Deep Learning Digs Deep: AI Unveils New Large-Scale Images in Peruvian Desert | Hacker News Reader

Deep Learning Digs Deep: AI Unveils New Large-Scale Images in Peruvian Desert

blogs.nvidia.com

50 pointsbcaulfield19 comments

Is "religious purposes" a kind of catch-all cliche? One doesn't have to think it's aliens to consider the necessary economics of building these things. You need to feed, water and house all the people doing it, their families can't be far, and those resources have to come from somewhere and someone has to collect and move them. Just a threat of force seems improbable, given the basic economics of that as well.

Celestial navigation or regional defence seems like the minimum probable reason. Also it's a desert with no landmarks except these lines. If you follwed those lines without the map, you might not know you were going in circles and you would run out of water and food pretty quickly. There are probably short cuts where sentries could see an advancing group following the lines and alert the settlement while the invaders took the long way in. Maybe prey animals would follow the lines in search of water as well separating them from cover and making them tired and easy to harvest. The directions could be transmitted orally and encoded pictorally without someone being able to see the whole picture.

These seem more plausible than "religious purposes," which tendentiously sets up religion as magical thinking, and the people who built these structures as irrational.

Outside of the fact that this is a paper on finding them rather than interpreting them, a few key points.

> Celestial navigation or regional defence seems like the minimum probable reason.

The blog post says "or astronomical significance" which seems to cover the first part.

I'm really not sure what regional defence you get from:

> With this approach, we identified four new geoglyphs in the northern area of the Nasca Pampa, namely: a humanoid, a pair of legs, a fish, and a bird

and they're dug down just a few inches.

> There are probably short cuts where sentries could see an advancing group following the lines

If your regional defence rests on trusting enemies to walk around in small circles following a shallow line dug in the shape of a monkey, you are likely to have a bad time.

> These seem more plausible than "religious purposes," which tendentiously sets up religion as magical thinking, and the people who built these structures as irrational.

It's probably worth seeing what scholars actually say about this, there are some links on the wiki pages, as they'll have thought a lot more about it than you or I. But I'd not be surprised by some belief system leading people to create what largely seems to be art.

> One doesn't have to think it's aliens to consider the necessary economics of building these things. You need to feed, water and house all the people doing it, their families can't be far, and those resources have to come from somewhere and someone has to collect and move them. Just a threat of force seems improbable, given the basic economics of that as well.

They're shallow lines, not huge towering structures. From the wiki page on the lines:

> With careful planning and simple technologies, Nickell proved that a small team of people could recreate even the largest figures within days, without any aerial assistance

Indeed, some scholars have probably thought about it more than I have, but apparently they aren't here. Maybe it's just art, but even art has an economical purpose that yields information about the suffiecient and necessary conditions to create it, and it is not merely an expression of the magical thinking implied by what is usually referred to as ritual and religious purposes.

If it takes "days," you still need to get those days of water out there in addition to the weight of food and shelter. If their threats were nomadic, a false path imposes costs on incoming threats, and for as you say, the cost of only a few days with a small team. One set of ideas provides testable hypothesis - the other produces unfalsifiable categories of "ritual purposes" and it seems like lazy journalism.

I hear exasperation about ancient aliens type theories from academics all the time, but when you read all these "ritual purposes" cliche statements, it's hard to see how they didn't do it to themselves and invite the kookery on their own disciplines.

These are the geoglyphs the paper identified:

https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03054403230005...

Tele bunny, that big frying spoon, that All Tomorrow creature, some eldritch doodle

Why would people spend so much time creating those large geoglyphs that can only be seen from the sky?

If we go with the Motel of the Mysteries school of archaeology then it was obviously for ritual religious purposes and they were meant to be seen by their sky gods or by their ancestors who can view them from the sky.

Alternatively if we go with History Channel school of archaeology then it was aliens. Ancient aliens who visited earth from extraterrestrial origins. The markings are meant to be seen by the aliens who haven't landed yet on earth's surface. Or maybe the aliens are very tall and they can see the whole pictures just when they are normally standing or sitting on the surface of earth.

Another explanation that I’ve seen that isn’t religious or alien related made me reconsider my view of them. Perhaps, these people had the tools and knowledge to make crude hot air balloons. A little out there but if they got up some height they could easily survey the land and lay out a design. From there if the designs purpose was in their society is another topic that if to speculation and deduction based on cultural remains.

I think Occam’s razor would suggest the religious explanation is more likely that hot air balloon technology. Doing large scale things for religious reasons is well documented for thousands of years before and after these were constructed. Hot air balloons? Not so much.

A simpler explanation is that they were able to climb up hills.

Maybe they came to the conclusion that if the gods are watching from the sky they can't see them. People would appear smaller than the ants. So if they want to contact gods they have to send huge massages that can be viewed from the sky. That really makes more sense than sacrificing virgin ants and hoping sky gods to see them.

For the same reason people today make corn field circles: humans are a playful species.

“Hey guys, remember last year’s Peruvian Burning Man where we got drunk and drew a large phallus on the sand? Let’s do an even bigger one this year!”

Our technology and day-to-day may have evolved, but the human brain is pretty much the same today as it was 10000 years ago.

So the fae folks are us all along

According to a quick skim of the wiki page, you can see them from hilltops and they may have only taken a few days to make.

Once humans get past basic survival, we seem to start filling our time at least partly with art.

Well, "the sky" is nearby hills and mountains. This is a flat plane between some hills and some very tall mountains. If you've flown over the area you can see they even carved a human figure into the side of one of the hills overlooking the plains, as if it was a person standing and observing.

Also, it wouldn't be a lot of time to make the figures. It's a plain with an aeolian crust that is easily penetrated. You just need to move some hand-size stones around and scrape the oxidized crust to reveal the lighter substrate. It would probably all wash away after a rain, except it just never rains there.

ok but the one on that nvidia webpage isn't one of the new ones

Thank you for commenting, I was confused because they say:

> The geoglyphs — a humanoid, a pair of legs, a fish and a bird — were revealed using a deep learning model

and the image is obviously some kind of monkey/lemur.

...plus you don't need AI to recognize it. But yeah, why they use a Wikimedia image instead of the actual discovered images left me scratching my head too. Of course, they would have had to ask the authors of the paper for permission, but I don't think that would have been a problem?

It’s straight from the wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazca_Lines

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