.). I'd hazard a guess that even 20 years would probably be enough to significantly hide most low-rise buildings.
This is why liberals are sometimes using the term genocide more broadly in a way conservatives don’t like. They reference things like “black genocide” and conservatives get mad because the actual slayings are too few to be considered “genocide”. Yet in terms of lost culture, putting a high enough percentage of individuals in prison, and confining enough of the others to ghettos, while driving them out of historical c…
It should be noted - this definition as genocide as destruction of a culture (instead of physical murder of a people) also supports the idea of "white genocide": A targeted effort by people with power to liquidate white peoples' group identity ("abolish whiteness") and to marginalize and obscure their traditional cultural touchstones ("don't teach books by dead white men" and related efforts to avoid teaching Shakesp…
I just wanted to say that this is a pretty bad comment.
And the reason that there are only a few surviving books is that the Spanish conquerors plucked those out to send back to Europe as curios before they burned down all the libraries.
Most of the books themselves were destroyed as the work of heretics, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices
This stuff drives me so nuts. It also seems to be something that I've only ever noticed being done by religious people who follow done monotheistic believe. Does anyone know if any destruction of a culture and its artifacts had happened by someone not motivated by monotheistic delusions?
Most of the books themselves were destroyed as the work of heretics, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices
This stuff drives me so nuts. It also seems to be something that I've only ever noticed being done by religious people who follow done monotheistic believe. Does anyone know if any destruction of a culture and its artifacts had happened by someone not motivated by monotheistic delusions?
It was common in the ancient world -- "we won because our god(s) are greater than your god(s)."
Look at the (pagan/polytheist) Romans' actions in the seige and destruction of (monotheist) Jerusalem, for one example. Or (pagan) Viking raids on English/Welsh/Irish Christian monasteries for another.
This is not my field of expertise, but why wouldn't we just run LIDAR scans of as much of the earth's surface as possible? Is it prohibitively expensive at this point? Is the computation [relatively] expensive? Is there a sound reason we don't race to do more? I get the feeling this kind of data could inspire generations of new archaeologists and historians. There are also some pseudo-archeological and pseudo-histori…
LiDAR collection is pretty dense from a data perspective. When I was working with helicopter collection teams we would regularly collect 1TB of point data per day at around 120 points per square meter. Based on the density of the canopy in Central America, the teams are probably using a density greater than that, and are using "multiple return" depth mapping so that they can see through the forest. Processing LiDAR d…
If my hasty math is in the ballpark, the raw data for 500 trillion square meters would be a few hundred petabytes. Not cheap, but cheap enough that I would guess the cost and logistics of acquiring the data are much more of an obstacle.
It should be noted - this definition as genocide as destruction of a culture (instead of physical murder of a people) also supports the idea of "white genocide": A targeted effort by people with power to liquidate white peoples' group identity ("abolish whiteness") and to marginalize and obscure their traditional cultural touchstones ("don't teach books by dead white men" and related efforts to avoid teaching Shakesp…
I just wanted to say that this is a pretty bad comment.
Where is your argument? Perhaps you should rethink your beliefs if you can't actually counter the post.
And it also says things like horses, chariots, steel, and other anachronistic things existed in the pre-Columbian Americas. There is no evidence (to date) to support any of those claims. You might want to look into the history of NWAF and Thomas Ferguson. Michael Coe, a renowned expert in this field and also mentioned on this post, was friends with Ferguson. It's an interesting history.
> And it also says things like horses, chariots, steel, and other anachronistic things existed in the pre-Columbian Americas. There is no evidence (to date) to support any of those claims. Horses definitively existed in (far enough) precolumbian America. The dominant belief seems to be that they died out (perhaps due to human hunting) at or shortly after the end of the Pleistocene, ca. 10-12kya, but there is some evi…
Could it be that maybe some things were lost in translation? Maybe a “chariot” isn’t exactly the way we think of a chariot now. Maybe it was just a saddle?
This highly corroborates Charles C Mann's book 1491: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the... From wikipedia: The book presents recent research findings in different fields that suggest human populations in the Western Hemisphere—that is, the indigenous peoples of the Americas—were more numerous, had arrived earlier, were more sophisticated culturally, and controlled and shaped the natural land…
This is not my field of expertise, but why wouldn't we just run LIDAR scans of as much of the earth's surface as possible? Is it prohibitively expensive at this point? Is the computation [relatively] expensive? Is there a sound reason we don't race to do more? I get the feeling this kind of data could inspire generations of new archaeologists and historians. There are also some pseudo-archeological and pseudo-histori…
> In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
This is not my field of expertise, but why wouldn't we just run LIDAR scans of as much of the earth's surface as possible? Is it prohibitively expensive at this point? Is the computation [relatively] expensive? Is there a sound reason we don't race to do more? I get the feeling this kind of data could inspire generations of new archaeologists and historians. There are also some pseudo-archeological and pseudo-histori…
> In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not…
for those (like me) wondering where this wonderful passage is excerpted from:
""On Exactitude in Science" or "On Rigor in Science" (the original Spanish-language title is "Del rigor en la ciencia") is a one-paragraph short story by Jorge Luis Borges, about the map-territory relation, written in the form of a literary forgery."