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DressCritical t1_j8viz4m wrote

Echolocation can do interesting things, but it cannot really go through an underground tunnel system and give you a map. This is made up for movies and TV, at least at our current level. It would actually be a lot more like what you would get by shining around a big flashlight. It locates things in an area in the dark but doesn't generally go around corners or allow the mapping of anything but what is there in the room.

Sending seismic tremors through the ground so as to find all the empty areas below would be better, but still is quite a bit short of giving you a 3D map. It really isn't that easy.

And if you used seismic tremors, you might damage the catacombs.

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Rangermatthias t1_j8vjlga wrote

There's a scene in Prometheus where they map a cave system that turns out is part of a space ship (as I recall).

It made me think why couldn't we do something like that with modern technology - like drones, IR cameras, echo-location style sensors, etc?

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na3than t1_j8vlphq wrote

We can ... sort of. Using conventional sensors to build a 3-D map of the space you're in isn't all that hard. The challenge is linking the map of the space you're in to the next map you'll make after you move an imprecise distance in an imprecise direction. GPS doesn't work underground, a magnetic compass can be misled by local geology, and dead reckoning accumulates errors pretty quickly.

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DressCritical t1_j8vjwil wrote

We are working on developing such things, but so far they are still science fiction.

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