Episode 167: Transcript
Episode: 167: The Truth About Giant Objects in Space (with Sarah Parcak)
Transcription by Alexander
Annalee: [00:00:00] So Charlie Jane, you know how like certain images just like stick in your brain from a book that you've read and then just like pop into your brain all the time, even if it's not like your favorite book?
Charlie Jane: [00:00:11] Yeah, totally.
Annalee: [00:00:12] OK, so I'm going to just confess that oftentimes when I look up at the night sky, actually like I did last night, because there's a very beautiful moon, I always flash on this moment, which is early in Neil Stephenson's novel Seven Eves, where the premise is that the moon has just inexplicably exploded. And he describes how for months, like the debris from the exploded moon hasn't like hit the planet yet. They know it's coming. But for a while, they're just sort of seeing this exploded moon in the sky. And it looks like this sort of giant, creepy smear. You know, it doesn't look like little fragments because it's so far away. And it's such an arresting image.
[00:00:54]And I always look up and check to make sure the moon is intact. Even now. But here's the thing, as you know, so far the moon has not exploded. But you know what is up there in orbit causing more and more problems?
Charlie Jane: [00:01:12] What?
Annalee: [00:01:13] Space junk. I am terrified of space junk. Is it just me or do you also share my panic about space junk?
Charlie Jane: [00:01:22] I'm not scared of space junk. I'm angry about space junk. I think that space junk is, you know, it's a kind of a symbol of how irresponsible we've been in general and just like how foolish we are as a species that we're so keen to get out there and explore space that we're actually going to make it impossible to get out there and explore space because there's going to be so much debris in orbit around our planet that trajectories for launching a vessel from Earth are going to get more and more difficult to find.
[00:01:52] And, you know, now we're launching all these like satellites for things like Starlink, which are making astronomy harder to do from the surface. It's very dark and dystopian and like almost like a weird, you know, one of those twee ironic fables where it's like, whoo, they thought they were getting a magic goose, but they actually turned the goose into a hat or something. And it's just like we thought that we were going to like conquer space. But instead, we did this thing that made it impossible to conquer space because we were such arrogant fools. And it just makes me really angry and just annoyed at the foolishness of humanity and the fact that we're so short sighted.
[00:02:30] And I mean, on the other hand, if it if it means that we get something like Space Sweepers, which is such a fun movie, then, you know, I guess that'd be good. But yeah, I mean, I think space junk is just kind of a synecdoche of human hubris is what I would say.
Annalee: [00:02:44] Damn. Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:45] Or a metonymy. Wait, I think it's a symbol.
Annalee: [00:02:48] It's a part for the whole. Yeah, I mean, I am down with the metonymy of space junk. And I mean, I think partly I'm scared of it because we don't really know if some of it is going to eventually rain down on us. I think most of it wouldn't be dangerous. It would probably burn up in the atmosphere. But you're right that it's going to be incredibly difficult soon for launching spacecraft. It could be dangerous for any kind of orbital craft that might run into a tiny piece of debris at like a gillion miles an hour.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:19] Fucking it's like bullets. It'll tear right through you.
Annalee: [00:03:22] Yeah. Well, luckily, space junk and the moon are not raining down on our heads just yet, because you are listening to Our Opinions Are Correct: the podcast by and for space janitors. I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who writes science fiction. And my latest book is called Stories are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:43] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm a science fiction writer. My next book, which comes out in August, is called Lessons in Magic and Disaster. And it's about a young witch who teaches her mother how to do magic.
Annalee: [00:03:56] And you should preorder it right now. So yeah, it's very important. We should like at some point have an episode where we actually talk about the importance of preorders, because these authors are forced to start asking people to preorder their books up to a year in advance, which is really wild. And I think it makes readers really confused.
[00:04:18] We're not going to talk about that this week, though. We're going to be talking about gigantic, fancy objects in space from the Death Star to Dyson spheres. We're going to talk about why we're obsessed with huge objects zooming through the cosmos. And then we are super psyched to be talking to the archaeologist Sarah Parcak, who is a pioneer in the field of remote sensing archaeology, which means she uses satellite data from space to locate ancient cities in the Egyptian desert and more.
[00:04:50] And on our mini episode next week for patrons, we will be talking about two fascinating new scientific findings about human life during the Pleistocene.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:01] Yeah. And if you want to get it on that, go to patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.
Annalee: [00:05:06] Woo. All right. Let's launch this show.
[00:05:09] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]
Annalee: [00:05:42] I keep hearing this phrase – oftentimes like in science fiction forums – where people talk about the Big Dumb Object: BDO. Where does this come from?
Charlie Jane: [00:05:53] Yeah. OK, so “Big Dumb Object” is a term that was coined back in 1981 by friend of the pod, Roz Kaveney, an author and critic. She was writing a tongue in cheek essay about space opera. She used the term Big Dumb Object to refer to huge, often enigmatic structures in space. She pointed to a few obvious examples like Larry Niven's Ringworld and a bunch of things in Arthur C. Clarke's fiction, including Rama in Rendezvous with Rama. And usually the Big Dumb Object was built by mysterious aliens, but it could have been built by humans. The most important thing is it's huge and impressive, and we may not fully understand it.
