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Satellites Spot Hidden Villages In Amazon
sciencehabit writes The Amazon is home to perhaps dozens of isolated tribes who make their living far off the grid from the wider society, growing crops and hunting and gathering in the forest. These reclusive peoples are threatened by drug running, illegal logging, and highway construction, even if they dwell in 'protected' reserves in Peru or Brazil; one group, apparently pushed out of its lands, made contact this summer. Now, researchers have a new way of examining their fate without disruptive and frightening flyovers by aircraft. Researchers use high-resolution WorldView or GeoEye satellite images to monitor demographic changes in isolated Amazon tribes. The scientists got location and population estimates for five isolated villages along the Brazil-Peru border from Brazilian government reports and other sources. Then they examined 50-centimeter resolution satellite images taken in 2006, 2012, and 2013 and could spot the peoples' horticultural fields and characteristic pattern of either longhouses or clusters of small houses; these villages could be clearly differentiated from the transient camps of illegal loggers or drug runners.
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Their life cannot be complete without the opportunity to whine about the U2 album that appeared on their iphones.
Imagine how we would look to someone from 1914.
"You've had 100 years and still no flying cars? Lame."
If even these people can't have any privacy then we're all really screwed.
The Sentinelese People of the Andaman Islands have figured out how to keep their privacy: kill anyone who comes within the range of their arrows. Other, less belligerent, tribes in the Andaman Islands have made contact with outsiders, and suffered near extermination from introduced diseases. So the Sentinelese privacy policy seems to be working well for them.
OK, we found this group of people... moving on.
Chalk it up for +1 diversity, but for God's sake, don't try to visit them and sneeze in there general direction.
If they were unhappy, they would have walked in one direction long enough to "discover" others. Leave them be.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.