
What 61,000 hidden structures reveal about Maya civilization - mooreds
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/what-61000-hidden-structures-reveal-about-maya-civilization/
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cagenut
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus)

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chiefalchemist
...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.

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kjeetgill
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.

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fooker
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.

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chiefalchemist
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.

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fooker
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubation_period](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubation_period)

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partycoder
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan_genocide)

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

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empath75
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.

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jbottoms
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.

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petard
This sounds like a tomb raider's dream come true

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simen
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.

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

A related article is [https://phys.org/news/2018-09-unprecedented-massive-
scale-lo...](https://phys.org/news/2018-09-unprecedented-massive-scale-
lowland-maya.html) (via
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18097425](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18097425)).

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

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

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dan-robertson
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.