[00:06:36] [Sound clip from Star Trek: The Next Generation in which Data, Riker, and Picard discuss the possibility of having found a Dyson Sphere.]
Charlie Jane: [00:07:04] So we'll actually link to a history of these items in the show notes.
Annalee: [00:07:07] So when did this term become really widely used? Because I feel like I hear it all the time.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:12] Yeah, it got picked up in the 1990s and, you know, the science fiction encyclopedia kind of started using it. We'll link to that as well in the show notes. And then, you know, you kind of knew that Big Dumb Object had arrived as a term when Arthur C. Clarke himself used it as an in-joke in a book that he co-wrote with Stephen Baxter called Sunstorm, where humans have to build a massive shield around the Earth and they kind of refer to it jokingly as a BDO or Big Dumb Object.
[00:07:37] So, you know, this term that was invented to poke fun at Arthur C. Clarke got big enough that Clarke himself started kind of using it playfully. And so recently, there's a move to start using the less ableist and more kind of serious sounding term, “macrostructure”.
Annalee: [00:07:53] Ooh, I love “macrostructure”. That's a great term.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:56] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:07:56] So why do we love macrostructures so much? I mean, we could call them giant silly artifacts. We could call them like big, huge marbles. What the heck makes them so exciting?
Charlie Jane: [00:08:11] Yeah. So the usual explanation is, you know, that it injects a sense of wonder or a sublime or transcendence into so-called hard science fiction, which otherwise is just purely dry and serious. And it's just like talking about technical specifications for deep spacecraft.
[00:08:29] Annalee, I'm going to send you a quote from a 1997 speech by Peter Nichols, who used to be the editor of the science fiction encyclopedia about why these kind of macrostructure stories matter.
Annalee: [00:08:41] OK, this is what he says. “The sublime is dehumanizing. It makes us feel small and unimportant, and indeed hardly there at all. I think this feeling of our vulnerability and littleness in the context of cosmic vastness and indifference is one of the root feelings of space fiction. SF writers capable of perfectly good, straightforward journeyman prose tend to fall into florid poetics of the most excruciatingly embarrassing kind when trying to imagine what transcendence might feel like. BDO fiction is about being dwarfed by space and hugeness, about attempting to maintain our own humanity, warts and all, in the light of this vastness.”
Charlie Jane: [00:09:20] I love that so much. I love “florid poetics of the most excruciatingly embarrassing kind.” He kind of goes on to say that these space mega structures are at the heart of what makes people really love science fiction. And you think about 2001: A Space Odyssey. And obviously, there is a lot of that, like that people really bonded to.
Annalee: [00:09:40] Yeah, for sure. I mean, people in archaeology world talk about this stuff all the time, like mega structures and why people are constantly building, you know, everything from ziggurats to super tall, you know, skyscrapers. That's the same urge, like to feel this awe.
[00:09:56] I wonder if the mysterious alien mega structure is kind of a way of injecting fantasy into a hard SF story.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:06] One hundred percent. And like, you know, we did a previous episode about Clark's third law, which the more I think about it, I feel like Clark's third law is basically just like a get out of jail free card for having magic in a hard science fiction story. If you could just say, “well, it's super advanced technology. We don't have to explain it because there's no way humans can understand it. It's just so advanced.” You can basically have anything. And I think a lot of writers really take advantage of this. And it's just it's a way of kind of what Peter Nichols was saying about like it allows you to have the sublime in an otherwise derived story.
[00:10:38] It does allow you to also have basically gods and magical entities without losing the label of hard science fiction. And so it allows you to kind of have your cake and eat it, too. But, you know, Annalee, I'm wondering what if something massive in space is built not by aliens, but by humans? We actually get to see humans building it.
Annalee: [00:10:59] Yeah, I mean, I think I mean, as you were talking about sort of the fantasy elements, I was already thinking about how you also have these mega structures in stories that are about the wonders of engineering. At the top, I mentioned Neil Stephenson's book Seven Eves, which is a you know, it starts kind of in the near future and then it jumps ahead thousands of years to when humans have built a giant mega structure around the planet.
[00:11:26] It's kind of a ring around the planet that they're living on. And and it's all so carefully mapped out. I mean, this is a Neil Stephenson specialty. Like he loves to kind of think about the actual dimensions of a giant object and how you would maintain it and how people would get on and off of it. It's it's really actually a fun read for that reason. It's like what if an engineering spec was incredibly exciting?
[00:11:52] And I think this is also why, you know, we continue to be obsessed with stories about space elevators. I mean, a lot of stories have space elevators. There's an incredibly famous and iconic scene in Kim Stanley Robinson's novel Red Mars to name another famous white guy, hard science fiction writer. And in that scene, spoilers for a novel that's many decades old, a space elevator has been built by people who are colonizing Mars, by humans who are colonizing Mars. And there's a terrorist action between different factions on the planet. And they disconnect the elevator from its counterweight. And so as Mars is is rotating the space elevator, which is quite long, wraps multiple times around the planet and causes just this incredible natural disaster.
