What 61,000 hidden structures reveal about Maya civilization | Hacker News Reader

What 61,000 hidden structures reveal about Maya civilization

arstechnica.com

94 pointsmooreds26 comments

stuff like this continues to justify the "high-counters" theory that the native population of the western hemisphere was much much higher than we though. conversely that means the smallpox/etc plagues were much much deadlier than we thought. somewhere on the order of a quarter of humanity died in just a few decades.

if you're curious, this book does a great job of laying it out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_A...

What they are finding are archelogical sites from the classical period—before the collapse. The collapse was pre-contact. Also, it appears their civ went through periodic collapses.

Now, you can still be right, but this evidence of density was for the classical period pre collapse.

...conversely that means the smallpox/etc plagues were much much deadlier than we thought. somewhere on the order of a quarter of humanity died in just a few decades..."

Makes me wonder what would happen today? We're more densely populated and mobility (local, national and international travel) is much greater.

I suppose it's not a matter of if, but when.

I suppose the only way it could have been prevented would be knowing in advance what would happen in case of contact, having the self restraint to not allow any intrusion and to spread vaccines. Ie. having our current technology.

But really it seems like it would have happened whenever American population centers contacted more than a dozen Eurasians.

I'm not so pessimistic at all!

The travel of information is so incredibly fast. Just thinking back to the ebola scare (my memory may be fuzzy) but we even knew when someone had broken quarantine out in Texas.

We have exact low number counts of how many people even got infected coming into the US.

A hypothetical disease that spreads quickly without apparent symptoms but takes a really long time to incubate would be pretty deadly in the current world.

Remember, drug discovery is still not a very scientific process.

Yes. But a long time today (fast and fluid travel) is not the same long time of decades ago. The faster and more frequest we move, the small the long time window gets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubation_period

A lot of evidence points to a collapse of civilization prior to European arrival. Agricultural collapse is thought to be likely for more than a few civilizations in the Americas.

You have to consider that European and Asian populations spent centuries building up resistance to various plagues that would quickly kill off a quarter of the population. It’s hard to imagine what it would mean to have all those various infectious agents sprung on a new population all at once.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics

Related to this, there's also the chronicle of Gaspar de Carvajal which related big cities instead of where the equatorial Amazonian rain forest:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaspar_de_Carvajal

1491 by Charles Mann is one of my favorite book of all time. Highly recommended.

The Maya still exist today. What people often refer to as Maya is their classic period.

In recent times, the Maya were massacred by a US-backed dictatorship:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan_genocide

And that's one of the reasons people flee the area.

The Mayan highlands in Guatemala are actually a great place to visit — I spent a month or so there a few years ago. The people are super nice and it’s just beautiful.

Having been there too, I strongly endorse your opinion. Did you make it to Tikal and check out the pyramids? Climbing Pyramid 4 and staring over the canopy at endless jungle was one of the better experiences of my life.

I have been a couple times and agree as well as it makes for a great vacation destination. For Starwars fans you can actually climb the temple IV in Tikal which was the original Yavin 4 filming location.

Nice deflection.

While you are there, visit the Maya mass graves try to learn about the US role in making that happen.

There are about 30 languages in Guatemala which is about the size of New Jersey. 10% of the population speak Spanish. Everyone knows the Spanish words for numbers, that is needed to transact business. Cakchiquel verbs can have 4 suffixes whick makes it one of the most difficult languages to learn. Some kids don't learn to conjugate well until they are 14 or 15.

This sounds like a tomb raider's dream come true

You could be standing on top of an archeological site and never know it. Many of the features discovered by lidar are very very hard to spot from the ground. The kinds of people who have the expertise to spot them tend not to be tomb raiders.

There was a large discussion about this work earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16291272

What if every commercial plan was equipped with LiDar and perhaps a downward camera...could we scan most land masses?

Probably Not as most commercial flights follow pre-determined corridors. So while it would work for those corridors I think most of the land masses are never hit. Add to that that these flights were probably done from much lower altitude than regular commercial flights operate at

They could toss a couple up into orbit and scan the whole earth...maybe?

Reflecting a laser from earth all the way back to space is hard. The recently launched NASA satellite to look at the extent of polar ice fires a laser at earth and looks at the reflection. Ice is reasonably reflective yet even then the satellite gets about 1 photon back for every 1e12 it sends out.

Firing a large laser is expensive in terms of energy and expensive in terms of temperature: once a satellite is hot, it is not very easy to call down. All you can do is try to radiate the heat away but that’s not so easy or effective.

Transport routes generally are highly centralised.

Shipping traffic is a case in point. Nothing keeps a ship from travelling anywhere over the oceans ... except that ports and profits are in specific locations. Traffic denssities are high enough that you can track major shipping routes by their sulfur-dioxide emissions on satellite atmosphere visualisations.

Current conditions across the Indian Ocean:

https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/chem/surface/level/ove...

Aircraft flight patterns are similarly concentrated:

https://www.metabunk.org/sk/skitched-20130827-051029.jpg

Reply on news.ycombinator.com