Archaeological digs happening in the sky | Hacker News Reader

Archaeological digs happening in the sky

theguardian.com

55 pointsdiodorus15 comments

If I were a multibillionaire with money to burn, I would fund a planet-wide lidar scan. So much of our history could be hidden beneath waves, jungles and snow.

Gosh, imagine what the conspiracy theorists will say.

Imagine all what they'll discover when there's a way to reliably scan the earth with neutrinos

There is already a similair tehnique called muography which uses muons and has already been used for scanning the pyramids in Gizah and currently for the Mayan pyramids in Chichen Itza amongst others. Pretty SF stuff!

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

There is an argument for not digging out everything we can right now.

Technology improvements might allow us to get much more information in the future.

It seems like the cat is out of the bag; LIDAR/SAR is proliferating. If you don't look/dig for stuff, another team of researchers will.

Technology improvements like... LIDAR?

No. The idea is usually things that let you extract more info at the dig site, from the excavation process.

Note that before lidar, photographs taken from a plane were also very useful for discovering archeological sites that are not obvious while seen from the ground.

Wikipedia has a whole article on it, including lidar developments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_archaeology

Does anyone know how accessible lidar scans are for hobbyists? eg. I would love stick it to a drone to scan my backyard even if it just shows me the rocks underneath

Buy the oldest second hand version of an iPhone that supports Lidar. Doesn't matter if the screen/battery is busted. Strap it to a drone and have your custom app broadcast that data somewhere while you're flying around.

How big is your backyard anyway? Maybe you could just walk around it with a selfie stick instead.

In which case, code the app first, buy iPhone, try it out the same weekend, return for free. :)

Using iPhone 12 Lidar to Map Two Unconnected Underground Spaces

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOuYuL8OJDg

Could you find pipes, coax cables and other things in your yard or wall s in your house with Lidar on the iPhone?

You should probably look into stud finders and metal detectors. I didn't even know this but apparently iPhones have a built in magnetometer so there are apps for that as well!

Are agencies and other groups searching for buried gold using this method? https://hn.algolia.com/?q=civil+war+gold

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