[00:12:43] It's it's again, it's incredible to read because Robinson, you know, really likes to have things be accurate. And when, you know, it's a big explodey accurate thing, it's it's quite impressive.
[00:12:57] So there's this there's a fascination of building something massive. There's a fascination with destroying something massive. Obviously, the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks are full of like these kinds of objects as well. So I think there's a whole sub-genre devoted to like building giant objects in space that are just fricking cool to read about.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:16] Yeah, I'm wondering now if like, you know, you have a generation of authors who were growing up in the 30s during the work project administration, saw the building of like the Hoover Dam, saw the like interstate highway system, the Bay Bridge, all these massive bridges, all these like huge, just noble infrastructure projects that were like a collective enterprise. And actually the space, the space program as well in the 1950s and 1960s was a huge undertaking that humans did working cooperatively.
[00:13:45] I mean, I think if you're if you're coming up during a time when people in real life are building cool, huge things, you're going to think about that as a thing that is cool to write about or that humans do.
Annalee: [00:13:58] That's a really interesting point that I hadn't thought about before.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:01] Me neither until just now.
Annalee: [00:14:04] You're so smart. But no, really, like I feel like the awe of infrastructure is so important. This is something that friend of the pod Deb Chachra writes about in her latest book about infrastructure and how… She talks about charismatic mega structures and how these are things that we kind of organize our civilizations around. And they're incredible. Like having an incredible water infrastructure. That's really impressive. You know, these are all things that we we do have awe and reverence for. And I think they've been kind of sidelined in recent years by things like AI, which is not an inspiring mega structure in any way.
[00:14:44] You know, I wonder if you think that part of the mega structure fetish, shall we say, is about being obsessed over a certain kind of hard science fiction, like a certain definition of it.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:58] You know, it's been pointed out many times that when you list the canonical authors of space mega structure fiction, they tend to be men. They tend to be like Larry Nevin, Arthur C. Clarke. You know, the list is basically like a list of cis white men. And there are women who have written books with amazing space mega structures in it. Linda Nagata comes in. The series that starts with…
Annalee: [00:15:19] Nancy Kress…
Charlie Jane: [00:15:19] Nancy Kress. Ann Leckie more recently.
Annalee: [00:15:23] Also the Xenogenesis series, which is like literally – or Lilith's Brood series by Octavia Butler, which is about a planet sized entity. Like, come on, folks.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:34] So it's not that women and people who aren't, you know, men or women don't write these stories. It's more just that like when people list the important stories in the big space macrostructure genre, they only list stories by white men. And I think that does tell you something.
[00:15:50] It's similar to how hard science fiction is, you know, you have to be a certain type of person to be considered a hard science fiction writer, I feel like. And, you know, I do also think about like the fact that when people talk about huge structures in space, they talk about like things that are like solid that are made of like metal or made of like some kind of polymer that's like super advanced.
[00:16:14] They don't talk about like wormholes. Like there's artificially generated wormholes. They don't talk about things that are kind of might be equally impressive engineering. In fact, I would argue a wormhole is a more impressive feat of engineering. But we don't talk about that the same way that we talk about like a giant like, you know, hunk of something in space. So I think that that's interesting as well.
Annalee: [00:16:34] Yeah, that kind of makes me think of Becky Chambers' novel, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, which is explicitly about building a wormhole. It's about building transit infrastructure in space.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:47] Oh, my God. Yeah.
Annalee: [00:16:48] And that's another example. Becky Chambers is explicitly kind of playing off these stories of the big mega structures because her characters are basically space truckers. They're working class. And so they're not doing a big fancy structure. They're just doing like a work a day structure, even though it's actually just building a way more impressive than, say, the Death Star, which is just for destroying things. And I mean, it's hard to be excited about that.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:14] Yeah. So like, the Death Star never made sense to me, but we can talk about that another time.
Annalee: [00:17:19] I mean, literally, when people talk about ridiculous objects in space, like the Death Star is the poster child for that. It's like, “why did they need to make it so big?”
Charlie Jane: [00:17:33] It's just a big gun. And you could achieve the same impact from like just throwing rocks at a planet. You could destroy a planet without a big gun. You just need a tractor beam.
Annalee: [00:17:41] Yeah. In fact, that was one of the things that was great in the Expanse series was that they just throw rocks at each other.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:47] Throwing rocks.
Annalee: [00:17:48] Also throw a super tiny black hole at someone. You don't need a big object. But I also think this gets to the “mega” in the mega structure, which is we're just really easily impressed by things that are gigantic. And I think that that there's a sense that if something is really big, it must be really complex and it must be really important as opposed to something super tiny and precise or something that is distributed to a wider public.
[00:18:18] Like when I say distributed, what I mean is like a transit network or like a food or a water network. You know, these things are not impressive to us because they aren't like a big chunk of steel. You know, they're like a big network.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:30] But also a lot of the most impressive things in space are going to be tiny. They're going to be things where we're like, “we don't understand how this works, but it is there.” Like scale is not necessarily the end all be all. I mean, in space or on Earth even. Like some of science's biggest questions and marks are, you know, at the quantum level, obviously.
Annalee: [00:18:50] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:51] Yeah. And, you know, obviously, as Douglas Adams said, space is really big, like really, really big. And so you want something that registers against all that bigness.
