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Rosetta Disk For 10K-Year History
fleener writes: "The BBC reports and SiliconValley.com comments on the Rosetta Disk, a 2" nickel nano-analog, optical storage disk that records text and images at densities up to 350,000 pages per disk, designed to last 10,000 years. It will be unveiled at the 10,000 year Library Conference, in a discussion of how to store our history and culture for the future, given that current digital storage formats degrade quickly and are platform dependent. The prototype contains the first three chapters of Genesis, in 1,000 languages. What information do you think is valuable and relevant to give future archaeologists?"
It would be simple enough to have a diagram of a person looking at one of the disks through a microscope. One of the biggest benifits of this is that there is no need for any other power source then the sun.
Information wants to be free like speech wants to be free, not like we want beer to be free.
"The prototype contains the first three chapters of Genesis, in 1,000 languages. "
.{redmist}.
What a waste of storage. Why not all the Subgenius that's fit to print?
-------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------
They should archive the fact that Windows had bugs in it, because it's possible that Windows 12000 will be bug free. We mustn't let the younger generations forget the things we went through to bring them stable computing.
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.- George Santayana
Hate to burst your bubble, but Genesis is believed by Christians, Muslims, and Jews. There would be no need to include text from the Quran or Talmud to include these groups.
//m
The whole point is to provide language translation, not to teach math. 1+1=2 seems to be the same in all languages.
//m
Yes but the Encyclopedia Brittanica is out of date within a year. They want you to buy year books, or buy a whole new set.
//m
As a snapshot of our times, we should include something that communicates our relationship with technology. I would suggest the text of the nuclear weapons FAQ, photographs of mushroom clouds, and the text of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (which the United States has yet to sign). Follow this with photographs of man walking on the moon, an exerpt of the human genome project, and perhaps one of those colorful maps of the World Wide Web.
We have lived for half a century with technology enabling us to wreak complete destruction on ourselves and our environment, yet we have demonstrated a similar capacity to work towards a common good. This has, to a large degree, defined us as a people and how we cope with these technologies will form an important part of our historical legasy. Which facet of the human animal will win out in the end is unclear, and how we will apply this technology to solving our current problems will be for historians of the future to determine.
It's not as much of a censorship issue to me as it would seem to be to you. It's a matter of disturbing the peace. IRL, that is a valid charge for people who are making some pretty obvious trouble for themselves. That is NOT the same as casually talking to your friends about the "evil governemnt" and hence being removed. Were that the case...I agree with you completely...but that isn't the case at all. It would be more like you go out one sunny morning casually start screaming about the "evil government" from a rooftop while other people are trying to go about their lives. Odds are it would annoy the people around you....whether they even agree or not. Hell...get real. You can climb onto a rooftop and scream about how GREAT our government is...I would still want you to shut up for it. Why? Not because I agree or disagree....but because it's annoying.
How would I stop it? Well...I could ask nicely. (Would that have stopped OSM? Hmm...I really doubt it...be real here.) No...I'd probably call in the "evil establishment" government of ours...who would probably resolve it by dispatching an officer to investigate. I am glad that option exists personally.
How exactly can They be sure that this capsule won't be opened until around 12k AD? Put a bumber sticker on it asking future generations to kindly wait until the appointed time?
--
Dyolf Knip
The quote attributed to Voltaire above was actually paraphrased by C.S. Tallentyre
Thank you for the correction. I have had difficulty finding definitive confirmation. The best I could do was this comment
from this site. Maybe I'll have to break down and go to a physical library. *smile*
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
The Rosetta stone allowed those who understood one language to understand two others which were previously not understood, right? So take some of the art our society values most - perhaps one piece from each country or language - translate it into every language we can find, and stick it on a durable disk! Wouldn't that be a godsend to archaeologists? The medium would even allow us to put movies on there and subtitle or dub them. Just a thought....
grep -ri 'should work'
Didn't it occur to you that the word 'analog' in the first sentence of the article might mean that the disk is NOT DIGITAL?
-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
Please read.
E=MC^2
(fission, fusion, or antimatter, it doesn't look too good for a planet with a technological society on it)
Why is it that every time the Bible or anything relating to it is posted on slashdot you people go fscking crazy?
Grow up...
> Yeah, they can take some cues from Star Trek. >They're always finding 1,000+ year old >electronics that not only work, but have been >left on the whole time! Luckily for them the computers weren't running Windows.
Why do we need to kick start civilisation? Humanity managed to sort out civilisation (assuming we are civilised, there are plenty of good arguments and examples to say that we aren't) without any form of kickstart You also seem to assume that whoever/whatever was to replace us in the event of a Life Extinction Event would be of hominoid, or at least hominid origins. I would suggest that the odds of this are fair, but not great. Cheers Hacman
All the Metallica songs, in MP3 format?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You didn't read the article did you? Come on, own up. The disk is analogue - all you need is a microscope and a knowledge of the written form of one of the 1000 languages it is engraved in.
-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
1. samples of our language that help the readers to understand it quickly :-) and why we did this :-)
...if they care :-)
2. hello world
5. philosophy (what we think of atom bombs and feudalism and many of the original wirtings) 4. scientific knowledge (how to build atom bombs and the like)
3. history (what our civilization looks like and what we have found out about the past)
6. manymany comments of all the people who liked to write some (without filtering them
7. culture: show them what we've got, what we like! How we express and celebrate, fine lyrics, drawings, theatre and everything that is not too boring on a "static, nano-carved" disc
I consider the personal comments the most important cause I disklike the standard view of our society (modern, good, sensible, fair) and want to tell my view.
there's enough for everybody, let's share it
This *ALMOST* wasn't in last months wired. Atleast they had pictures.
SB.
hey, that's some not-right shit there! WTF? I thought you guys said that you wouldn't ever censor? like its ok to say that mp3s are cool and put up copies of microsoft stuff, but we can't make some offtopic stuff once in awhile?
ah, sorry guy, i just haven't been reading slashdot lately, but when i do, it seems the only thing worth reading are the troll posts in the comments section, and they're too long and my attention span dwindles, so i just compulsivly check my web-based email instead
First something like the rosetta stone, so that our languages can be understood. e.g. an illustrated dictionary. With say an English HOWTO.
;).
:).
:).
;).
Decimal system.
We should include male + female DNA + blueprints for sperm and egg, for various popular creatures including humans
And some physics constants+measurements just to see if things changed
Some stuff about our various cultures. newsprints, magazines, with rankings for fiction, nonfiction, debatable etc
Guiness book of records maybe - so we can see the limitations, and what are regarded as "achievements".
If possible the sort of stuff that was holographically stored in the alien ship in Arthur C Clark's Rendezvous with Rama.
And tons of stuff which should not be patented again- talk about prior art
Cheerio,
Link.
I got the impression it was more like a microfiche and they could examine it with a microscope.
While we cannot make a perfect decision about what to record for our decendants/replacements, we can make an educated guess. Go to your local book store. Look for books on aboriginal people. Count the number of books in the following subjects: art, religion, technology and history. You should find that the most common subject is history, followed by art, religion and technology. Repeat for Phonecians, Greeks, Chinese and Europeans.
How should this guide our decisions when makeing such and artifact as the Rosetta Disk? I would propose that we give them that which we value in our own ancestors.
We should explain our history. Let our future archeologists understand us through our history, maybe (wistful thinking, I know) they will avoid some of our mistakes. Give them dates, give them events. They will find artifacts, so why not give them a context with which to understand those artifacts?
