Albert Lin: I’m on a quest to find the secret burial site.
The forbidden tomb of the man who ruled
one of the largest empires ever known.
Genghis Khan.
It’s the most incredible archaeological puzzle
of the last millennium.
( applause )
Thanks a lot.
This is me.
Can anybody in this room guess which one is me?
( audience laughter )
It’s that one, right.
( audience laughter )
And that’s my grandpa and my grandma
sitting around all their grandchildren, in Hong Kong.
My grandpa used to tell me all the time that
he thought that, you know
that we had come from the north.
And he told me to study hard, you know
to do well in school, but…
to be curious about those sorts of things
to try to figure out where we came from.
To always know where we came from and who we were, right.
So, I did study hard, you know, I’m…
There’s me at a microscope studying hard.
And then one day I ended up with this
Ph.D. in Engineering!
And I thought about my grandpa, you know.
I thought about this guy who– he grew up at a time of war.
And he travelled all over China but he never made it north.
And I thought, well, you know, I’m going to do this.
And I saved up a little money and I bought a ticket to China.
And I had this plan, I thought that I would go to
the outskirts of the capital Ulan Bator
and I’d buy a horse, on the outskirts of the capital.
I’m a grad– just like a fresh grad student, right
I’m like, “I’m going to buy a horse”, you know.
I didn’t know how to ride a horse.
( audience laughter )
And, I was going to go out into the middle of nowhere
and I was a going to live with these nomads
and when I had to come back I would…
press “home” on my GPS, you know
get back to the capital
back to the same place that I’d bought the horse
and I would trade it back in for
you know, the cash that I had used to buy the horse and then
you know, I’d break even and then come home.
And, I met these two women on this train
you know, these two Mongolian women.
And, the next thing you know, they said, well, look I’ve–
They had a brother and they introduced me to their brother.
He agreed to take me up to…
…to their uncle’s land, and they would give me a horse.
And there I lived with these nomads.
Literally lived with these nomads for months.
We think of this place as this far off country, you know.
A place of legends, right?
And there was one individual
whose name was Temujin.
He went to this mountain called the Burkhan Khaldun
or the God mountain.
And he spoke to the sky, to Tengri.
And he asked what should he do, right.
What should he do? Should he live this like…
this life of being a subservient slave
you know, his wife had just been stolen from him.
Or should he fight back.
This guy Temujin would one day take on the name Genghis Khan.
In Mongolia he’s thought of as a hero.
He’s thought of as the great creator of…
of not only their nation but their… religion
you know, their spiritual leader.
So why is it that we don’t know
this history that the Mongols see?
There was never a painting of him
during the time that he was alive.
There was never a document written
about him by his own people while he was alive.
There’s literally not a single one of…
the Imperial family, he or his sons or his grandsons, anybody
not a single one of their tombs have ever been discovered.
It’s like it was just this…
this whisper of history, right.
But he also created this world, which we see today.
He had a system of meritocracy, which was far beyond its time.
He created the first, you know, global currency.
He installed a uniform written language
that he instated across all of the lands that he dominated.
He created the first empire
which practiced religious freedom.
We don’t really know that much about him, right
but, he changed the world.
And maybe if we can go back to this
this zone, this Ikh Khorig, this forbidden precinct
maybe we can begin to piece his story back
from the last bit of evidence that we have then,
then we can start knowing more about the truth of this story.
So, that’s me, that’s where I was, right.
I just finished my Ph.D. in Engineering.
I thought, well, maybe I can start using my mind
in a way that will allow me to answer these questions, right.
I can use satellite imagery
I’ll get the world’s highest resolution satellite imagery
I’ll… use this over the entire region of this Ikh Khorig
I’ll scan it with point-five meter resolution imagery
then I’ll use drones, with cameras on them
and I’ll take pictures of the earth
where the satellite imagery told me things were, you know
a little bit off or weird or something that looked ancient.
Then I’d use things like ground penetrating radar
like magnetometry, like electro-magnetic induction
to try to scan the ground and
find things in the sub-surface that were off.
And I would use these tools because
the Mongolian belief is that
if you disturb the tomb of Genghis Khan–
The reason why that area was so forbidden is because
if you disturb this tomb then you might cause this curse
that will end the world, right.
But I quickly realized how am I going to find anything.
I’ve got 6,000 square kilometers of data
in which one pixel is less than half a meter in resolution.
I’ve got literally a lifetime of work to do
just to sift through this data
to find that tiny fragment of information that might be weird.
This is my data, right.
Can I have people help me find something like a tomb of
you know, something that I don’t even know
what I’m looking for, right.
Can anybody tell me if I said if you had to find a tomb
what you would say, I mean, in this image
does anybody see something that looks off?
Yeah, right.
You know, these little things, right?
That looks modern, that looks like a river
and what is that, right.
We thought well, that’s simple.
So let me make it simple for everybody.
Let’s make it easy for people to do this.
Let’s make it so that you can tag data easily.
We chop up all the information into all these tiny little bits
and we’ll make it simple and easy for people to see what
you know, to place dots and tags on things
that they think are weird.
And, we built this thing and we put it online
we thought, well, this is how we’ll do it.
We’ll create this website where we’ll have
people sifting through data.
And then every single day, in the field
I would download this data with satellite communication links.
And I will go and search for those…
those sites of interest that are identified by the crowd
and then I’d blog back.
In less than a few months, we started collecting data that
exceeded over like, 2.5 million human generated tags.
And then when you look a little closer at certain regions
you can see each one of these dots
is an individual tag by a person who is sitting on their couch
in San Francisco, New York, Washington DC
and when they converge
you start to see things, clusters, right?
When you pulled away the data
you see the same tiniest little nuances of something weird.
”
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