[00:19:00] You know, and actually bringing in Douglas Adams, I feel like there is something kind of absurd about building just a giant chunk of matter in space for reasons. It's just an intrinsically absurd idea. It just feels like incongruous and weird. And I think that a lot of space fiction kind of dances around the absurd in a way that that's part of one of the pleasures of reading space opera and space, you know, action or whatever for me is because there's a little kind of layer of absurdity to it.
Annalee: [00:19:29] Yeah. Especially when you do get out to these really vast distances. And again, I think this is to bring up Iain M. Banks again - I mean, one of the masters of mega structure writing, I would say. I mean, he had a great sense of the absurd and all of his culture novels had to have extremely silly bits, extremely satirical…
Charlie Jane: [00:19:50] The ship names…
Annalee: [00:19:51] The ship names, but also just like lots of quips. You know, like he's a very quippy writer and he does. He's fascinated by mega structures. And I would say almost every single one of the culture novels has at least one completely bonkers mega structure. And oftentimes he will delve into the absurdity of the people who built it. And it becomes kind of poking fun at capitalism because some of these are structures that are built for tourism or for gaming or for actually cloud storage, essentially there's like a planet of cloud storage.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:27] Wow.
Annalee: [00:20:28] But then there's also stuff that is mysterious. Like in the novel Matter, where the characters are actually doing an archaeological excavation of this nested world and they have no idea who built it. And when I say nested world, it's literally a hollow earth. It’s a big, giant ball that it has a bunch of balls inside of it, nested deeper and deeper and deeper, and each level is its own mega world. And the closer you get to the center, the closer maybe you're getting to some kind of understanding of what it is. But these nested balls are positioned all around the galaxy, so it's like a galactic-scale mega structure. And they never fully figure... I mean, they sort of figure out what it is, but sort of don't.
[00:21:16] And I think to make a mega structure really work, I think, it has to have an element of absurdity. It has to have an element of, like, satire, because it is just in the end. And I'm sure Iain Banks would cackle and say, it's about dick-measuring. Dick-measuring in space.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:32] I mean, that's kind of what we've been dancing around this whole time.
Annalee: [00:21:36] Giant balls in space.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:39] I mean, some balls are held for solid pleasure. Some balls are held for orbital stability across a trans-dimensional plane.
Annalee: [00:21:46] Yeah, no, I think that was the original AC/DC song had that lyric in it, and for some reason, the record company made them cut that out. So I think we've maybe solved a little bit of the mystery of the big object in space.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:58] I think we're getting there.
Annalee: [00:21:59] Yeah. So I mean, you know, maybe we'll have other kinds of giant body parts being imitated in space one day, and we'll have achieved some kind of equilibrium.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:08] I mean, is 2001 about a giant space uterus? Because in the end, you get like a giant space baby.
Annalee: [00:22:14] Yeah. I mean, in a way, it kind of is. It's very womb-like. But it's also, I mean, remember, what 2001 is really about is a massive comms infrastructure in space, because those monoliths, megaliths...
Charlie Jane: [00:22:30] Those giant phallic objects.
Annalee: [00:22:31] I mean, is a giant rectangle really a phallus? I'm going to hand it to them that they created something that didn't really say phallus or anything else. But it's a communications infrastructure, which is kind of like, the movie and the book Cosmos as well, right? Where they build this incredible structure and it's for communicating.
[00:22:54] And I think that's a different thing, you know? But it is true that 2001 kind of did try to play with that mega structure vibe, even though the structure is not very big.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:06] It's kind of the canonical text for a lot of people. Anyway, so we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll be talking to Sarah Parcak, who does archaeology using big objects in space.
[00:23:16] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:19] Oh, and by the way, did you know that this podcast is entirely independent? We get our funding not from like big data or big government or…
Annalee: [00:23:30] Big objects in space.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:30] Big mega structure, big mega space, mega structures. There's not like a giant space obelisk like...
Annalee: [00:23:35] Wait, did you say MAGA structures?
Charlie Jane: [00:23:37] I did not. But thank you for inserting that into my freaking brain, dude. Oh my God. Now I need to go take a shower.
[00:23:46] Anyway, we get our money not from like giant space monoliths, but from you, our listeners, through Patreon. And you know, if you become a patron right now, you're helping to keep this podcast going. You're buying us coffee and donuts from the good donut place. You're paying our wonderful producer, Niah Harmon. And you get mini episodes every other week in between our main episodes. You get to hang out in our Discord with us, where we solve all of the questions of the universe.
Annalee: [00:24:13] It's true.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:14] All of that can be yours for just, you know, whatever you can spare. A few bucks, 20 bucks. Anything you give us goes right back into making this podcast happen. Find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.
[00:24:27] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:24:29] Sarah Parcak has used satellite imagery to identify lost cities and settlements in Egypt, Rome, and elsewhere. She is a National Geographic Society archaeology fellow, a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and a 2013 Ted Senior fellow. She is also the director of the Laboratory for Global Observation at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. You might have seen her discussing her work on the BBC or the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and she’s also the author of a terrific book that I love, called Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past. Welcome, Sarah.