As for art: what is the one remnant of 'cave-men' everyone is aware of? Paintings and arrow heads. Art is universal. A child can understand a painting. Art stands on it's own merits.
Religion, philosophy and technology I group together. Why? Not because I think of them as alike in any way, rather, I imagine that a 10,000 year distant archeologist would have trouble distiguishing them. We don't have all of the answers, and these three diciplines all attempt to answer the same fundamental questions. In 10,000 years, we have come from no philosophy to metaphysics. We've come from arrowheads to high yield laser guided nuclear bombs. We've come from huge, impersonal, hierarchical, bumbling religion to...huge, impersonal, hierarchical, bumbling religion. And hell, why should we bother explaining the difference? We should just present them as different theories addressing the same issue.
P.S.: These damn things will not last if they're on the earth. Terra Firma is awful on artifacts. The ice caps, mountain tops or the moon might not be bad ideas. My vote goes for the moon. Why? Because we can make it highly visible. Just imagine a few high albedo plains aranged in a straight line, like an elipsis... It would at least give tourists something to see if society doesn't collapse. And any developing society would know what to do when they got to the moon, if they got to 1960-ish technology.
Yes, I'm still a junky. Are you still a bitch?
My favorite was "That's All", but I also liked "Home by the Sea". I hope they included these. Of course, I would have preferred to send Billy Joel down through the ages.
What? You meant the book from the bible, not the album? Oh. Sorry.
Besides the usual information of history, I saw other posts indicating that it might be used to build a civilization from scratch. If this is so, textbooks about _everything_ would be useful.
:).
Another thing they could include is "everything", the website! What other place offers exterme insite into the way a geek thinks, about absolutely everything? Everything2 as well
Yeah, they can take some cues from Star Trek. They're always finding 1,000+ year old electronics that not only work, but have been left on the whole time!
Genesis is older then christianity.
Wow, that's just like I said above. Yes I know that the three semitic-based religions believed the story, and yes I know it is pre-everything. Genesis exists in one form or another in most semitic texts. The Quran may not have it in the same form.
Now to my point. There is more wisdom than genesis out there. Whatever you may make of the story of Adam(adapu) and eve(forgot for the moment), there are other things that are honestly christian, muslim, judaic, buddhist, etc. I agree with your statment towards linguistics. It would give them one heckuva rosetta stone.
Lowmag.net
How can a digital storage media not be media dependant? Please explain.
You still need a protocol or method of decoding/encoding the data. Granted standard IDE HD's with a FAT file system are platform dependant, but who can't get the specs on them and use them for whatever?
Right, since you don't need anything else to get a strong basis of what religion X,Y, and Z are by the first three chapters. What makes them unique? Wouldn't it be better to include some of the later teachings? something outside of the semitic (actually pre-sumerian) realm? .. You simply can't make it fit. That is part of the reason you need to include other stories from all three books. A history of law from Hammurabi or the Middrash would be nice. This is a function philosophy, and it would translate well.
The Talmud and the Quran are both important, as is the new Testament of the bible in defining their respective groups. To state we don't need anything else because we have a creation myth is an argument based on shaky ground indeed. Keep in mind that these religions keep this story as a tradition and a myth, not as literal truth. To some fundies, the earth is 6,000 years old. This doesn't even jive when you consider there are stories even older still than the first recorded semitic histories (in the talmud)
Anyways, here's hoping they don't get to centered on one or two points of view..
Lowmag.net
Hey, CmdrTaco:
If you're going to post a link to Genesis, please post one that isn't so thoroughly flawed. ;-)
The King James version of the Bible has been shown, time and again, to contain hundreds of translation and transcription errors. It's study should be relegated to historians and theologians, not average Christians.
Probably the cleanest Christian rendering is the New International Version. However, being Jewish, I'll stick with the Jewsih Publication Society's version! *grin*
Follow this link to an excellent translation of the Bible.Cheers!
~wmaheriv
~wmaheriv
"Shema Yisroel- Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Echad!"
If this thing is going to last 1,000 years, why not include something useful, like the location of all the nuclear waste dumps containing plutonium and other radioactive elements with multiple thousand year half lives. (24,000 for plutonium?).
There was recently (a few years back) an architectural design contest for storage of radioactive waste. The idea was to design a container that would not only last tens of thousands of years, but transmit (by it's structure - since no language used today will still be around - almost certainly) that the contents are dangerous - "Keep Out!"
There should be some interesting ideas from this contest that would help these Rosetta Disk folks make sure that someone actually figures out what this thing is for.
Now where is that URL...?
"Well it's not Victory - but then it's not Death either."
Aren't there lots and lots of babylonian documents written way before genesis?
--
"HORSE."
"HORSE."
-Flaming Carrot
Because the choice of the bible indicates a possible lack of thought into the alternatives to store.
tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
postmoderncore - art and creation are a higher purpose
Most important, I think that we need to record the progression of technology. I think that the best way to do this is to store a meta-event that caused a major impact on human-kind. Geez -- I didn't even mention its effect on the planet... One way to do this is by recording all media on some device similar to this. Another alternative is to store everything published by all the major research centers. We might want to raise the filter and just store technological advances that made it into the mainstream, like the effect of the moon landing, and the mars probes. And there is always that little piece of software written about 7 years ago by a young guy at CREN which has pretty much changed the face of knowledge distribution as we know it. I guess what I am getting at is that if we were to store this kind of meta-event, then the other changes which are so well covered and perviasive in the media would make sense.
A copy of the original Rosetta stone.
A good reason to use a section of Genesis is that it's already been translated into virtually every language on earth, so that much of the work is already done. A good reason not to use math is that the whole point of the exercise is to provide a cross-reference of textual language, as the original Rosetta Stone did. The idea is that if future historians have an inkling of how to translate, say, Cherokee, into their own language, so they can translate ancient Cherokee texts, and then they find this disk, they will be able to cross-reference what they know of Cherokee with the other languages on the disk, allowing them to translate texts from other languages as well. The contents of the text are unimportant. What's important is that it's long enough to give plenty of context, vocabulary, and sentence structure, and that the meaning is consistent across all the languages represented on the disk. The only text I can think of that might have anywhere near as many translations already made is Shakespeare's plays, but I suspect the language of Genesis has been modernized, which would make it more useful for the project. -Bill
You are all hopelessly childish and can't spell. I don't even know what you were trying to say there. I'm done with this thread.
Yes you are right, They made one and put part of the Bible on it. Who says that they CAN'T make more???
You need to follow your own advice in the future
I mean that as a genuine question. You are in possession of no more facts than the rest of us, yet you won't even open to the possibility that there is something to this. Why?
All the stories, articles and comments ever posted on slashdot. Is there anything more suitable for this?
--- If OS were buildings, then the first woodpecker to come around would erase 95 % of civilization.
This is an easy one, a full archive of /.
I sure hope they don't make the mistake of saving the text files as MS Word. We all know how often that file format changes.
You, or Gregory Benford is absolutely right. Compare this to the way scholars have been studying the middle ages recently. Noone really cares about the brilliant scholastic discussions hunchbacked medieaval monks have spent a lifetime committing to paper..what we are interested in is the "junk" that creeps up through the dogma in their books, i.e. brief moments in which something of daily life in their time shows through, for example when they're attributing behavioral patterns to Jesus or his disciples that we know can't have been exhibited by them because we now have a fairly solid understanding of life in ancient Palestine. Based on this knowledge, we can figure out that what those monks described in works that were meant to live through eternity must've been the fad of the day in 13th century Avignon.
