Can We Make a 3-D Map of the Whole World?

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Scott
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Can We Make a 3-D Map of the Whole World?

Post by Scott »

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/l ... -the-earth
A lidar project wants to document the entire planet, before everything changes.

"The plan, he says, is to start with the most vulnerable ecological and cultural heritage sites, and go from there. For example, Fisher estimates that the entire Amazon rain forest, where a scourge of forest fires recently made international headlines, could be lidar scanned by plane and helicopter in six years, for $15 million. The next step could be to use some future technology that puts lidar in orbit and makes covering large areas easier.

“Right now we’re not able to put a lidar instrument into the orbit that would give us the kind of resolution we’re requiring,” Fisher says. “Ten years from now, maybe that might not be true. But we can’t wait 10 years.”

Photo below:
The ancient Angkor Wat in Cambodia, where lidar revealed large parts of the site invisible to the human eye. COURTESY KHMER ARCHAEOLOGY LIDAR CONSORTIUM 2012
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Re: Can We Make a 3-D Map of the Whole World?

Post by LPaulCook »

Google has quite a bit of the world in 3D now. They are doing the oceans now too. Not LiDAR but it is 3D.

Aerial LiDAR is how they found all those ancient pyramids and lost structures in the jungles northern Guatemala.

There's going to be a TV show about all this very soon on NatGeo.
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Matt Young
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Re: Can We Make a 3-D Map of the Whole World?

Post by Matt Young »

A more accurate 3D model of the world could enable more accurate weather prediction. The weather is affected by the millions of buildings, forests and topology that exist. Being able to simulate on such a model could make a huge difference to prediction.

You would just need a quantum computer to run the simulation. And those are almost here.
If you don't see that there is nothing, then you are kidding yourself.
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