Sarah: [00:25:07] Hey, thank you so much for having me. Great to be here.
Annalee: [00:25:10] Yeah, it’s awesome to have you. Alright, so let’s just start with the basics. Tell us what it means to be doing archaeology from space.
Sarah: [00:25:19] So space archaeology is like the super fancy term that we use to describe what we do, but also NASA has a space archaeology program, so I figure if NASA calls it “space archaeology”, it is what it is. So, it’s using any kind of remotely sensed data sets. So, whether it comes from a drone, whether it comes from satellites, whether it comes from a laser mapping system flown on airplanes called Flydar – it’s really… The general scientific term is “remote sensing” for archaeology. So, people who look at drone data, people who look at aerial photographs. And it can even refer to looking at evidence that we leave behind on the Space Station. So, it’s kind of a broad, all-encompassing tent.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:11] Yeah, so you’ve done a lot of work – we mentioned – on ancient Egypt, on the Roman empire. Can you tell us about some of the sites that you've discovered, like how many sites total have you discovered? And is there one that you're like most excited about that's like the coolest discovery you've made?
Sarah: [00:26:25] So, you know, one thing I try to make it clear to people, you know, I work as part of collaborative teams. So, you know, it's always a team effort. You know, my name may go first on a publication just because as a senior principal investigator, that's sort of how it is. But I've worked with many amazing groups of folks over time.
[00:26:45] So we've done broad scale mapping work, you know, across North Africa. So in Egypt, in Tunisia, across Europe, in the UK, in Canada, we've done some work in India, China. We've worked all over the world. And my team and I have been able to map thousands and thousands of archaeological sites, you know, some as small as like a hut circle from 8,000 years ago in Egypt's western desert to, you know, a new Inca fortified site from 1,000 years ago somewhere in the mountains of western Peru. And in Egypt, the discovery that I'm most proud of is that my team and I were able to map a pretty significant portion of the ancient city of Tanis.
[00:27:40] So using very high resolution half meter resolution satellite data, we were able to see hundreds of homes and potential palaces and administrative buildings dating to about 3,000 years ago. So we've been lucky. We've worked all over the world. But, you know, the really fun part is then going out on the ground and surveying and seeing if what you see on the ground matches what you've seen on your computer screen.
Annalee: [00:28:05] Yeah. And that often gets called “ground truthing”, where you go out there and you actually get to, like you said, dig around or at least walk around. So how long is it going to take, do you think, for people to ground truth these sites? Like, will they all be ground truth or what's going to happen?
Sarah: [00:28:22] So, you know, so many of my colleagues, you know, have used this to map sites. You know, it seems every couple of weeks there's a major new discovery announced somewhere in Central America or in the rain forests of Brazil or somewhere in Saudi Arabia. And the nice thing about the technology now and the resolution of what we're using is it's out there someday. If people want to go see what's there, they can.
[00:28:48] But things are so clear now, you could very clearly see the outlines of whole structures. You have a really good sense of what they are. So, yeah, so sometimes you need to go out and do that ground truthing work. But in so many instances, you know, if there are hundreds and hundreds of features found over an area thousands of miles square, it's just not possible to go and map and survey all of them, you know, and as satellites are only getting better.
[00:29:11] It used to be that you were restricted in terms of the resolution of data that you could access as a commercial archaeologist or an academic archaeologist. Now you can get satellite data that's as good as 15 centimeters and potentially less. So, yeah, I mean, it's so high quality now. I tell people, you know, to get better data, you actually need to fly a drone over a site, especially if you're doing large scale mapping data. You just don't need super high resolution stuff.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:44] So, I mean, you're talking about sites being discovered like constantly. Like, is this kind of changing how we think about the ancient world? Like we used to think that like, oh, there's like a few big city or a few medium sized cities and like everything else was just kind of sparsely inhabited. And now are we thinking about like a lot of these places differently in terms of like the density and the kind of variety of human settlement?
Sarah: [00:30:05] That's a great question. So what's been amazing about using, whether it's satellite imagery, drone data, you know, laser mapping data flown on helicopters or drones, in nearly every instance, archaeologists have had to rethink scale and size and function of so many ancient cities.
[00:30:26] I mean, Annalee, you know, to your last book, the way that that my colleagues have used later imagery at Angkor Wat and used it to not just understand there's this massive series of temples and interconnected networks, but it's a whole hydraulic empire. And, you know, how and when and where and why the city of the Khmer Empire grew in relationship to access to water and resources and why it struggled during periods of drought. You know, archaeologists are able to understand that much better because of the use of LIDAR data.
[00:30:59] It's certainly that way in Egypt. You know, you have this restricted landscape where mass desert to the east and to the west and of course the Mediterranean to the north and people are living in the same places that they've been living for thousands of years. So thousands of ancient Egypt's – of the cities and towns and villages that people lived in throughout the ancient Egyptian empire for 3000 plus years. You know, they're beneath modern towns and we've been able to use the satellite data to pinpoint where most of these ancient cities and settlements were even beneath modern towns.
