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Comment by vtange | Hacker News Reader

When the inevitable day comes when we fully and thoroughly finish scanning every nook and cranny of the Pyramids, I wonder if they will be able to maintain their novelty? Will tourists eventually cast the place aside as "been there, seen it all" once technology has fully mapped the place?

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Presumably a lot of people would still want to experience the sheer grandeur and atmosphere of being on the spot. I mean, plenty of people still regularly visit sites and monuments with little or no mystery. The excitement of standing before a millennia old structure can never go away. But yes, some of the current novelty will wear off.

Do people visit the pyramids to appreciate their unexplored parts? You can think about the mysteries of the pyramids from anywhere in the world; people visit just to see something impressive in person.

I think "VR tourism" could be a pretty cool thing if large scale 3D mapping of interesting places takes off. I imagine it to be a little like a more immersive "Street View" from Google Maps.

You could walk through all of the strange passages of the pyramids one minute and then be looking at Earth from the surface of the moon the next.

To be honest, Google Street Maps and Google Earth already do this for me. There are a lot of places that I've wanted to visit, but after seeing them on Google Earth I've found that my desire to visit such places is gone. I look at it as a cheap form of tourism without the risk of pick-pockets ;-)

However, I still want to travel and experience places that are not man-made. I love to hike and there are trails all over the world I'd like to explore.

My grandmother visited in the early 80s, and said "I learned a lot more watching a documentary than visiting".

Visiting is about the emotional experience, not the educational one. You could learn a lot more about the Mona Lisa by reading an article, but it's perhaps still worth visiting the Louvre.

We know where everything is in Disney World. People still go there.

Yet also the thrill of the unexplored goes away when one doesn't bother to explore.

Even if it were just a big pile of rocks, it's still a pretty awesome achievement.

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