( CNN ) -- When I was a boy , my father used to take me by the hand to visit the ruins of the ancient metropolis on the outskirts of our town . We would always stop by to visit the huge winged bulls that guarded the gates of the ancient city of Nineveh . I was scared of the winged bulls , but at the same time , they excited me . Through them and the site , I learned the stories of the civilization that lived along the Tigris River in what was now Northern Iraq . Many decades later , I started a technology company that brought the world its first 3-D laser scanning system and cloud of points software . The systems we developed were extremely fast and could rapidly collect millions of points with very high accuracy and very high resolution . A surveyor with traditional survey tools would be hard-pressed to produce maybe 500 points in a whole day . These new systems would produce something like 10,000 points a second . As you can imagine , this was a paradigm shift in the survey and construction businesses , as well as in the reality capture industry . TED.com : Experiments that hint of longer lives . In 2001 , Cyra Technologies was acquired by Leica Geosystems . Right around that time , a terrible tragedy happened : The magnificent 160-foot-tall Buddhas in the Bamiyan Valley in Afghanistan were blown up by the Taliban . They were gone in an instant . Unfortunately , there was no detailed record of the site . This devastated me , and I could n't help but wonder about the fate of my old friends , the winged bulls , and the fate of heritage sites all over the world . My wife and I decided to start a project to digitally preserve world heritage sites . We called the project CyArk , which stands for Cyber Archive . CyArk is now an international nonprofit organization . With the help of a global network of partners , we 've completed more than 50 projects to date , including Chichen Itza , Rapa Nui , Babylon , Rosslyn Chapel , Pompeii and Mount Rushmore . CyArk uses 3-D digital documentation , archiving and the dissemination of the data to tell the story of the sites and engage the public . We are losing the sites and the stories faster than we can physically preserve them . Natural phenomena take their toll , but it has become clear that human causes are a significant part of the reason for their destruction . TED.com : How algorithms shape our world . We 're fighting a losing battle . Not only are we losing the sites , we 're losing a significant piece of our collective memory . Imagine the human race not knowing where we came from . Because of the accelerated pace of destruction , we created a project we call the CyArk 500 Challenge -- to digitally preserve 500 world heritage sites in five years . To me , the 500 is really just the first 500 . To sustain our work , we take the technology to local universities and colleges . They then can help us with digital preservation of their heritage sites , and at the same time , they get the benefit of learning a technology they can use in the future . Two years ago , we were approached by a partner of ours to digitally preserve an important heritage site , a UNESCO heritage site in Uganda , the Royal Kasubi Tombs . The work was done successfully in the field , and the data was archived and publicly disseminated through the CyArk website . Last March , we received very sad news . The Royal Tombs had been destroyed by suspected arson . A few days later , we received a call : `` Is the data available , and can it be used for reconstruction ? '' Our answer , of course , was yes . Our heritage is much more than our collective memory -- it 's our collective treasure . We owe it to our children , our grandchildren and the generations we will never meet to keep it safe and to pass it along . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Ben Kacyra .
Ben Kacyra : World 's most historic , treasured sites are always at risk of destruction . He says technology developed for the construction industry can rapidly digitize sites . Kacyra 's nonprofit CyArk is preserving 500 world heritage sites . He says the world is at risk of losing its collective memory and heritage .