[00:31:34] You know, we probably won't be able to excavate them, but it just gives us a sense of the size and the scale of the empire. And we see this all over the world. So you have people, you know, we've lived in so many of the same places for so long and it just gives us a new appreciation of the scale of where we've lived and how we've lived. And also it like runs counter to what we might think. So you think of like the rain forests of Brazil or Central America as always having been there. But these new laser mapping LIDAR efforts have shown that they didn't look the same a thousand years ago, 2000 years ago.
[00:32:09] So so much of how we think the modern world looks just wasn't that way in antiquity. And that's what the satellites help us to understand.
Annalee: [00:32:15] Yeah, I know that a lot of these discoveries in Mexico and south of Mexico, where you're like looking at these tropical jungles, it seems as if people in more ancient times, I mean, even up to as modern as a thousand years ago, we're clearing the forest and like that we wouldn't have seen like these massive jungles. Is that something that you see elsewhere where it's actually things have regrown and previously would not have been there because of humans, I mean?
Sarah: [00:32:43] Right. I mean, we certainly see this across the US. So many indigenous groups practiced agricultural terracing. Obviously, a lot has been bulldozed, destroyed with more recent farms. But again, looking at laser mapping, looking at the forests across the southeast US and New England, we see large terracing systems that indicated, you know, at some point in antiquity, these places were free of trees.
[00:33:11] Now, obviously, in some places, they would have had a lot of trees too. But yeah, I think ancient peoples did pretty serious land forming and terraforming. And it's hard for us to get our heads around because too, we think we have this incredibly, I think it's a colonialist view of how indigenous peoples interacted with their landscapes. And we do a lot of projecting. We don't do enough listening. And they were living clearly in so many instances and far more harmony with their landscapes than us. But it wasn't pristine. They had complicated relationships with their environments. And we learn more when we appreciate that perspective.
Annalee: [00:33:49] Are there any new remote sensing discoveries, even in the last year, that you think are particularly noteworthy that our listeners should know about?
Sarah: [00:33:57] So there's a really interesting study done by my colleague Jesse Casana and his team. He's a professor at Dartmouth. And he and his colleagues used old spy imagery from the 1960s, as well as more modern high resolution imagery to map Roman forts across northwest Saudi Arabia.
[00:34:21] So the Romans really pushed deep into that region. And we don't tend to think of the Roman Empire as extending that far to the east, but it did. And it shows this mass network of hundreds and hundreds of forts. So that's super cool to me.
[00:34:35] There was another really recent study. It was in Mexico, again, looking at very high resolution laser mapping and a pretty large Maya settlement. was discovered deep in the rain forest. So again, the more data we have, there are vast tracts of Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, into Costa Rica, that just haven't been mapped yet, where I think a lot more discoveries like that will appear in the next decade.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:06] Yeah. So one of the things that we've been hearing about is that archaeologists have to deal with sites being destroyed that are like important sites. Obviously this happens in wartime where stuff is being bombed and archaeological sites are destroyed as part of that. But also sites can be deliberately destroyed as part of kind of a culture war. And can you talk about that specifically about like the destruction of Armenian sites in Azerbaijan?
Sarah: [00:35:31] Sure. You know, when you look at very high resolution satellite imagery, you know, you have a pretty good record, especially now for the last, you know, certainly 20 years, right? Now, early years, 2005 to 2008, there's not as much coverage, but from 2010 onwards, we have really extensive high resolution coverage of most of the world. And there have been many, many Armenian archaeological sites, sites of historic interest and great importance destroyed. And colleagues of mine have been tracking that.
[00:36:05] You know, when we see this, I think it has to be addressed. You know, there have been up to 188 archaeological and cultural sites in Gaza have been deliberately targeted and destroyed by the Israeli government. And it's a fact. There's no disputing it. You know, you can see very clearly on satellite imagery, sites have been bulldozed, bombed, and you know, many, many archaeologists have been killed there.
[00:36:32] And it's a sign of genocide when archaeological sites and cultural sites of great importance to peoples, to places, to cultures are targeted. It's horrific. I mean, obviously, alongside the loss of life, I don't want to put one above the other, but it goes hand in hand.
[00:36:50] It's interesting, interesting in quotation marks. You know, there was this great outcry when ISIS, ISIL deliberately targeted so many archaeological sites in Syria and Iraq. And when the Bamiyan Buddhas were destroyed by the Taliban, there was an international outcry. And when almost 200 archaeological sites and cultural sites, I mean, this this area is so archaeologically complex going back thousands of years. We understand the site and the conflict in the region better when we know its history. When those sites are deliberately destroyed, it's amazing to me that so many archaeological and cultural organizations are silent. We have to ask ourselves why.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:32] To be clear, these are sites that are being deliberately destroyed in order to destroy someone else's heritage. It's not just collateral damage.
Sarah: [00:37:38] No, it's not. It's not collateral damage. I mean, collateral damage happens in war. And again, I'm not validating that or saying that's a good thing. It's a byproduct of war. But when it's clear hundreds of sites are being targeted and bombed and bulldozed. You know, this is a land strip. You know, we certainly have significant evidence from ancient Egypt of armies moving through that region, fortified areas, archaeological sites. It's a mass thoroughfare, right, in antiquity. It's a really important piece of land in antiquity and now. So there's been deliberate targeted destruction of sites there by the Israeli government.
