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Comment by crote | Hacker News Reader

I believe this can be done with CT scans - they are already applied to non-destructively learn more about known fossils.

Routinely scanning random chunks of stone would be prohibitively expensive, of course.

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Depends really .. if the source quarry is pulling blocks and thin slicing them for tiles | counter tops then it's relatively easy (in the world of industrial mining) to photographically scan the top and bottom of every slice of stone after it's been cut to tile thickness.

A number of quarries already automate the slicing and "inspect" surfaces for defects via computer vision.

The trick is pattern recognition to catch things of interest so that if required the raw slices can be retrieved before they're shipped.

It's destructive tomography .. with an option to digitally reconstruct a solid, or even to physically rejoin slices.

Obviously the solution is to CT scan the whole planet. Then it'll be easy to spot the fossils.

Indiana Jones and the Tomography of Doom

Finally, after all these years, I have a use for all of my real-estate investments in subterranean cave systems.

Well :) if you would vote me to the emperor of everything (don’t recommend it, i have eccentric tendencies) I would dig up a mile by mile by mile of random cube somewhere and document it in excruciating detail. Kinda like a paleontological version of the Hubble Deep Field image. A very detailed and very good look at somewhere where otherwise we don’t expect to find anything particularly interesting.

I'd love to see an /r/TheyDidTheMath on the energy required to CT scan the entire Earth all the way thru. I assume you'd have to vaporize the planet.

You could do secants rather than diameters. Just image the surface layers. Although even just the 5km or so to the horizon sounds like a scary amount of energy.

How about neutrino imaging? (I thought I was joking, but... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-018-0319-1)

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