The point is this: there is no way for us to know what future generations will want to learn about us, so we can only hope they'll find enough 1990's trendiness in this to make it interesting for them.
Or consider this: to us, the fall of the Berlin Wall was a monumentous experience. But over a long period, it won't be important. "Thousands of years ago, there was a 50yrs cold war going on..there was a wall and then it fell and the war was over." Doesn't the 100 years war between England and France seem insignificant to us now, after only 5, 600 years?
This endeavour will only benefit our ego's. "See, we've left our mark." 10000 years from now, humans will be studying AOL cd's (as another poster pointed out), and they will consider them to be much more important as artifacts of late 20th century life than any Bill Joy article or time capsule.
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
At the pace we're growing now, the disck would reach all of 20 people who care, and that's just because they're the only ones who found it.
:)
Go watch futurama, see how they screwed it up?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
IN order to read it, on "hacker" operating systems like "linux", download DeCSS and place the disc in you DVD-ROM drive....
...oops, wrong subject
Someone put a "K" on the "10" in the article title and put me out of my misery.
I know! Just yesterday, I had to run to Fry's and get Microsoft English 2000 Pro so I could read this book (dead-tree) I bought at Amazon.
Meesa be thinking yousa should be reading the link before commenting.
sealand? like in the chrysalids?
English today and english 500 years ago aren't comparable in this context because they didn't diverge. (I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying that's a bad example) Anyhow, what is the criterion for determinining if it's a language or a dialect? Mutual comprehensibility? (kinda like the EASY definition of a species)
Never mind that anyone who had the tools to read 350000 pages off a 2 inch disk would probably already have a pretty good grasp of mathematics, or would at least know somone who did.
Yes, but are people still studying them?
Genesis is important, not just for its age, but for the influence it has had upon Judaism, and by extension, the rest of Western Civilisation.
It is still avidly discussed and studied, and will continue to be so long as there are Jews in the world.
Oh, and whilst I'm on the subject- Genesis is widely regarded by us Jews as being alegorical. Chances are very good that it was ^never^ taken literally. It certainly isn't now, save in the most extreme personalities.
For all of you who are bashing it as 'quaint mythology,' I challenge you to read it objectively and with an open mind. It is filled with valuable lessons, and thousands of books have been written expounding upon these lessons. Genesis is there to teach us things that few are patient or honest enough to hear...
I, for one, applaud their choice of Genesis. I only hope they include a good commentary with it, just in case our descendants don't "get it" any better than the average /.er *grin*
~wmaheriv
~wmaheriv
"Shema Yisroel- Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Echad!"
Humanity won't be wiped out by an ice age, it wasn't the last twenty times, and it'll take a good few million years for any current non-hominid to evolve into something capable of reading nanotext on a little disk of nickel. There are some however who believe that an extensive human civilisation was wiped out in the last ice age leaving almost no trace of its passing. I don't want that to happen to us, but I think this rosetta disk doesn't answer all of the problems. ps. I love the "rosetta boot disk" comment, DrPsycho!
This was tried before in 1700 BC in Minoan Crete. Unfortunately no one today knows what version of Word they used...
As far as I know we have less
than 200 languages on planet earth.
This includes navajo, strange
african dialects and south american
indio dialects.
Well, just read that in Scientific
American, german version, some 10
years ago...
Any idea?
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
... and as chad exchanged his coin for three fish and a donkey he unwittingly oblittered the entire works of Shakepeare...
schoolkids may rejoice
Genesis is older then christianity.
It's is also one of the most widely distributed texts in the world. Since the disk is to be used to help future linguist figure out what will then be dead languages, using a widley known text will help emmencely.
Will Genesis be around in 10,000 years? I don't know. But it is more likely to survive then the latest copy of wired.
Ignorance alert -- This question will display my ignorance of the Jewish theology --
Isn't Genesis in the Quran?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If nothing else Im sure it is pretty easy to find translations of the Bible in many laguages. If you are about to do this kind of project you dont want to spend half your money on translating "Planet of the Apes" God (couldn't help it ;)) knows how many times.
Karma: 2.71828182846 (Mostly due to small, fun pills)
I like the Moon idea but a 2" disk is going to get lost pretty quick in all that dust.
I think a 9-meter tall slab of black rock, situated in a major crater like Tycho would be more obvious.
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
But surely the point of a rosetta disk is to do the same as the original rosetta stone ie offer a translation of a dead language. What's on it doesn't matter - chances are there'll be some other writings laying around where future generations can learn all about how to blow themselves up.
I take it everyone's seen one of those BaGua things, you know those octagon looking things with Yin-Yang at the middle. Well, there's long been a theory in the Chinese culture that the BaGua was THE KEY to infinite knowledge, the key to unlock all wonders of the universe, the only piece of information left to us by an advanced civilization prior to uh, I guess Genesis in this case. I think that makes more sense than this stupid micro-disk thing.
Otherwise, put it ancient chinese/egyptian hieroglyphics makes more sense ^_^
I wonder how big the kernel would have to be? :^)
(please leave your Civ jokes at the door)
-DrPsycho - Coping with reality since 1975
Why would it not be considered one?
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
The hope is hope that some remanant of the languages remain so that if only 1 of the 300 are useful, translating between the others would be easy.
Information wants to be free like speech wants to be free, not like we want beer to be free.
-- The relevance of the first three chapters of Genesis to the lucky anthropologists who dig them up in 10,000 years or so will seem as ridiculous and dated as Incan human sacrifices seem to us today... Why not put something that people (If there are any of them around to dig it up) could use to re-construct the past as a lifestyle, something in the form of Samuel Pepys diaries, perhaps, or maybe the lessons we (haven't) learned about pollution, over-fishing, limited resources, and human weaknesses; the possibilities are staggering. What a poor choice, when one stops to consider that the "us against them" - "other-side-sucks" state of mentality (mostly caused by religion, by the way!) got us into most of this mess to begin with! I would think even Ren and Stimpy would be more relevant.
I hate the fucking system, But the system loves fucking me.
Nick
-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
Why Genesis? was my thoguht too but it looks like they were after a rosetta stone which allows one to decode one language in one that might have survived and the claptrap in the Bible has been translated into more languages than any other info and there is no denying that it still influences our modern world. For example Egypts history (the 20th centruy version). The country was named "Egypt" by the french less than 200 years ago. A Hewbew word meaning "accross the water" is something like Aegept and the place with the pyramids must have been the people involved with Mosses so their kings are called Pharos and the Egyptians get blamed for enslaving the Jews over 5000 years ago which resulted in a war in the 1960s where Isreal tooke over the Sini and conducted huge archology surveys and determined that the exodus didn't go through the sini desert. In the last 20 years its starting to look like the jews were in northern Iraq before they were in their current homeland.
And, this is not spamming. Spamming is what the Real Beer Guy is doing in this very same story-- posting *many* copies of *crap*. This is just one copy in two stories of something that is either very important, or a troll. *If* it is true, whoever posted it is fully justified in so doing it.
Granted though. There could be some brief iconography to indicate:
I wonder how small it should be made. If I found a disk that said 'magnify me' and I looked at it at 400x and didn't see anything because I actually needed an electron microscope, I wouldn't take it down to the university and beg for time just to see if there's something there.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
Future Archaeologist: "So, Joe, I've been searching through this huge archive of chatter about some petrified girl named Portman and a lot of discussion about some really bizarre copyright law issue--I still haven't found what that means, or what this "Windows" thing is, but I did read in it about this really cool storage...hey... did you bring that coaster back from a dig? ...um...could I look at it? with a microscope?"