Annalee: [00:38:13] So how do archaeologists deal with that? How do archaeologists try to intervene or try to rescue what they can when a war like this breaks out or like in Azerbaijan, a culture war where, you know, Armenian sites are being targeted? How do you intervene?
Sarah: [00:38:28] It's hard because, you know, to get the world interested in archaeology in a place like Azerbaijan is far more difficult than to get the world interested in archaeological sites in places like Egypt. People go ask “Azerbaijan, where? What? What is that?” Which is terrible, right? We should have great value for all cultural heritage everywhere. There's certainly archaeologists working to document Armenian heritage, can try to raise awareness. They can show before and after satellite images. They can reach out to international organizations.
[00:39:07] But when it's being deliberately done by governments that wield enormous power and control and arms bulldozers, what can really be done? What can be done to stop it? And we can document, I think we document, we take pictures, we record histories, we try to put them in safe places so that no nefarious tech bros can get the sites to shut down or delete information. And that's, I mean, you know, we can advocate, but the truth is, we're powerless to stop the destruction. And it's happening everywhere. And I hate to say it, but at far greater scales now that the world is more on fire than it ever used to be.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:50] Is there, I mean, you talk about this space infrastructure, which I'm assuming is beyond the reach of a lot of these like horrible governments. Like you have satellites traveling over regions which might not be able to go to on foot. Is there a way in which space archaeology helps you to document stuff or to observe stuff before it's destroyed or to, you know, get data that we can preserve for the future?
Sarah: [00:40:13] Yeah. So, so now, you know, there are all these new satellites that have been launched or there's more data available. So one really great, fairly new company is called Planet Labs and it's based out of San Francisco. And the really cool thing about Planet Labs, the gentleman who's the CEO, Will Marshall, is fantastic and really trying to share their data as much as possible. And it's different from other satellite companies in that they have a series of small satellites, which they call Doves.
[00:40:47] And there are dozens and dozens, hundreds of them, and they're able to record the whole Earth every day. So whereas normal satellites, you know, the satellites that I use for, say, capturing high resolution data, you know, maybe they're getting data once a month or once a week from a site. And that can be really expensive if you're tasking a high resolution satellite to capture large data sets of a specific place versus daily data. OK, it may be at a slightly lower resolution. But all you really need is one high resolution image to kind of understand. And you can document damage, at least at scale, right? If a whole site has been bulldozed or there's been mass damage, you can see it on the Planet Labs satellite data.
[00:41:30] So that's certainly a new tool that we have for land destruction. Otherwise, it's a matter of documenting, you know, maybe there's more of a slow burn destruction. So maybe sites are being looted or being slowly cut into by, say, modern cemeteries or a modern town. And that can be documented using high resolution satellite data over a longer period of time.
Annalee: [00:41:53] OK, so we had a question just because we have you here. You know, we want to ask you an ancient world question, get into something a little more fun and exciting. So we were both wondering, what can archaeology tell us about our current culture war in the U.S. over trans people? Like, were there trans people in antiquity? Did gender binaries exist in the same way back then? Is that a question that you can even ask because it's so huge? Like, tell us about archaeology and gender.
Sarah: [00:42:23] Nine thousand hours later. So, yeah. So first of all, you know, whether anyone wants to believe it or not, you know, there have been trans humans and queer and gay and lesbian humans here ever since we became human. It's part of our identity. It's part of what makes us human. I mean, certainly we see homosexuality – we see this in the natural world. You know, I can't remember the exact number of species. So I think it's over 100. Please correct me if I've gotten this wrong. Apologies to biologists who are listening who are horrified that I didn't get the number right. But it's a lot, right? This is documented in nature.
[00:43:00] So, you know, certainly I can speak for ancient Egypt. You know, today we hear a certain subset of online male screaming about, you know, people wearing dresses and makeup and wearing wigs and jewelry and how that's just men wouldn't do that. I'm like, would you talk to Ramses II?
Charlie Jane: [00:43:24] Oh, yeah. I mean, gender roles are always a moving target. I mean, over time.
Sarah: [00:43:29] Always. You know, certainly in Egypt, there were there were there was definitely a sense of gender binary, but not like our quote unquote gender binary. It didn't function in the same way. It was connected to their religious view. Right.
[00:43:41] They saw things very starkly in fertile black Nile soil and harsh red desert. So men were represented as being darker skinned because they would be outside more. And women had lighter skin and had more of a role indoors. But, you know, there were literate women in ancient Egypt. Women were very powerful as heads of the household, certainly richer women. And we also, of course, have women who were kings.
[00:44:10] Hatshepsut was like the original gender bender. And you look at pictures, you look at images of her. If you've ever been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there's a whole row of her as a sphinx or statues. And she has slightly more feminizing facial features, but not necessarily. And she had to become this this male role in order to assert her power. And certainly even the way we think about gender in archaeology and sex has changed.
