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Given that treasure hunters and looters can also use the process outlined in this blog post, leaving it alone seems like a guarantee that it will be explored by looters first.

That's a story that's been going on for literal centuries.

Myeah but is now about to continue on an industrial scale.

That doesn't make it any less bad

How long is a figurative century?

This is in response to people in the comments saying we should do lidar of the entire world and have AI find whatever it can.

Looters can also do their own lidar scans.

Probably not of the entire world, though.

For now they cannot do that, nor in the foreseeable future.

Why not? It isn't exactly a secret technology nor are LIDAR-equipped RC aircrafts/drones particularly out of reach in terms of cost either. What would stop them exactly?

With this you are searching for a needle in a haystack. There's a whole bunch of jungle to cover. With a drone you would spend ages not finding anything due to their limited range. That Would be pretty bad ROI.

Also, drone mounted LiDAR is often not powerful enough to go through dense foliage which you have in these tropical climates.

Ok, those are all reasons why it's hard, which it is for everyone by the way, not just "looters". It's still possible and doable, like it is for others. Your previous comment made it sound like it was impossible specifically for looters for some reason, which I'm glad we've cleared up wasn't your intention, thanks for explaining!

> nor are LIDAR-equipped RC aircrafts/drones particularl

Here in Romania it can be quite illegal to LIDAR map the local terrain without an official approval, and I'm not quite sure if that approval is ever given to individual persons/groups of persons that do not have any official status. So, no, I cannot just go out and LIDAR map my surroundings, even though the technology is available, I'd risk going to prison.

Is looting also not illegal in Romania already? I think the context was already "These people don't care about laws", so again there is nothing practical stopping them from doing so.

It already is, but it's easier to loot on the ground than to put a drone in the air, filming/recording stuff. I.e. we stil have some people trying to loot/dig in places where they shouldn't have, but we have a lot less fewer people putting unauthorised Lidar thingies in the sky. And I say that while I'm part of the local/Romanian Lidar Facebook group.

> but we have a lot less fewer people putting unauthorised Lidar thingies in the sky

What you could know, that you have a lot less people getting caught with unauthorized Lidar drones/RCs, in Eastern Europe :) Thank you for sharing your experience none the less, but I'm not sure we should extrapolate from your experience over Mexico/Central America. You're absolutely right it's easier to loot on the ground though.

I would humbly suggest that perhaps the most consequential looters might be more like script kiddies than bond villains. Just vicinity and convenience

Using slop engines to loot ancient ruins is an apt metaphor for what slop engines have already done to humanity's written corpus.

For their next trick, perhaps billionaires can exhume our dearly departed and see whether they have any gold teeth or baubles worth scavenging.

would be funny if they went there and it was already looted

IDK, this jungle terrain is very difficult to navigate

Archeologists have been using Lidar equipped RC aircraft for quite some time now. With the way things are going it won't be too difficult to have a small swarm of UAVs doing the mapping soon.

This is in response to people in the comments saying we should do lidar of the entire world and have AI find whatever it can.

Lidar google map layer is going to be a thing.

"archaeologists can excavate and protest"

protest (argue against) -> protect (defend against harm)

the knowledge of these locations from the air should have some value in itself, no?

It isn’t about having value or not. Some people in the comments are talking about using lidar on the whole world and seeing what agents find. Thats a great way to give looters all over the world the heads up so they can rush over and steal whatever they can. Any archeological site has valuable information on what a slice of humanity’s world used to be. Giving looters a head start means destroying that information often permanently.

A helpful example might be Heinrich Schliemann, a businessman who fancied himself an archaeologist and destroyed much of Troy’s history by digging it up as fast as he could. He was so focused on finding treasure to prove to world he was a great archaeologist he irreparably damaged the real layers that were Troy.

From his wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Schliemann?wprov=sfti...

> His excavations were condemned by later archaeologists as having destroyed the main layers of the real Troy. Kenneth W. Harl, in the Teaching Company's Great Ancient Civilizations of Asia Minor lecture series, sarcastically claimed that Schliemann's excavations were carried out with such rough methods that he did to Troy what the Greeks could not do in their times, destroying and levelling down the entire city walls to the ground.

Well to be fair archeology as a profession did not really exist at that point, it was mostly rich peoples hobbies, or authoritarian rulers way of legitimizing their rule through an ancestry argument

This actually isn't entirely true and archeologists at his own time said they way he worked was bad and the Ottoman government tried to stop him. At one point he had to flee the site and could only get back by hiring a professional archeologist to help him.

Well isn't it handy that recording lidar is really expensive, so we luckily won't be having large scale public access to data very soon

> The best way to protect a site is to leave it alone. If we start finding dozens or hundreds of sites it will be more than what archaeologists can excavate and protest.

Ain't the site itself the most important thing? As opposed to items: looters won't steal the site?

Looters will absolutely destroy a site to find valuables that may or may not even be there. Ai-khanoum is a classic example, with the vast majority of the site having been filled with pits on the off chance there were valuables. Nowadays they use bulldozers and excavators to loot at an industrial scale. It's pretty difficult to do archaeology on a pile of sifted dirt.