On the other hand—pick any area of the pacific northwest and look at a map of where the permanent roads are. Pull it up side by side with a map of an area that you’re familiar with. Zoom in on both, to a magnification you’d consider reasonable for imagining things at walking-around scale. Pan around on the PNW map and try to find a permanent road. It’ll take a minute.
Most land out here grows timber, sure. Timber is harvested roughly once every 30-50 years.
At this point, I’d bet that every square mile of the area has been visited by humans. Forestry land is heavily trafficked once every few decades; conservation land is surveyed and studied and sometimes visited by tourists.
The question, like a missing term in the Drake Equation, is when. The L term captures for-how-long, sure, but only implies a difference between “someone sent us radio signals for 100 years around 1000 AD” and “someone sent us radio signals for 100 years around 2000 AD”.
I have two cats who hate me. (not their fault, they came from an animal hoarding situation so they’re probably kinda traumatized) They seem to think I’m noisy and conspicuous and I stink, and to their perceptions I certainly do. They despise being perceived. I can tell that they’re in my house because I can check every nook and cranny and learn their favorite hidey-holes, and the food I put out for them gets eaten, and their litter boxes get full. But if this was out in the woods instead of the artificial and tightly controlled environment of my home, I would likely not know they’re around, just like most hikers don’t know when they’re being watched by a mountain lion. The cats hate the places where I spend time, just as they love the parts of my house I rarely visit. The places they love and hate change as my habits do.
Oh, and both cats are black longhairs. They move fast, so between that and the fur, every photo I’ve ever tried to take of them out and about has come out hideously blurry. I joke that they’re related to Sasquatches...
Anyways, humanity’s forays into the woods are, from an animal perspective, loud and stinky and highly predictable. We place our cameras in places we can get to. We hike and camp where there are trails. We drive on the roads we build, loudly and stinkily. When we’re planning to log, we survey first, marking up the previously untouched woods with neon flagging tape and spray paint. Surveyors and hunters alike get to the woods in pickup trucks, and then traverse established human-trails for as long as they can before dipping into the shallow end of the “unoccupied” wilderness.
If some creature hated everything about humanity the way my cats hate being seen by me, I wouldn’t be too surprised if a small population could simply migrate around between the areas that humanity is using the least, while we’re waiting for the next crop of timber to grow.
I think that sasquatches are pretty unlikely for other reasons—with other things in the woods, we eventually see the side effects of their existence. Scat, browse, bones from them and their dinners. Trails, prints, hair with DNA in it. Holes in the food web when they all vanish, diseases of the known species whose habits interact with theirs, like overpopulated mangy deer after you take the wolves out of a region, even though most people never see a living wolf. Something would have to have an accurate and constantly evolving mental model of human abilities and expectations to hide all that evidence from us, so I think Occam’s Razor still says “probably not” to the Sasquatch.
But “we have cameras” is, IMO, the weakest form of the argument. Our cameras are overwhelmingly concentrated around the sounds and smells of frequent human occupation, which is exactly where something with the temperament of my cats would not want to be. We do have some few unmanned cameras, solar powered, cellular uplink, that might be able to stream images from a single clearing in the woods for long enough to stop stinking of our presence. But that counts on guessing where to put the camera.
I think people hear “forest” and imagine the forests they’ve been in, which in most of the world are something like parks. When you think of a forest, do you think of a space where you can walk around under the trees? Do you think of picturesque winding trails that lead somewhere?
I grew up in the woods of the PNW, and every other forest I’ve visited around the world has felt wrong somehow. Thin, barren. Jungles, though… Jungles feel like home plus a bunch of venomous stuff that wants to kill you. But these forests… You can’t see, you can’t be seen. There’s about a month after it snows when you can see a little further, and that’s the time to make trails, but all the rest of the year the trails will do their best to heal themselves.