[00:44:42] You know, it used to be that, you know, when we're looking at bones, you know, my bio-archaeology colleagues and specialists, very set, OK, this looks to be these bones look male, these bones look female. But now we understand gender is, of course, on a spectrum. And so are bones. Just because bones present as being bigger, we can say, “OK, it's more likely that these more robust bones with these more robust muscle attachments, given the context of the burial, it seems more likely that this individual could have been male.” But there's a different language that archaeologists are using to talk about sexuality in the past. And, you know, we know there were Viking warriors who were women.
Charlie Jane: [00:45:31] Isn't there a thing that's happened pretty often in archaeology where we find some people who were sacrificed or we think were sacrificed? It's like they're female, they're virgins. And then later it comes back and like, oh, actually, no, they were not female. We don't know if they were virgins.
Sarah: [00:45:44] Yeah, you can't determine…
Annalee: [00:45:46] Yeah, you can’t tell virginity from bones…
Charlie Jane: [00:45:49] So also that we tend to assume – make assumptions about bodies when we find bones that have been visibly like there's some evidence of human sacrifice or something.
Sarah: [00:45:58] I don't know. I just assume all the men who come screaming into my mentions on social media are virgins. But what would I know?
Annalee: [00:46:04] You're going to have to sacrifice them first and then let them cook underground for like a thousand years and then do a DNA analysis. And then you'll know.
Charlie Jane: [00:46:12] Right. Right. Right. Yeah, 100 percent.
Annalee: [00:46:14] That'll tell you a lot.
Sarah: [00:46:16] And the question is, you know, were these individuals actually sacrificed? You know, it can be hard to tell one way or the other. You know, it's changed a lot. And I think that one of the main things for us that has caused us to think differently and challenged me to think differently is, you know, there are so many, you know, now practicing queer, trans, gay and lesbian archaeologists or non-binary.
[00:46:43] And obviously, the more diverse your field is, the more people will push you to like take your data and twist it around and try to put your like, “OK, this is what I've assumed. But like there's a tent that's bigger. And how do I how do I think differently about these roles and these people and what they may have been like?” You know, we certainly saw this with more women entering the field of archaeology in the 1970s and 1980s and the whole field of gender archaeology.
[00:47:12] So, yeah, whether the bigots like it or not, like the truth is trans people, queer people, gay people have always been here, non-binary as well. I feel like in so many instances in ancient cultures, you know, we have to imagine we think, “oh, well, they they would have been like us. They would have hated these people.” But maybe not. Past peoples could have been more understanding or more compassionate. We have to make space for that, too.
Charlie Jane: [00:47:37] Maybe we're just too primitive to understand them.
Sarah: [00:47:38] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:47:39] Yeah, exactly. OK, so, Sarah, to finish up, I have a final gender and archaeology question to ask you, which is, inspired by an Internet meme about how men think about the Roman Empire all the time. So how often do you think about the Roman Empire?
Sarah: [00:47:56] OK, I get really mad at the Roman Empire. Like, I blame them for destroying ancient Egypt. So…
Annalee: [00:48:05] Freaking colonizers.
Sarah: [00:48:05] They're total colonizers.
Annalee: [00:48:07] Totally wrecked it.
Sarah: [00:48:08] Octavian. Just I can't stand him. If you're hearing me in the afterlife, Octavian, you may be waiting for me, but I'm waiting for you.
Annalee: [00:48:17] Yeah, I'm coming for him, too. I'm like coming for all of those Roman colonizers in Egypt. Wrecking Alexandria. Like, what the hell? Jesus. I'm also pissed at the Roman Empire.
[00:48:28] Thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find your work online or in the real world?
Sarah: [00:48:33] So you very kindly mentioned my my last book, Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past. I have a forthcoming book. Not til 2026. I am so sorry. I'm madly working on it right now called Humanity: A Survival Guide.
Annalee: [00:48:48] Ooh, that sounds awesome.
Sarah: [00:48:50] So yeah, speaking of colonialism, it will invert what everyone thinks about the world ending and collapsing. Collapse is a lie.
Charlie Jane: [00:48:58] Nice.
Annalee: [00:48:58] I fully agree. Yeah, love that.
Sarah: [00:49:00] I am on Bluesky, this wonderful social media site. My handle is still as in the site, which shall not be mentioned: indyfromspace. So folks want to find me there. And if you like, I don't call them dad jokes. I call them mommy jokes.
Annalee: [00:49:17] Good pun. Yeah, I can definitely recommend Sarah's feed for anyone who likes puns and the ancient world, which they kind of go together.
Charlie Jane: [00:49:26] Hell, yeah.
Annalee: [00:49:26] Yeah. All right. Well, thanks very much.
Charlie Jane: [00:49:27] Thanks for joining us.
[00:49:29] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:49:32] You’ve been listening to Our Opinions Are Correct, which you can find anywhere you get quality podcasts. You can also find us on social media, like Mastodon, Instagram, Bluesky – we’re usually ‘our opinions’ or ‘our opinions are correct’ on those places. As you know, we’re also on Patreon and we would really appreciate your support. You can find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.
[00:49:59] Thank you so much to our brilliant producer and engineer, Niah Harmon. Thanks to Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez-Nichols for the music. And if you're a patron, we'll see you on Discord. Otherwise, talk to you later.
Both: [00:50:12] Bye.
[00:50:13] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]