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
I really demand that Rob & Co. clear this up. If it turns out they have had any sort of legal dealings against this guy, I'm outta here.
I remember the days when Rob was all for the option of anonymity and the idea of freedom of expression. This were the ideas embodied in the moderation system; this was the only reason he managed to sell it to a suspicious horde of users crying "CENSORSHIP!!!". But, for a few months, I've had this idea creeping in the back of my mind that commercialism and economic success have spoiled the /. crew, and made them lose track of their original values.
Why have I been thinking that? The bitchslappings. Regarless of whether Andover is really suing osm, the bitchslappings are true. They represent a violation of the social contract on which /. moderation was founded-- that /. comments would run free of editorial intervention.
Overall, /. is not the place it used to be. And there is no real alternative. Kuro5hin sucks-- it's all the ignorance and dogmatism of the slashbots, but with even more anal self-righteousness and no sense of humor. Humor is looked down on in Kuro5hin.
If this lawsuit turns out to be true, I think it marks the end of an era; and we should all snap out of it. Slashdot, you have changed, and not for good.
Wonder how small it should be made. If I found a disk that said 'magnify me' and I looked at it at 500x and didn't see anything because I actually needed an electron microscope, I wouldn't take it down to the university and beg for time just to see if there's something there. If the creators are counting on the significance of the object to be retained for 10,000 years, as it sits in a time capsule or clean room, they're mistaken. Besides, if this was the case, all the data encoded on the object could just as easily be stored digitally, along with the equipment needed to read it. Perhaps if it had some text large enough to read, then more text was embedded within those letters, etc, so that a casual observer would realize there is additional information, and would go through the trouble of magnifying and discovering just how much.
If it is digital, however, all one would need is a search engine to look through that data for anything you want.
Standard I/O Error. Incompetent/Operator.
Well I guess Civilization II can take up the first 100 odd Meg or so, I guess we'll also need some media player that is as durable, and in this case a computer that will survive as well to run the thing on.
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
Are we building a pyramid? What is to protect it from 10,000 years of natural and perhaps man made disasters? If it is not in an "obvious" structure or monument, how will people or whoever find it?
Very few of the buildings or storage facilities built in the last few hundred years are likely to have lifetimes greater than 2000 years or so.
Also, I would not assume a linear or exponential progression of technology over the next 10K years either. If one looks at history, for every two steps forward, humans have taken anywhere from 1 to 3 steps back depending on time period. e.g., the Egyptians (3000-1000 B.C) and the Romans (500 B.C. - 500 A.D.) had better technology than Dark Ages Europe (500-800 A.D.). Only in the past 500 years have we advanced steadily with respect to technology.
Aide: Grant drinks too much to command an army. Lincoln: Find out what he drinks and give it to my other generals!
err....10,000 yrs from now is Y12K
Aide: Grant drinks too much to command an army. Lincoln: Find out what he drinks and give it to my other generals!
I imagine they will say: "How quaint. We'd nearly forgotten that our ancestors had their beginnings in such superstition and silliness."
This happens not only in religion, but also science. The ether theory comes to mind (light travels because of an invisible fluid), now we think we know better. I remember a Flogisten or something like that that severely predates modern chemistry, but it was considered the best science of the time. Heck, take a look at a science book that is over a decade old.
Our range of views of science, religion and history change quicker than you think.
The size of the disc might be handy, you could have a disc you always keep in your pocket as an ID, hold basic records, what you believe, family info. That way if a large portion of society gets catastrophically destroyed, way in the future archaologists would be able to gather a very detailed picture of what our society was like.
We could create a series of "Rosetta disks".
Use the first as the key, the remainder as a historical archive of the state of our planet.
Future civilisations could learn from our mistakes. Then Archaeology will finally become recognised as the amazing science that it is. Pity the Ancient Romans only discovered lead poisoning, and not the Greenhouse Effect or Faster Than Light travel.
Failing all else, they can figure out why our social models failed, and rework their society into something more stable, that will actually last out the next 10,000 years.
of 'I Love Lucy'
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
it would be neat to have those genesis albums in all those languages. peter gabriel rules.
If you had bothered to read the articles, you would know why: Like the original Rosetta Stone, the disk will take a single text and record translations in many languages and scripts. Our goal is as many currently extant languages as possible. For the core text, we are leaning towards combination of creation myths - from Genesis to the Big-Bang.
Stop and think for just a second before flying off the handle. You're giving the rest of us atheists a bad name.
Posted by Venison Meat:
Something better than Genesis? Genesis is the true account of of the inception of the human race. It should be the first thing saved.
How much of my online life DON'T I want preserved for 10,000 years?
I just read an article in this month's Wired (pg. 94) in which Jim Mason (the guy in charge of the project) said the goal is a 10000 year disk but the current nickel one only lasts for 2000 years. Is someone wrong somewhere or did I misread something? Go to this link for an older article (last month!) that says it only lasts for 1000+ years with no guarenteed 10000 life span. http://www.wired.com/wir ed/archive/6.06/newmedia.html?pg=4
The microscope could be constructed so that the slide fit perfectly into a holder even if most of the information was destroyed it is likely that someone would figure out how to put the two together.
Information wants to be free like speech wants to be free, not like we want beer to be free.
Actually it is not that stupid to take a (standard?) work and put a myriad of different language versions on it. The original rosetta stone contained 3 times (or was it 2 times) the same text which ultimately led to deciphring an unknown language since one of the languages was known. ;-)
Imagine a future where perhaps Swahili still exists in some form, they find the Rosetta-Disk and are able to decipher English and suddenly those awkward paper thingies get readable as the works of Shakespeare... (Okay, paper would have decomposed by then, but you get the idea)
Now, that would be cool...for those future archeologists of course
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Look at the recent beer post: same post repeated every minute, and totally unrelated to its context. Is that really an "expression of opinion"? Looks like pointless noise to me.
The Slashdot crew aren't supressing dissenting opinions or trying to hide stuff that makes them look bad. They just tuning out noise. And that makes what they're doing a useful service, rather than monsterous censorship.
Taco: By all means, bitchslap the beer guy, open source man, etc. It's not that what they say is wrong, it's that they don't say anything at all.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Forget the planet-destroyer, we've just built a system-destroyer! Woo hoo!
On second thought, forget that, go watch Gunbuster. They turn Jupiter into one big bomb and nuke the galaxy center!
In all seriousness, you're thinking of 1950's weapons. What do you think people will be fighting with 10,000 years from now?
If you think humans will never have the capability to destroy planets, you're not thinking far enough ahead. I think we could easily build a single bomb that would crack the crust and kill everything on the planet right now, in fact, I think we could have built it since the 1960's. Once we get going on the antimatter thing, we'll probably be able to vaporize the planet with one bomb.
Personally, I think we'll eventually cut up all the planets to build space stations. You get a hell of a lot more living space that way.
Maybe /. could do another feature (I know they did something like this a year or two ago) on what people should use for "permanent" storage. I'm currently involved in a project putting U.S. Supreme Court documents on-line. When I told the Court's librarian that we would back everything up to CD-ROM, she asked "But how long will CDs be here? A decade? What about fifty years from now?" Good question. I had no answer. I think they'll keep the hard copies.
Ok, let's face a few points here...
In 1000 years, much less 10,000 years there'll be nothing around to read the disks with...
given that...
Archeologists will just find these to be nickel curiosities, and any found will be melted down for other uses or made into jewelry. "The disks are curious. Some claim that they are roach made, but they appear in clusters which lead us to belive that they are natural formations created by an, as yet, unknown geological process"
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
Yeah, so now Big-Bang is a "creation myth"?
