LiDAR archaeologist reveals vast hidden Mayan cities discovered beneath rainforest canopies

software faster cursor ramp get started for free at graphite. com and we got our next guest in the building. Welcome to the stream. Mean, am I pronouncing that correctly? Yeah, meron or meron. Yeah, meron. Fantastic. Uh, give us the update. What are you up to? Where are you in the world right now?

Yeah, I'm in San Francisco. I'm back in San Francisco. I was in Bise for the past two weeks doing the scan there. That is complete. The preliminary results were super super cool. What were you scanning for? Yeah. Yeah. Give us the whole back story because I I remember like the initial post. It was maybe 6 months ago.

Sure. That we saw. So, this has been in the works for a while. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um I mean, basically the Mayans, they cleared out forests to build some of their cities and settlements. And so, when they moved or they died or in any way they vacated their cities, trees ended up growing back over them.

So, if you look at it from the satellite, the it's just completely green. It's just completely trees. Um, but beneath the trees are these like magnificent pyramids and roads and buildings and whatnot.

And so, and they're invisible from space and they're invisible on the ground because it's just so hard to traverse these rainforest. And so, what I'm doing is we're flying planes with very big, very strong light LAR scanners under them. And we're scanning these trees.

And while most of the canopy is just completely full of trees because, you know, it's a rainforest, some of the lasers make their way through.

And then you classify the points, you remove the trees, you look at the ground, and then you know if we discover something like a pyramid or roads or structures and stuff, we know that we found something that no one's seen for the past, you know, thousand 2,000 years or whatever.

So yeah, lighter scanning for us to find civilizations. Did you find anything? Yeah. What'd you find? Yeah. So um doing two scans this year, 400 square kilometers in Bise, 600 square kilometers in Mexico. The Biz one's done, but only like a third of it has been processed so far. Super cool.

There are some there pyramids. are like hundreds maybe even thousands of buildings um hundreds of kilometers of roads you know things that no one has ever seen you know since a thousand 2,000 years ago. Yeah. Tell me about the uh tell me about the the the economic model of your entire operation. You're flying planes.

You've got LAR scanners or Yeah, it's a nonprofit. So I mean so what got me interested in this was I saw this but there'll be a for-profit spin out at some point and I could I could get units. We're going to tokenize the Mayan ruins. Yeah, the capped lidar unit. No, 100x.

What got me interested in this was I saw this cool paper over Thanksgiving or so, funnily enough, um that was about how some conservation efforts scanned some trees in some forest in Mexico and then these archaeologists removed the trees and they found stuff underneath.

And so I decided to see like, oh, like if if you can spot, you know, random archaeological sites without even explicitly looking for them, I wonder, you know, have they been doing more of it?

And the answer is like, you know, archists have archaeologists have done some of this stuff in the past, but ultimately there's just not a whole lot of money in archaeology. I mean, you know, it's not it's not a very like wellunded thing.

Like it's like maybe all the money going into archaeology on an annual basis is the same as like, you know, a series A or series B or something. Um, and so, and it's like massive economies of scale because you're flying planes, you know, the more you can fly them, the more you can, you know, divide your total costs by.

There are these like extremely expensive like million-dollar LAR scanners. And yeah, I mean, you know, the the main costs are basically the plane and the LAR scanner and the crew to go and actually do the scanning. Um, yeah. So, where where do you go from here? What's the next step? Yeah.

So, still the data has yet to be processed.

Um the processing is basically figuring out what points belong to the ground, which which ones belong to the trees, removing the tree ones, taking the ground ones, and then while like you know the the naive visualizations are like striking like you know you're seeing like this huge pyramid or whatever ultimately the archaeologists draw the most interesting inferences like you know is this actually super novel to us like sure like this is no one seen this before but like did anyone expect this to be there or not?

So give the data to so process to point cloud, give the data to the archaeologists. Um they make their inferences, but my goal ultimately is to scan all of this area. I mean ultimately I think you know we need to put more money into archaeology. I think there's really cool stuff to do with tech and archaeology.

We need more tech talent in archaeology. And my goal is essentially to use these results, you know, get like publish them, all that stuff. Raise a lot more money and do like a significant larger scan next year, like 10,000 square kilometers at the very least next year.

and within a couple years, you know, finish all of Central America, then move to the Amazon, then other interesting archaeological projects like, you know, scanning coastlines, stuff like that. Um, so I just Anything to anything to scan in in America considering it's it's uh the fourth tomorrow in the US.

I you know, the the thing is the thing that's interesting to me about Central America is that they they actually had like massive pyramids and stuff.

uh the US and the Amazon like there is stuff there but like ultimately the and the Amazon at the very least they didn't have stone so everything that you find are like dirt mounds which are cool like the fact that they're there like in places that seem so hostile to life kind of in general you know like raining nine months a year or whatever is cool but yeah there are like dirt mounds and stuff in the US and the Amazon as well but at the moment my interest is mostly in Central America I think there's like you know 50,000 square kilmters or so there to scan and I plan on scanning all of them first and then and then others How are how are the local governments in in these areas?