What should it look like once a house has burned and the homestead is abandoned? Here, the forest eats it. A few years on, there’s nothing left but a cacophony of green. I have a friend who loses piercings if they take the jewelry out for more than a day—the woods are like their body, but with healing up their roads and trails. Every time you log, you have to cut the roads open again, often cutting into the soil where it’s built and slumped and covered over where you had the road just 20 years ago. Sure, you buy rock for the roads so the log trucks don’t sink into them, but it sinks into the clay and you’ll have to buy more next time you’re ready to log the place again.
If you know where to look, you can find abandoned homesteads, but it’s not from manmade items lying around. The metal and plastic and glass are there under the soil if you dig for them, but it’s the plants that tell you where to dig: English Ivy is the first clue; it means the settlers planted it on a grave site or a gatepost nearby. Then, depending on the time of year, you look for symptoms of the other things they planted: Apples fermenting and deer-eaten, fallen in the fall, or daffodils signposting a former garden bed in spring.
The woods here eat stuff, like that plant in the Broadway musical, just closer to impossible to kill. When something dies, the bones get spread and buried and gnawed. Even the deer will chew on bones; small rodents reduce antler sheds to powdered calcium back in the food chain. Vines subsume abandoned houses; deciduous trees pump nutrients from the subsoil to their leaves and mulch those leaves annually onto everything beneath them.
I’ve been nearsighted all my life, but only in the classroom did I notice it. In these woods, in the parts of the year when it’s nice to be outdoors, distance vision is very nearly useless. Spotting motion helps; acute hearing helps greatly. But with how the flora capitalizes on every available photon of sunlight, there’s rarely more than a few feet of line-of-sight from anywhere to anywhere else.
I guess all I’m really getting at here is the intuition that you might already have if you’re a birdwatcher: It takes a lot of luck to spot something. But the somethings in the woods which are “real” in the conventional sense can eventually be spotted, or at least their side effects can.
Reading https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nwJCzszw8gGjPTihM/i-still-think-it-s-very-unlikely-we-re-observing-alien and pondering the Bigfoot thing.
On the one hand, We Have Cameras Everywhere(TM).
On the other hand—pick any area of the pacific northwest and look at a map of where the permanent roads are. Pull it up side by side with a map of an area that you’re familiar with. Zoom in on both, to a magnification you’d consider reasonable for imagining things at walking-around scale. Pan around on the PNW map and try to find a permanent road. It’ll take a minute.
Most land out here grows timber, sure. Timber is harvested roughly once every 30-50 years.
At this point, I’d bet that every square mile of the area has been visited by humans. Forestry land is heavily trafficked once every few decades; conservation land is surveyed and studied and sometimes visited by tourists.
The question, like a missing term in the Drake Equation, is when. The L term captures for-how-long, sure, but only implies a difference between “someone sent us radio signals for 100 years around 1000 AD” and “someone sent us radio signals for 100 years around 2000 AD”.
I have two cats who hate me. (not their fault, they came from an animal hoarding situation so they’re probably kinda traumatized) They seem to think I’m noisy and conspicuous and I stink, and to their perceptions I certainly do. They despise being perceived. I can tell that they’re in my house because I can check every nook and cranny and learn their favorite hidey-holes, and the food I put out for them gets eaten, and their litter boxes get full. But if this was out in the woods instead of the artificial and tightly controlled environment of my home, I would likely not know they’re around, just like most hikers don’t know when they’re being watched by a mountain lion. The cats hate the places where I spend time, just as they love the parts of my house I rarely visit. The places they love and hate change as my habits do.
Oh, and both cats are black longhairs. They move fast, so between that and the fur, every photo I’ve ever tried to take of them out and about has come out hideously blurry. I joke that they’re related to Sasquatches...