--
"Man in the Moon and other weird things" - wfmh.org.pl/thorgal/Moon/
Nick
-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
He discusses in detail the problems encountered when attempting to communicate across millenia.
Things like: most media don't survive, languages rarely last 1000 years intact, and so forth.
Even if you could preserve the medium ( a disk, or
whatever ), another problem is, of course, how to read the darned thing.
The book also mentions the *inadvertent* communications that occur across millennia. Like the contents of prehistoric garbage heaps and so forth.
It's an interesting problem.
shall
Ironically, the officials in charge of the project decided to use the disk anyway.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
You must mail them now and tell them that this kind of thing is not what Slashdot is about.
No...Slashdot is not about making dozens of irrelevant and stupid offtopic posts for the rest of the civilized world to tolorate. OSM screwed up, and Slashdot has the right to do something about it. I say all the power to THEM for standing up for THEIR rights. That is one of the things that Slashdot would seem to be about.
In my own opinion OSM was interfering with MY usage of slashdot. Putting dozens of off topic crap posts on here is probably not the best way to make allies with other readers. When OSM gives some respect to the other people who read here, like myself, then maybe I'll give a damn about his cause....which he wouldn't have if he gave us that respect in the first place.
Sorry man...but I have no pity OSM about any punishment he gets. It's completely self inflicted.
> What information do you think is valuable and relevant to give future archaeologists?
i think that it would be nice to tell future archeologists some things:
1) How to read a device this small
2) How to preserve data for 10k years (wouldn't it just suck to find out that it only lasts for, say 5k years? Do we really know that it will last that long? Have we been testing this product for, say, the last 10,000 years?)
3) We could write an explanation of why we thought that we were so damned important that we had to preserve information for 10,000 years.
4) "First Post"
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
Images (some were just strange) Sounds Languages and also Music.
The problem is, in 10,000 people won't know what to make of it.
___
Put the GPL text on it in 1000 languages.
"If you have done 6 impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways" -- hhgg
Interesting my left nut!
/.. Nobody cares about your problem, if they did, then somebody would have posted a discussion on the topic: Slashdot user whines about mistreatment by moderators, staff.
It's offtopic! The above post has NOTHING to do with technology concerning archival data storage.
If you have been spanked, then you must be a bad boy, you must have done something to deserve it. Go to your room and stop whining on
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Genesis was originally Jewish
carlos
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
There should be a special set of documentation (etched on plastic maybe) which explains basic mathematics, and defines a simple language. I suggest using something like lojban because it is designed to be logical. once the archeologists are able to read lojban pretty well, -then- give them instructions on what the disc is, and a basic instructional course in English or whatever language stuff is put on there in.
Also, making sure that the disc and all the documentation for it is visible is going to be especially hard. Whether or not the disc can survive 10000 years withour damage in a pristine room, well, the Egyptian tombs were thought to be secure too.
All in all, tohugh, it's a noble idea, and has gotten me thinking about what sort of pictograms would have to be used as the introduction; an entertaining puzzle.
to accept the praise of personal wisdom is an affront to the very ideal i hold dear.
I need more sleep... Sorry if I offended anyone (religious people, lawyers, politicians, CEOs everywhere) but you know it wouldn't be sincere... :)
control the media, control the mind..
Considering how many life-forms are
going extinct each day, perhaps we
should consider encoding gene sequences
for future generations to re-create
(I am assuming this will be possible
in 10,000 years). Of course this might
take zillions of these little disks......
I can't believe that they are pushing to
encode the bible! Considering how much
all of the religions have changed in just
the past few thousand years, I suppose the
bible will be as entertaining as neanderthal
cave paintings are now.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
The whole point of the Foundation is to get people thinking about what the world will be like beyond the next couple of cycles of Moore's law. We suffer from too much short term thinking as a society. The actual construction of the clock/library etc. is secondary to opening up people's horizons.
Interesting things happen in the Long Now. You can store any book you want - you just need to wait a few hundred years until the copyright expires. Patented technology - no problem!
Go to the root www.longnow.org and browse around a bit. I recommend 'The Clock of the Long Now' as an entertaining and thought-provoking read.
Well, as far as I can see it, from the point of view of someone who does at least, some historical research. The most useful things to put on such a medium would be descriptions of daily life in various cultures, recipes for food eaten during this period, typical fashions, dance steps, all the kinds of things that usually aren't put in "high literature". From this sort of record, archeologists might actually be able to get a better understanding of life at this point in time.
Also important would be social attitudes, reasonings behind special events and the like.
m2cw
David
David de Groot Snr Systems Engineer
It seems to me that the whole point of the "Rosetta Disk" is to provide a key to languages that may be dead or impossible to decipher 10,000 years from now. They are hoping that one of the languages on the disk will survive and the passage in that language can be used as a key to enable future archaeologists to figure out the other languages on the disk and translate other survivals in those languages. That's how the Rosetta Stone worked, after all.
If that's the case, there are two things that they should be focussing on in selecting text and languages to be included:
We might want to include a complete dictionary in one of the languages (my anglo-centrism would suggest English, not least for the size of its vocabulary and the mnumber of borrowings from other languages). This can help them get a fuller picture of that language to decipher other remains and, in conjunction with other multi-lingual finds they may come across, may help build up a larger picture of those languages. We may also want to think of what we can include as a key to computer-readable records that aren't so computer readable in the future. Whatever we include in the way of instructions shouldn't assume that our future archaeologist reads the language our instructions are written with.
Another approach (which they appear to have taken) is not assume that even one of the languages that you are using will survive into the future but to assume that a passage will. The language can then be treated as an "encryption scheme" for the semantic content of the passage. Future archaeologists may be able to decipher the language if they know what passage has been written. Genesis is a very good passage for this sort of thing. It has already survived thousands of years relatively unchanged and may very well survive thousands more. Even if our language is dead to future generations, parts of it may survive in a religious context (just as latin was used in the church for over a thousand years after it ceased to be a living language and Hebrew survived for thousands of years in a religious context before being revived as a living language). Keeping this in mind, including Genesis in one language (probably the same language as we've included the complete dictionary) along with a series of illustrations making it clear what the text referred to would make another point of entry for the Rosetta Disk.
Or so it seems to me. YMMV.
Respectfully, David Tallan
"Well Shantz, now we know why humans didn't get through the ages... Can you imagine that they believed on THAT? And to make such a damn effort to dig THIS THING so we could read it 10,000 years later? Really they should have take a more careful look at what happened the 10,000 years BEFORE."
And when are we going to get straight talk about this lawsuit thing from Rob & Co.? What baout just a simple denial or confirmation?
It's okay that they put religion on the disk as a prototype, but come on... Future civilizations will laugh at us if the Bible is our recorded history.
We need technical information about our societies, laws, census data, etc. That's what would be helpful in the future. The great works of history should be placed on these disks, in ONE language. Why 1,000? Because they could do it, that's why. I think it's plain wasteful, and I hope they get some responsibility and realize that this is the history of the world here. Not the drunken babblings of some ancient middle-easterners.
(Not to offend anyone if I did, sorry, I just still don't think the bible is an accurate reflection of our world.)
What's brown and sounds like a bell? Dung! --Eric Idle
Whats the point of undercutting its best strenght, if something lasts for 10,000. doesn't make it less useful then something that only lasts 1000.
---
--
Insert Witty Sig Here
Ignore the bloody post. Raise your threshold.
