We shouldn't be rushing to explore space when we haven't even explored our own planet's ocean, or page 16 of google search results.

Bitdiana Jones. 16th page of Google, that's dark, humid, full of snakes. Better bring a torch!

One wonders what other mysteries are waiting to be uncovered amid the dark depths of Google search results ...

Since the 16th page of a google search is usually the end of the third repetition of the first four pages of a google search, he'd probably already missed it three times...

That map, while interesting, seems entirely subjective - the whole appearance of the map can be determined by the thickness that you set the street view lines to, no?

It won't be visible to the naked eye. Maya ruins like these are covered by centuries of overgrowth. Lidar scans can spot shapes buried under this overgrowth, but from the air it'll at best look like random hills of dirt.

Maybe if there are structures comparable to Calakmul (which is close to Xpujil), you'll see some rocks on a tall hill.

I'm guessing you've never actually been in "the jungle". It's not hospitable at all.

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."

"4 hour drive" implies you can just drive into the jungle... that's not exactly how these things work.

I've been watching the Ancient Apocalypse (S2) on Netflix and I had similar thoughts on discoveries. With drones and lidars we can discover so many of these villages/towns/cities, but the challenge would be to actually send boots on the ground and excavate into getting meaningful data/findings.

At the same time, the baddies (grave robbers, looters, etc.) can use the same tech and beat us to the game.

Dinosaurs lived on Earth for about 100,000,000 years, at least 50 times as long as our species. Perhaps some dinosaurs were the most advanced species our planet has ever seen.

https://pbfcomics.com/comics/dinosaur-meteors/

An interesting theory (albeit likely sci-fi) is that on a long enough timescale, any existence of an advanced precursor society will have been lost by tectonic plates sliding down. But that's a timescale of hundreds of millions of years (apparently the earth is ~4.5 billion years old, human life that left traces of intelligence behind is a percentage of a percentage of that)

Maybe not full-blown technology, but a lot of New World philosophy, art, and mathematics, and history were destroyed by the Europeans or otherwise lost to time. Maybe even medicines that we don’t know about. They didn’t have electric computers though.

The conquistadors praised Tenochtitlan, viewing it as an advanced city equal to the Spanish cities of the time.

That means we squandered almost 10,000 years of human history before humans became an advanced civilization. We could have invented flight, discovered antibiotics, etc five thousand years ago.

Is "love" really the right descriptor here? The implications are truly depressing.

The oldest city that we’ve found to date was buried - intentionally - under a mound of earth.

There could be dozens of these sites

Lidar the planet

The first 10 are all SEO and AI junk now.

Flock will hire him as a consultant when they develop their upcoming "fine people for unpermitted garden sheds" service.

(joking, but sadly not joking)

I was imagining what Indiana Jones would look like in this day and age.

I was going to say: that's a thesis result sorted - check.

It's going to get as common as

> New exoplanet discovered

Very soon.

And therefore unworthy of barely being mentioned.

Page 16 of google.

He might have been the first person to see those datasets except the ones who published them.

Ok, we've taken the accident out of the title above.

I appreciate the link but your comment isn't in keeping with the site guidelines, which include:

"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.

Can the locals draw a map of these lost cities? Or are they just aware that there are many lost cities, but without knowing exactly where they are?

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".

Wow archaeology should be rife for disruption if you can just go around and ask locals. Seems like anyone with gumption could be the next great scientist.

Or maybe one of those locals could be. I wonder what stops them?

What is the proportion of villages where surveying the locals will lead to documenting an abandoned city that is otherwise only known to the locals?

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".

"Discovery" probably isn't the right word, but the important part isn't knowing that something is there, the important part is telling the rest of the world about it.