Are they excited about what you're doing? Are they are they are they emailing you for updates? Hey, what did you find? Well, well, when I was in Bise and I was talking to the, you know, the people in the city, they were super excited. You know, they they're proud of their history. They find their sites cool.

They find that like other people are interested in them. They're very cool. And I think that people are super excited. The governments are also very excited because, you know, this boosts their tourism. This boosts their national heritage.

It shows that, you know, there were once great civilizations here and like, you know, that's something to be proud of.

Um, and they're also wary because the problem is that there's a big looting problem in these countries, especially countries that like don't have, you know, so much money dedicated to archaeology to protect all of the sites.

Um, and so they're a little worried worried about uh the data privacy and stuff related to this stuff because yeah, like you know when you're earning like I don't know like $10,000 a year when that's your GDP per capita and you like find like a jade mask worth like you know 200k in in on in the black market like there's a strong incentive and so they're trying to prevent that and so yeah I mean we've been working with the governments to assure them about the data privacy but generally like they're super excited about this.

Yeah I I can imagine. Can you talk about El Dorado? Um, you know, huge if true. Huge if true. Big if true. Yeah. Uh, I mean, what is the lore? What is Are there any are there any folks out there that still believe it's out there?

Is there any like like what what is the uh what is the historical narrative and then what is the modern narrative? Um, well, I I think the meta point is kind of that uh things like El Dorado, things like Atlantis, like Noah's Arc and stuff are like kind of how a lot of people get interested in archaeology initially.

They're like, "We're going to find Noah's arc in Turkey. " And then you look and you're like, "Oh, well, you know, huge if true, but I don't know how much these these hold up to some scrutiny. " And you're like, "Okay, like what are other like more practical things that we can be doing? " Yeah.

So, um, yeah, I mean, huge if true, but like, you know, most likely not true. But it's it's good that these persist because it gets some people interested in archaeology. Yeah. What about other things that we should be scanning for? I mean, if not gold, rare earth elements are top of mind.

Maybe there's a secret chip fab somewhere we could grab. Yeah. Data centers. Um, data centers. Yeah, exactly. Just I'm expecting you to find Mayan data centers. Yes. I mean, what do you think? the Jensen back. There was a Jensen of that era. That would be truly huge if true.

Um, well, I I think we should scan the Amazon. I mean, there's like been really interesting stuff there. Like the early people that like, you know, the early Europeans that went there, they reported, you know, like 10-ft tall naked women that are like shooting arrows, which is how it got the name Amazon.

Um, you know, it would be cool to maybe fact check this, but like even if this is not a real like there's probably some stuff that this was based on. Um, it would be cool to look for Atlantis, you know, huge of true.

Um, I think we should scan all the coastlines of the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, the Caspian, you know, because there are probably so many cities that that are now underwater. I'm Iranian. I would love to do archaeology in Iran as well.

Um, you know, there there's so many civilizations that uh that like, you know, are mentioned in Sumerian history, but like we have no traces of except for like, you know, that we know there was a powerful king there.

So there's there's a ton of archaeological uh mysteries, but like kind of the bits versus atoms thing is also true in archaeology where like the atoms part of archaeology doing field work, doing digging and stuff that hasn't really changed in hundreds of years, but they're like interesting opportunities in bits now of like you know Nat Freiedman's Vuvius scrolls uh or you know doing LAR scanning using satellite imagery stuff like that and like those are kind of the lowerhanging fruits.

the more we can do remote sensing, the more we can do scalable things because that's the lower hanging fruit and then yes, like making really educated guesses about like where some like Atlantis might be and like doing work there.

But I'll do you find it do you find it funny or fascinating that that being an explorer is like super contrarian like we have this idea that that the world is fully discovered and you know we we've we've mapped every coastline so there's nothing else to do.

like high school career fairs like no one's saying, "Oh, you can still discover things. " Which is like what gets me interested. Like I didn't know this was an option. Um I don't know if it's contrarian, but like yeah, I mean not many people are doing it. I would love if there were more people doing it.

There was more interest. There was more money in this. Um but yeah, I mean, well, you're starting the exploration industrial complex. You're the first of the of the modern era. It'd be great.

I I I think when the results come out and like they're going to be super cool and yeah, it's going to get a lot lot of people a lot more interested in this sort of thing. Fantastic. Very cool. Well, come back on whenever you've have updates. We we should do the next one from the air ideally uh and Starlink powered.

Yeah. Yeah. The plane's flying like 500 meters taking the sharpest turns of the canist. It's not going to be a pretty sight. Well, it'll be fun. Anyways, thank you for coming on. Thank you for talking.