Anyways, humanity’s forays into the woods are, from an animal perspective, loud and stinky and highly predictable. We place our cameras in places we can get to. We hike and camp where there are trails. We drive on the roads we build, loudly and stinkily. When we’re planning to log, we survey first, marking up the previously untouched woods with neon flagging tape and spray paint. Surveyors and hunters alike get to the woods in pickup trucks, and then traverse established human-trails for as long as they can before dipping into the shallow end of the “unoccupied” wilderness.
If some creature hated everything about humanity the way my cats hate being seen by me, I wouldn’t be too surprised if a small population could simply migrate around between the areas that humanity is using the least, while we’re waiting for the next crop of timber to grow.
I think that sasquatches are pretty unlikely for other reasons—with other things in the woods, we eventually see the side effects of their existence. Scat, browse, bones from them and their dinners. Trails, prints, hair with DNA in it. Holes in the food web when they all vanish, diseases of the known species whose habits interact with theirs, like overpopulated mangy deer after you take the wolves out of a region, even though most people never see a living wolf. Something would have to have an accurate and constantly evolving mental model of human abilities and expectations to hide all that evidence from us, so I think Occam’s Razor still says “probably not” to the Sasquatch.
But “we have cameras” is, IMO, the weakest form of the argument. Our cameras are overwhelmingly concentrated around the sounds and smells of frequent human occupation, which is exactly where something with the temperament of my cats would not want to be. We do have some few unmanned cameras, solar powered, cellular uplink, that might be able to stream images from a single clearing in the woods for long enough to stop stinking of our presence. But that counts on guessing where to put the camera.
I think people hear “forest” and imagine the forests they’ve been in, which in most of the world are something like parks. When you think of a forest, do you think of a space where you can walk around under the trees? Do you think of picturesque winding trails that lead somewhere?
I grew up in the woods of the PNW, and every other forest I’ve visited around the world has felt wrong somehow. Thin, barren. Jungles, though… Jungles feel like home plus a bunch of venomous stuff that wants to kill you. But these forests… You can’t see, you can’t be seen. There’s about a month after it snows when you can see a little further, and that’s the time to make trails, but all the rest of the year the trails will do their best to heal themselves.
What should it look like once a house has burned and the homestead is abandoned? Here, the forest eats it. A few years on, there’s nothing left but a cacophony of green. I have a friend who loses piercings if they take the jewelry out for more than a day—the woods are like their body, but with healing up their roads and trails. Every time you log, you have to cut the roads open again, often cutting into the soil where it’s built and slumped and covered over where you had the road just 20 years ago. Sure, you buy rock for the roads so the log trucks don’t sink into them, but it sinks into the clay and you’ll have to buy more next time you’re ready to log the place again.
If you know where to look, you can find abandoned homesteads, but it’s not from manmade items lying around. The metal and plastic and glass are there under the soil if you dig for them, but it’s the plants that tell you where to dig: English Ivy is the first clue; it means the settlers planted it on a grave site or a gatepost nearby. Then, depending on the time of year, you look for symptoms of the other things they planted: Apples fermenting and deer-eaten, fallen in the fall, or daffodils signposting a former garden bed in spring.
The woods here eat stuff, like that plant in the Broadway musical, just closer to impossible to kill. When something dies, the bones get spread and buried and gnawed. Even the deer will chew on bones; small rodents reduce antler sheds to powdered calcium back in the food chain. Vines subsume abandoned houses; deciduous trees pump nutrients from the subsoil to their leaves and mulch those leaves annually onto everything beneath them.
I’ve been nearsighted all my life, but only in the classroom did I notice it. In these woods, in the parts of the year when it’s nice to be outdoors, distance vision is very nearly useless. Spotting motion helps; acute hearing helps greatly. But with how the flora capitalizes on every available photon of sunlight, there’s rarely more than a few feet of line-of-sight from anywhere to anywhere else.
I guess all I’m really getting at here is the intuition that you might already have if you’re a birdwatcher: It takes a lot of luck to spot something. But the somethings in the woods which are “real” in the conventional sense can eventually be spotted, or at least their side effects can.