I recall Bill Rathje commenting that other than the Great Wall of China
that the only human construct visible from space is the Fresh Kills
landfill on Staten Island.


http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/pdf/fkl/fien1.pdf

Silas Hurry


> Because of the great distance and the resolution of the human eye, I
> don't think any built structures are visible from the moon. These days,
> the Great Walls of China (after all, there were a number of them) blend
> into the surrounding scenery so well that you can't even spot them using
> Google earth. What you can see from space (but usually no higher than
> about 350 miles or so) are strip-mined areas, such as we have here in
> Kentucky, and large swatches of deforestation, especially in the Amazon
> River basin. At present, the most visible mark of humans to someone in
> orbit (provided we discount the illuminations of cities at night) would
> be a certain predilection for very large scale destruction. It's easier
> to tell what we've destroyed (or economically altered, depending on your
> point of view), as opposed to what we've built. I can only assume that
> large-scale deforestations from the late 1800s and early 1900s would
> also have been visible from space. That might be an interesting
> historical archaeology topic - "Historic Instances of Large Scale
> Disturbances Visible From Space, ca. 1800-1900".
>
> Daniel B. Davis
> Archaeologist Coordinator
> Kentucky Transportation Cabinet
> Division of Environmental Analysis
> 200 Mero Street
> Frankfort, KY 40622
> (502) 564-7250
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bob
> Hoover
> Sent: Monday, February 12, 2007 11:29 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: China to measure the Great Wall
>
> The Antonine Wall was a brief and very simplified version of Hadrians
> Wall.
> You can now walk a trail the entire length of the latter.   Like the
> Chinese
> wall, both were designed to mark a boundary, not to keep people in like
> the
> Berlin Wall.   I read somewhere that the Wall of China is the only human
> feature
> svisible from the moon.   Maybe the lights of LA can now complete with
> it.
> When they merasure it, will they use metric? Chinese li? Certainly not
> the English system! The westward extension of the wall is particularly
> interesting.
> Aurel Stein in Ca. 1910 found a series of forts and signal stations
> along the northern fringe of the Tarim Basin, similar to signal stations
> in Roman Britain and the Rhine-Danube frontiers. Perhaps some Roman
> military engineers liberated
> from the Partians by the Han armies lent their expertise?   If so, this
> will
> almost certainlhy result in a scientific cover-up similar to that of the
> red haired Tocharian mummies of the same area. These connections are
> always fascinating but speculative.
>
> Bob Hoover
>