PhD student finds lost city in Mexico jungle
bbc.com
bbc.com
Oh, I thought he’s just gotten lost deep in the jungle (presumably looking for the free pizza that was left over from the undergrads’ seminar). But wow, 16’th page of Google, that really is uncharted territory.
Must admit this is the most overused excuse I’ve ever heard in my life.
“Hey, let’s all work on this one problem and ignore every other problem.”
starts sketching out a funding application for a mission to explore page 17
Would it make a difference if instead of querying google he was at the library of a Mexican organization for environmental monitoring reading obscure reports?
Based on the images, I think that the largest structure is about here: 18.891548°N, -89.323622°E. But you can't see anything in google earth (otherwise why would he have had to traverse 16 pages of google search results).
Southern Mexico and Central America are incredibly beautiful though, and ancient ruins there are fascinating places to visit.
Today the Maya still live in the area and they support their families by working in the tourist industry.
Is there a similar map product that shows how much of the Earth's surface has yet to be surveyed with lidar (or a suitable equivalent)? I would assume that areas with zero vegetation can be covered by satellite imagery but it is possible that the resolution is poor (for example, SRTM had a 30m resolution).
Not discounting this finding. It's just becoming more common.
At the same time, the baddies (grave robbers, looters, etc.) can use the same tech and beat us to the game.
"Lost Cities with Albert Lin" (2019)
It's an 11-episode show where they use Lidar in each episode to find lost cities.
And nobody sent a drone yet? The BBC has a jungle drone team.[1]
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3P6MX7bbl0Y5SSnvJW...
Maybe if there are structures comparable to Calakmul (which is close to Xpujil), you'll see some rocks on a tall hill.
The other thing is that that area of Mexico is just teeming with this stuff. There's just an untold boatload of "lost cities" in there. They can't dig and map the stuff they are working on, much less any of the numerous finds that have been made in the past 10-20 years.
"Oh, yea, yay, another lost Mayan city. Woo hoo."
> "hidden in plain site", the archaeologists say, as it is just 15 minutes hike from a major road
It was meaningless time. If we’d gotten to our current development level ~5000 years ago, we’d just be writing these same comments next to calendars that had their zero sent to ~7000 years ago.
Half of Europeans that died during the great plague would’ve benefited, for example. Most people who were born in the past 150 years would still be alive.
let your imagination have a go at it.
I threw out the Great Plague, or something similar, as an example of something that wouldn’t have occurred because science would have addressed these types of diseases. Covid today would be easily treatable in a more advanced society
Clearly history wouldn’t play out the same way. The point is that today’s society would be much more advanced
There could be dozens of these sites
Lidar the planet
I mean it's still quite unlikely though.
(Again - probably not)
if you broke humanity down into one archaeological find per 10k years you probably wouldn't think we had much of a society either.
If dinosaurs ever became like us, there should be a clear layer in the rock where they started throwing their trash on the ground.
Right, that's that done, now, onto the 3 centuries of murder, rape, pillage, inquisition, and subjugation.
What we do probably underestimate is how advanced ancient hominids were. They mostly worked with materials that decay like wood, plants, and animal skin. But we're slowly learning that they were more advanced than we used to believe.
whoa, I had no idea there were that many pages in a google search. that's some serious googlefu to get that kind of a result. I guess it definitely says something about the researcher too to continue on that deep.
I'm expecting that comment to have been hyperbolic though
- discovered lost Mayan city
(joking, but sadly not joking)
Though we no longer have it, so perhaps I should mention that next time I meet with my agent.
> New exoplanet discovered
Very soon.
And therefore unworthy of barely being mentioned.
He might have been the first person to see those datasets except the ones who published them.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/did-recent-expedit...
If only 2% of villages have an undiscovered profitable heritage, then 98% of surveys will show no results, which makes it difficult for anthropological surveys to compete with lidar for grant funding, especially when lidar is still new enough to seem "sexy" and "sci-fi".
This same funding agency that doesn't directly fund computer research also has $2.5M available for proposals specifically targeted to starting collaborations researching AI alignment. They have another $3.5M for the actual collaborations themselves, and an additional $2.2M for AI work that "contributes to scholarly research in the humanities".
And for that matter, if the locals did know the specifics but weren't spreading that knowledge, then it still can constitute a discovery.
"Discovery" can mean revealing knowledge that was previously known to insiders, eg. if I say "I discovered an underground smuggling ring and reported it to the police", you probably wouldn't argue that "you didn't discover anything; the smugglers already knew about it".
Just wanted to say how much I'm enjoying this point.
Newspaper Headline:
Discoverer of Underground Smuggling Ring Proven a Fraud: Ring Leader Says He Discovered It First"
Or maybe one of those locals could be. I wonder what stops them?
Like a lot!
They even pretend to be able to read ancient languages/scripts when in reality that are just making stuff up.
> Or maybe one of those locals could be. I wonder what stops them?
They're living their lives, rarely becoming academics in the relevant field, assuming that local rock ruin is known to somebody outside of their community, or if not, then assuming nobody cares anyway.
You can probably find a lot of undocumented ancient stuff by asking shepherds in areas known to be territory of ancient poorly documented civilizations.
"Don't be snarky."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.