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Comment by beefsack | Hacker News Reader

It boggles the mind that something that massive didn't get picked up sometime, especially in this age of broadly accessibly high quality satellite imagery.

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Maybe the indigenous people knew about it

Quite likely. I have no idea why this was downvoted. It's usually the case native populations had far greater knowledge than they are ever credited for. Perhaps they will find some evidence of humans inside.

It's quite possible that the indigenous population knew of the cave, but it's very unlikely they ever purposefully descended into it. There's not much reason to, and it would be a very difficult descent.

"Not much reason to, and very difficult" describes most of the history of human population expansion over the globe.

"To see what is there" has been reason enough most of the time.

There could be other entrances, collapses, etc.

And yet when my acquaintance summited Mt Everest, there was a Tibetan native there in a fur suit and hat.

I am almost certain that there will be evidence of native incursion into the cave. Its been there a long time; the natives have been there a long time. Young bloods with nothing to lose are always doing damn-fool things like that.

There's no evidence that Sherpas summited Everest prior to Norgay doing it with Hillary's expedition. Into The Silence covers this in more detail, if you care to read the whole book, but there were technological and cultural hurdles to it ever happening.

Everest is a pretty clear example of native people not bothering to do stupid things until white people show up and get them tangled up in the mess.

From what I have read they were pretty far up but there is a pretty hard limit to what you can achieve without technology. There is a huge difference between climbing to 8000m vs 8800m.

Technical detail (who was first to the tippy top). Sherpa's were climbing the mountain for centuries. Somebody has been in that cave, because its there.

the article said it had probably been covered with snow year round until 20 years ago.

> Maybe the indigenous people knew about it

Or the military.

Canada is mind bogglingly big.

Yes it is. My favorite anecdote about it is that the province of Ontario is big enough to have vineyards in the south and polar bears in the north.

Half of Canada's population lives south of the red line in this map, which is also further south than Seattle.

https://imgur.com/CenW9oi

Yup. That line is just north of Montreal, so the area south of it includes Canada's two largest metropolitan areas.

Did you know there's a tiny bit of Canada that is further south than the California-Oregon border?

Detroit is actually north of that tiny bit of Canada too. Blew my mind a little when we moved here.

Imagine the things that are waiting in the Universe to be discovered.

No kidding. Just the Wawa-Sault Ste. Marie-Timmins-Sudbury quad is large enough to be lost in for several lifetimes. One tell that you are about to enter uncharted territory is a sign that reads 'last gas station for 400km'.

And that is one of the more accessible areas, there are still plenty of lakes where a water plane can land and there are logging trails every 30 km or so.

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