You ask that they start "tuning out the noise", tomorrow you'll ask them to remove everything that talks about BSD (or similar), and after this goes on, you'll sit back and simply ask Rob what you think.
The quote attributed to Voltaire above was actually paraphrased by C.S. Tallentyre. Voltaire's own version, as appeared in his Essay on Tolerance, read "Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too." This simple sentence is the definition of freedom and essential for a free nation
--
Never trust anyone over 90000.
sorry, I coppied that ending paragraph from a speach I gave one time . .. change "nation" to Internet, world, etc .. .
--
Never trust anyone over 90000.
Creation myths of any kind are ridiculous things to put down on a permanent medium for future generations.
Let's put down important things. Let's save stuff that, if the world was decimated in a nuclear holocaust tomorrow, future generations might actually miss.
"On the seventh day, God rested" = useless
"The fundamental theorem of calculus is..." = moderately less useless.
Reruns of "I Love Lucy."
I'm serious. It was the first television program to be prerecorded before broadcast, thus it was in turn the first show to go into syndication and has been available as re-runs for decades now. Turn on your 150 channel tv right now amd there's a pretty good chance that at least one of those channels is running "I Love Lucy" right now.
I don't even like the show that much, but in many ways television defined the leisure life of most people in the industrialized world in the last half of the twentieth century, and I think "I Love Lucy" is an excellent artifact of this era.
It would also give a decent -- flawed, but decent -- view of what a typical urban lifestyle was like for the era, not just in writing, but in movement, speech, and setting. All told, archaeologists of 10,000 years from now could do a whole lot worse. Consider all those styrofoam McDonald's boxes, for example. Surely a sitcom is just a little bit kinder than that.
I'm not sure if this storage medium is capable (in a useful way) of storing video data, but if it is, this is my vote...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Genesis is the first book of the Old Testament, which is the only part of the Holy Bible that's part of the Jewish faith. It talks about the creation of the world and the sexual lives of the Jewish's ancestors.
After the Old Testament, there's the New Testament, which mostly talks about Jesus and is the inspiration of the christian religion.
The Quran is not part of the Holy Bible but is recognized by the Muslim as a "sequel" to the Bible
Perhaps I'm short-sighted. But I really don't see the Earth being around that long (Y12k). Am I alone in this? I think that 10,000 years is a little too ambitious. Making a 1000 year time capsule / rosetta stone would seem to be more practical, IMHO.
1) Copies of Windows 2000 and Windows Millennium.
/. containing the words "Portman", "grits", or "Beowulf".
2) Recordings of calls to tech support.
3) A thread containing Blizzard's excuses for the poor performance of Diablo II.
4) The Starr Report.
5) Any thread on
6) pr0n. Lots of it.
We are the first generation capable of demonstrating to our distant descendants exactly how thoroughly stupid we were. So let's do it.
If using Linux is about choice, how come people complain when I choose to use Windows?
I find this all highly suspect. The Trolls have been running their little games on this site for so long now I don't believe a single one of them, and to be quite frank, this particular one is so full of holes you could drop a car through 'em.
/. apparently sent my troll friend an email from their lawyer!".
For a start, the link to http://warmann.com/broken/legal.html is broken, And http://www.warmann.com/users/broken/legal.html contains nothing but a short page indicating that the person concerned can't talk about the case right now. Given the Trolls previous methods of being jerks, including Mr Goatsex et al, I have absolutely no faith that this isn't anything more than Yet Another Stupid Prank.
Along with that, the story itself is dubious, apparently this person was contacted by a Lawyer..err..wow, what, he gave his phone number away or something? I doubt it, I'd be surprised if he even had a valid email address, but if he did I can assure him right now that email is far too easily forged for him to believe it actually came from Slashdot. More likely it was sent to him by some Slashdot user totally pissed off at his immature and idiotic antics. I'm pleased to say that this appears to have worked nicely, however his friend here has taken up arms against Slashdot, a free service he's abusing the crap out of, because of something that might possibly, but probably isn't their fault, using a method of informing people which I at least find incredibly insulting and a waste of space. No discussion, no thought, just "Oh look,
My conclusion, Get a Life. The information you have presented has not one iota of evidence to back it, and you are a Troll.
You can't win a fight.
First, I must say that I extend much sympathy towards osm. osm was not a spammer, like 90% of the "trolls" on Slashdot today, but a true troll through and through. His absence in the last few days (maybe a week or more now?) has definitely been missed. That said, more information on the case would be nice. The page you linked to (on his site) has very little to say other than "thanks everyone, but my lawyer says I can't say anything". He doesn't even say what the legal trouble is about (last time I checked, off-topic posts were not illegal). If anyone has more information on the case, I'd greatly appreciate it. Obviously we can't expect Slashdot to report on it.
But then putting more than a couple thouand pages on it would prove useless, because it would take forever to search it. And also, what if these future people don't have magnifiing glasses?
After having spent a great deal of time contemplating the intertangled issues of beer consumption, I have arrived at the inevitable conclusion that perhaps green is the way to proceed nowadays.
,o(__),_)o(_)O,(__)o
.O(__)o,__).(_ )o(_)Oo_)
.----|......|......|......|......|......|_)0
/^^^.--|......|......|......|......|......|,_) . |o(_) . |_/`) . |O_) . | . |
The quality of commercial beer has been steadily decaying since about 1850, having had it's best times in the present Germany area in the 19th century. In contrary, the quality of hemp has been improving, as cultivation, genetic engineerging, and selective growing all contribute.
It is of no doubt that today's marijuana is of the best quality the world has seen. Why not take advantage? There are few things in life as good as your own herb, grown by yourself at home out in the garden and indoors in pots.
_, . '__ .
'_(_0o),(__)o().
o(_,-o(_ )(),(__(_)oO)_
|^^/.........|......|......|......|......|.....
|^^|.........|......|......|......|......|.....
|^^|.........|......|......|......|......|.....
|^^|.........|......|......|......|......|.....
|^^\.........|......|......|......|......|.....
\^^'---|.....|......|......|......|......|
'----|......|......|......|......|......|
|......|......|......|......|......|
\......\......\....../....../....../
`"""""""""""""""""`
Enjoy life, drink beer.
Personally, I think the best way to preserve our culture for the future is to take the entire Slashdot archives and stick them on the Rosetta Disk.
That way, future cultures (or space aliens sifting through the ruins of our society) would be informed that there was once a great evil empire called "Microsoft", but that we performed rituals to a goddess called "Natalie Portman" in the hopes that she would deliver us from oppression.
Of course, halfway through one of Jon Katz's articles, one of them would collapse and die from boredom, and they'd think the Disk was some kind of booby trap, and destroy it.
In conclusion, Microsoft is destroying our culture in the present, and Jon Katz will destroy any possibility of its preservation.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
As someone pointed out earlier, the Bible has already been translated, so why reinvent the wheel translating something else.
And what would you suggest anyway? Shakespeare? Back issues of Nature? Genesis, whether you think it's the word of God or not, is an excellent mixture of historical, descriptive, and abstract text, which makes it ideal to show the nuances of the various languages. This may be the only remnant of some languages some day, so it would be a pity if a language couldn't be fully understood because the text chosen was a politically-correct scientific diatribe.
If we have another ice age, and our civilisation fails to survive it, then 10,000 years from now there may be nobody able to read these neat little disks. We therefore also need to leave an intermediate record of how to kick-start a civilisation from scratch.
Christ that thesis is choice! Damn you, I hurt myself laughing!
How happy you must be at home. You must love your charming and creative "wife" deeply.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
with an army, as the linguists say.
