Sprawling Mayan network discovered under Guatemala jungle • Hacker News Board

Re: Sprawling Mayan network discovered under Guatemala jungle

#111

Post by ajmurmann » Sat, Feb 03, 2018, 6:06 PM UTC

jacobolus wrote: post #96

ajmurmann wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Do you consider the Chinese cultural revolution to be the product of monotheistic delusion? What about the more recent Chinese occupation of Tibet? What about the Nazi party? The Japanese occupiers of Korea and China during WWII? The British burning the Burmese royal library in the late 19th century? Or the current massacres of Muslims in Myanmar by Buddhists? The US Army in its genocide of indigenous North American…

This was a honest question. With so many atrocities going on it's hard to differentiate which ones don't only seek out to kill all members of a given culture but also their cultural artifacts. Thank you for listing several that fit the bill.

Re: Sprawling Mayan network discovered under Guatemala jungle

#112

Post by ajmurmann » Sat, Feb 03, 2018, 6:22 PM UTC

Turing_Machine wrote: post #106

jacobolus wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you consider the Chinese cultural revolution to be the product of monotheistic delusion? What about the more recent Chinese occupation of Tibet? What about the Nazi party? The Japanese occupiers of Korea and China during WWII? The British burning the Burmese royal library in the late 19th century? Or the current massacres of Muslims in Myanmar by Buddhists? The US Army in its genocide of indigenous North American…

"Do you consider the Chinese cultural revolution to be the product of monotheistic delusion?" Yes, actually. The religion was Marxism (i.e., the most murderous religion in history), with Mao Zedong as its Prophet.

There was a interesting discussion somewhere (can't remember where) that called communism the first techno religion. The idea was that everything is build around the expectation that labor will become less important and owning means of production becomes paramount because of automation. Very relevant thoughts nowadays. Nice to look in the mirror of the past.

Re: Sprawling Mayan network discovered under Guatemala jungle

#113

Post by nitrogen » Sat, Feb 03, 2018, 9:35 PM UTC

zo1 wrote: post #94

52-6F-62 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I'll just have to study up on the tech. IIRC there was a fairly quick LIDAR demo put on by a team at MIT that scanned the campus and surrounding areas in a relatively brief amount of time using a drone, I think. My ignorance on the subject of LIDAR has me wondering why we can't use a faster traveling vehicle, or would it be possible to do perform scans with something like a fleet of balloons that stream the d…

LIDAR data requires precise location-information of the scanning-device, otherwise the data you collect is at best useless, and at-most wildly skewed. This is because all the points are in-reference to the location of the device. A faster traveling vehicle inherently means less-accurate location measurements.

Can SLAM be applied in this case?

Re: Sprawling Mayan network discovered under Guatemala jungle

#114

Post by Turing_Machine » Sat, Feb 03, 2018, 9:39 PM UTC

ajmurmann wrote: post #112

Turing_Machine wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Do you consider the Chinese cultural revolution to be the product of monotheistic delusion?" Yes, actually. The religion was Marxism (i.e., the most murderous religion in history), with Mao Zedong as its Prophet.

There was a interesting discussion somewhere (can't remember where) that called communism the first techno religion. The idea was that everything is build around the expectation that labor will become less important and owning means of production becomes paramount because of automation. Very relevant thoughts nowadays. Nice to look in the mirror of the past.

I highly recommend Eric Hoffer's The True Believer if you're interested this topic at all. It's a short book full of major ideas.

Hoffer's treatment of the phenomenon is just as fresh and relevant today as it was when he wrote the book in the 1950s.

I got downvoted for suggesting that Maoism was a religion, but it quite clearly had more commonalities than differences with the more extremist religious cults (as did Stalinism, Nazism, etc.)

Re: Sprawling Mayan network discovered under Guatemala jungle

#115

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Feb 03, 2018, 10:57 PM UTC

erikpukinskis wrote: post #35

vanderZwan wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which in turn reminds me of Richard Feynman describing the Mayan Calendar in his famous lectures on quantum mechanics, as an example of how the Mayans understood how the planets moved by looking, that they even figured out a number of patterns and predictions, but that they still did not know why the planets moved as they did, his point being that current understanding of quantum mechanics is very similar to this[0].…

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…

[deleted]

Re: Sprawling Mayan network discovered under Guatemala jungle

#116

Post by dang » Sat, Feb 03, 2018, 11:00 PM UTC

Banthum wrote: post #75

erikpukinskis wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can't take HN threads into pure ideological warfare like this. It isn't what this site is for, and it's toxic to what it is for, namely intellectual curiosity. Since we've warned you before, and you obviously don't want to use the site as intended, I've banned this account.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Sprawling Mayan network discovered under Guatemala jungle

#117

Post by mirimir » Sun, Feb 04, 2018, 12:30 AM UTC

credit_guy wrote: post #101

mirimir wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oops, I was brain dead there. I meant 10^11. Or maybe even 10^12.

In other words 100 billion to 1 trillion. The world’s land area, excluding Antarctica, is about 50 million sq. miles. With a comfortable population density of 1000 ppl/sqm (like in South Korea, Holland, Israel, or the state of New Jersey) you would get to 50 billion (same as Trantor). The population density of Singapore is close to 20k ppl/sqm, that would give you 1 trillion. If you are willing to pad the Earth with…

I don't remember the number. What I recall is just that it was an absurdly huge estimate. And I'd love to have a copy of that ~1975 letter, if anyone has access to requisite tools.

And, in case it's not obvious, it's not a world that I'd care to live in.

Re: Sprawling Mayan network discovered under Guatemala jungle

#118

Post by mturmon » Sun, Feb 04, 2018, 1:22 AM UTC

InclinedPlane wrote: post #22

mmjaa wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something that has always fascinated me - just how do the processes which cover a landscape with, say, layers and layers of sediment - or jungle cover - really work? I mean, I get it - you leave something out, a few weeks later its going to get covered in a layer of dust/sediment. But how is it that entire cities get buried under 10's of meters of dirt? I'm sure geologists have this all figured out, but it al…

It's not that complicated. Humans tend to build in flat areas. Flat areas tend to be flood plains. When flood plains flood they leave behind sediment. There are additional ways that sediment builds up such as airborne deposits and importantly from growing plants leaving behind biomatter, but in a lot of cases flooding explains the substantial depth of sediment deposited.

It’s one of those overlooked facets of Nature. Much of the Great Plains sits on the Ogallala Aquifer. This is an underlying terrain, to depths of hundreds of meters, filled in by sediment from the Rockies (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer#General_cha...).

The greater part of the LA Basin is a floodplain which consists of hundreds of feet of sediment from the San Gabriel mountains.

Re: Sprawling Mayan network discovered under Guatemala jungle

#119

Post by Krich123 » Sun, Feb 04, 2018, 1:42 AM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #34

ga_golfnut wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

John Sorenson ( Professor of Anthropology at BYU) addresses most of your speculations in this article. I found his responses very well written: https://www.fairmormon.org/archive/publications/an-open-lett...

Re: Sprawling Mayan network discovered under Guatemala jungle

#120

Post by Krich123 » Sun, Feb 04, 2018, 1:44 AM UTC

ga_golfnut wrote: post #40

mholt wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There certainly is, you just have to look for it. https://bookofmormoncentral.org/blog/new-evidence-for-horses...

> While the evidence for horses in pre-Columbian America is encouraging, it still requires some caution. Additional C-14 dating from other samples will be needed to change the prevailing view. Until then, this evidence should be considered provisional, but promising. And was that peer reviewed?

You may find the responses in this article intriguing: https://www.fairmormon.org/archive/publications/an-open-lett...