I seriously doubt it's in the 6k range. People have the bad habit of counting regional dialects as a language
instead of stating that it's dialectic. It's like calling 'redneck' or 'ebonics', languages.
I could communicate, albeit awkwardly, with portuguese speaking friends using my high school spanish. Probably the same is true for Dutch and German. However, I can't understand a word of a lot of English speakers from the deep US south or from the Carribean. I can understand speakers of BAE (Black American English), despite their having grafted some grammatical structures from west african languages onto English.
To tally the number of "languages" that exist, you really have to look at the number of dialects that have specific government support and bodies that advocate normative standards (like the French parliament).
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Every time you plant a person you plant with them a current version of the damn disk. Surely a few corpses will make it into the next civilization? Then a few disks will too.
One thing I can honestly say is - why the fuck would we want to put Genesis on this thing, in 300 languages???
Well, for one thing, it's a piece of text you can easily find in several hundred high quality translations. This can make it possible for future scholars to reconstruct texts that are in English for a world were everyone speaks a derivative of some future dominant language. Remember modern English has only existed about five or six hundred years; English texts from 1500 CE are barely readable to a modern speaker. This period is 1/20th, and a lot can happen to a language's career in this time. Latin, Greek, Persian and Egyption may have seemed like the inevitable long term winners at various times in history, yet somehow we end up with a dominant worldwide language today which is descended from none of these.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
What the fuck use is Genesis to archaeologists?
Oh, so after we've all blown each other
away, hyperevolved cockroaches can learn
about how God created man and about Noah's
Ark and all that other bullshit...
I'm sure they'll be thrilled to hear about that.
Wow...
What a waste of a 10,000 year-old CD...
-- The Funk, The Whole Funk, And Nothing But The Funk
The beer guy has completely worn out his thing (hey, I like ASCII art and I like beer but it's plain worn out, OK?). But to say that osm "doesn't say anything at all" is so howlingly wrong that I wonder you can get it out your mouth. The clear fact, indeed the very thing that makes him a redeyed menace to his neighbors near and far, is that osm is downright logorrhaeic.
I know this for sure personally because he lives in the same town as me, and his wife Amy is friends with my wife, she's told her about his obsessive wordification. "He just goes on and on," Amy says, "I think it's cute," (she would, they're newlyweds) "but sometimes I wonder if maybe Warren does have a screw or two loose."
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Leaving the same text in multiple languages makes it fairly easy to reconstruct the syntax and vocabulary of then-long-dead languages.
The reason to choose the bible, I expect, is not one of cultural relevance, or religious bigotry, but merely the fact that it's already been translated into more languages than any other document on the planet.
The predictions I have heard suggest that within a century there will be less than 20 languages spoken worldwide - languages are dying out very quickly. For languages that have written forms, we can at least try to preserve them for the future. I think that other items of cultural significance will be probably be all too present archaelogically, but having all these languages in one place will be invaluable to future historical linguists as the rosetta stone was to the historical linguists and archaeologists of the past.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Why dont we just get big slabs of stone and etch it on that... i mean i'd loose nanodisk things at the rate of 20 a day. Unless of course they plan to make millions of the little buggers and hide them everywhere :)
Or why not just put it on a server in sealand and pay up the next 100,000 years of hosting.
Roundeye, so we meet again.
I cannot for the life of me understand the the blatent anti-Asian sentiment
expressed in your nickname. Our mutual friend, Quong Ho, has been there many
times for you in the past. And now what do you do?
Slander his physical appearance!
I am deeply offended by this. Quong is a good friend of mine, but even worse is
the hypocrisy expresed by a so called 'Christian' - YOU! Why do you even bother
to attend church...maybe to grovel on your knees and beg for forgivness for your
wretched hate-filled life?
Luckily, Quong does not read this site. If he did I am sure he would seek out
his "friends" user info. And there, rather than kind words, he will find
hate-filled sentiments against his race!
Frankly I am disgusted Roundeye. While I am not of Asian blood, I feel Quong's
pain. Was it not enough that you got him drunk and stole 35 dollars from him at
Leslie's party? Was it not enough that called his mother a "gook" behind her
back? Was it not enough that you offered to "turn in his research paper" while
he was ill - then threw it in the rubbish basket?
Now every comment you make on this webboard bears an anti-Asian air to it. I
hope the other readers of Slashdot can see through your thin veil of
intelligence and compassion to see the truth of what you are.
A LIAR!
A HYPOCRITE!
A HATE-MONGER!
FOR SHAME ROUNDEYE, FOR SHAME!
,
faeryman
The fine print in the article mentioned that not only Genesis, but other creation myths, up to and including the Big Bang theory, be recorded and translated.
The goal is to provide - in as many languages as possible - a set of boilerplate text, at least one instance of which is likely to survive 10,000 years.
Creation myths are among the most enduring of human stories. They're compact and easily-understood by humans, and we have existence proofs that they can be passed down over the millennia, even without advanced technology.
As such, if your core audience is "humans 10000 years from now", they're ideal material for a "Rosetta Stone" project.
The inclusion of the Big Bang (and/or hyperinflation theory, etc) is also a wise idea. The absence of theories beyond this level precisely dates the "stone" as "no older than the early 21st century". (After all, had it been written in the 43rd century, they'd have realized the universe really is "all turtles, all the way down!", and written their Stone accordingly :-)
I say "make a million of 'em, scatter 'em around the planet, drop a few over Antarctica, and stick one on every soft-landing space probe we build from this day forward."
(Aside: I really like the space probe idea. We screw up and our civilization collapses, BFD. Once our descendants develop spaceflight, they'll know we were here, and they'll know when we were here. I can't think of a better place than the Moon for long-term preservation of micro-etched materials, and we know that big hunks of metal on extraterrestrial bodies will be the first things explored once our descendants develop the technology to detect them. Luna:WesternCiv::Desert:AncientEgypt)
He posted something that doesn't 'respect' you, so it's ok to shut him up and deny him his right? /. says you can not post off topic comments. It only says that they might be moderated.
If this had happened on some schools web site, katz would be all over it proclaiming it as censor ship.
Just because someone posts something, doesn't mean you have to read it. I skip passed many offtopic comments, then get to what interesting to me. osm doesn not prevent anybody else from posting.
What next? banning people because they didn't use a clear subject that describes what their message is about? No place I could find on
Since this post is off topic I guess I should be sued to? Of course your post I'm repling to is also off topic, so you have failed to respect other people so you should be sued as well.
When someone is on a street corner talking about the 'evil' government, I guess it's ok for the government to have him removed because he is not showing them respect.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If a future archaeologists will be necessary to dig any information about us, the most valuable information will be why do we aren't there to give them any information. Carlos Toledo.
I bet plenty of people would get excited about the chance to preserve whatever matters most to them for posterity, and be willing to pay big $$$ to do so.
A couple thousand years ago you had to be able to afford minions to engrave big obelisks for you, in order to get that kind of staying power.
Now all you need are a few dollars or DM for, presumably, something like fab time. (How are the disks manufactured, anyway?)
I bet there are rich Internet entrepeneurs with big egos who'd spring for their own disk, plus a small commission for me.
(Lame idea? Well, at least I read the article and am not just kvetching about Genesis, when the article mentioned a variety of creation stories; and wondering about format obsolescence, when the article mentioned it's an analog, graphical disk. Geez, /. .)
I like the fact that it's in analog form, showing actual type istead of binary information, but if the creators are expecting the object to be seen for what it is upon discovery, it needs some work.
Digging up this item out of the rest of the techno-rubble, it would just look like a magnet or other piece of machinary. To be useful it must visibly represent information to the naked eye, without thousands of levels of magnification.
Perhaps if it had some text large enough to read, then more text was embedded within those letters, etc, so that a casual observer would realize there is additional information, and would go through the trouble of magnifying and discovering just how much.
If the creators are counting on the significance of the object to be retained for 10,000 years, as it sits in a time capsule or clean room, they're mistaken. Besides, if this was the case, all the data encoded on the object could just as easily be stored digitally, along with the equipment needed to read it.
It would make more sense to have a series of diagrams explaining binary code and its conversion into unicode characters, audio waves, and pixel representations, then have a digital stream which can contain multimedia which has all the translation information as well as multimedia information on the actual pronunciation of dialects, etc.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
10,000 years? By the time that comes, Rep. Sony Bono XVXIXIVX will have extended the copyright duration to author's life = 1e6 years. Remember, the expiration keeps getting upped *just* before the first Mickey Mouse cartoon's copyright would expire. Couple this with a proprietary file format that the EULA says is illegal to reverse engineer and I can assure you that *no one* will be reading *this* disk 10,000 years from now.
Absolutely. Oh, and by the way, a myth can be true. :) C.S. Lewis was once an atheist. His good friend and colleague, J.R.R. Tolkien was influential in leading him to Christianity. Lewis refered to Christianity as a "Myth." Tolkien said, "Ah, but it's a true Myth." Lewis was hooked.
----
Celebrate the finer things in life
Slashdot archives should be preserved for eternity. How else will future civilizations know the real use of hot grits, not to mention how our gods were actually petrified stars of motion picture. Not to mention the fact that the archives contain an outline for the traditional sport of karma-whoring.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
It is also the most copied text ever. If you were going to pick one text, what would you pick? O'Reilly's Programming Perl?
Actually, now that I think of it... that's a great choice!
With any luck, future civilizations will be evolved enough when they find any such records to recognize that they don't want to take advice from a bunch of screw-ups like us. After all, if we manage to dissapear, it will almost certainly be at our own hand. What makes us think our advice or knowledge will be anything but a curse to hypothetical future civilizations?
heh yeah, I mean as opposed to just broadcast live -- not like going back in time or something. Wiseass haahaha :)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Just dump the entire Encyclopaedia Brittanica,
and then maybe the last 50 years of the archives of the primary
newspapers and universities of each country.
And don't forget the Backstreet Boys videos!!
Y.
biologists don't seem interested in learning how to use RCS. 8^)
After having spent a great deal of time contemplating the intertangled issues of beer consumption, I have arrived at the inevitable conclusion that perhaps green is the way to proceed nowadays.
,o(__),_)o(_)O,(__)o
.O(__)o,__).(_ )o(_)Oo_)
.----|......|......|......|......|......|_)0
/^^^.--|......|......|......|......|......|,_) . |o(_) . |_/`) . |O_) . | . |
The quality of commercial beer has been steadily decaying since about 1850, having had it's best times in the present Germany area in the 19th century. In contrary, the quality of hemp has been improving, as cultivation, genetic engineerging, and selective growing all contribute.
It is of no doubt that today's marijuana is of the best quality the world has seen. Why not take advantage? There are few things in life as good as your own herb, grown by yourself at home out in the garden and indoors in pots.
_, . '__ .
'_(_0o),(__)o().
o(_,-o(_ )(),(__(_)oO)_
|^^/.........|......|......|......|......|.....
|^^|.........|......|......|......|......|.....
|^^|.........|......|......|......|......|.....
|^^|.........|......|......|......|......|.....
|^^\.........|......|......|......|......|.....
\^^'---|.....|......|......|......|......|
'----|......|......|......|......|......|
|......|......|......|......|......|
\......\......\....../....../....../
`"""""""""""""""""`
Enjoy life, drink beer.
Well, I hope nobody takes this as flamebait, this is just my personal opinion... I totally agree with this statement on a certain level. But, then again, anyone looking back on our history is going to be very _interested_ in the fact that at this point we still haven't figured out that organized religion is a sham. It kind of puts a lot of _other_ things in context...
I modded the Troll Investigation and I got
Ohh, this is a great idea. Could we instead leave something useful for future generations?
If there is an apocalypse and humanity needs a record of the past, wouldn't it be handier to include something other than a record of who begat who?
I'd personally rather have a nice set of instructions on how to be decadent than listen to some 4,000 year old skewed version of reality.
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
My father works at the national archives in Canada. His job is to preserve and restore historical objects (some of which are really bizarre). But this article is correct when stating that alot of the formats for storing data is platform specific. (They purchased our old Beta HI-FI VCR for data transfer because they only had 2 working ones left).
One of the major problems is providing this data in a format that can be easily decoded.
Some comments posted eariler speak of civilization using the information if we had some catstropic event. Unfortunately, if this occured, I doubt those who are left would be able to understand how to use it. Most likely it would be found on some excavation site, years from now. Would they look at a floppy disk and realize it has magnetic storage capabilities? Would they know that the CDROM actual stores data on its surface? Or would they thing they were some designer costers?
You see my point?
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
...while the future generations may find the "Rosetta Disk", it is far more likely that they will find one of the millions of discarded AOL disks, put this together with the WWF broadcasts they encounter in deep space after a long FTL trip, recognize their ancestors for the ignorant savages we are, and commit collective suicide as a species.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my disk?
Standard I/O Error. Incompetent/Operator.
Why have I been thinking that? The bitchslappings. Regarless of whether Andover is really suing osm, the bitchslappings are true. They represent a violation of the social contract on which /. moderation was founded-- that /. comments would run free of editorial intervention.
It was the Frenchman Francois Marie Arouet, better known by his pen name Voltaire, who said "I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it." I have often appreciated the sentiment, but actually applying it is far more difficult in the real world.
The 'bitchslappings' are certainly a violation of this principle. For those users who are constantly posting off topic material, I will not read your posts because they do not contribute to the topic at hand. And I will continue to moderate these as inappropriate. But, I will likewise defend your right to be off-topic, repetative, and irritating.
If you truly appreciate free speech and open discussion, the litmus test is this: will you defend the expression of opinions which which you strongly disagree?
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
I expect the Earth to be here in 10,000 years. I mean, it's already been around for (about) 4,500,000,000 years, and the sun i snot expected to go nova for another 5,000,000,000 years or so. Whats 10,000 compaired to that?
Will mankind be around in 10,000 years? Who knows.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
It makes sense to use a passage from the Bible (Genesis makes sense for symbolic reasons). This particular text has already survived 3000 or so years, and is unquestionably the most widely distributed work in existance.
It is much easier to decypher a code when you already have the plaintext..
Let's publish all issues of the National Enquirer and Star onto this thing. That will give future archiologists some interesting stuff to work with! (e.g., This ancient culture believed in bigfoot and space alien kidnappings. They also had 3 headed babies on occasion due to gene mutations.)
One aspect I really like about the disk is that, the first line is (partially) readable with the naked eye. Looks like very fine printing, but it soon gets too small to read with the naked eye.
Basically instructions by implication.
Done so that the disk won't likely be just a pretty little shiny thing like a CD will be unless they have CD players kicking about still in 10,000 years (not too likely.)
I am not saying that they shouldn't have used the bible because it is wrong. All I am saying is that when westerners are looking for significant texts of human history, choosing the bible could possibly indicate a lack of thought, where as there are many other texts of at least as much importance to human history (remember, human history, not western history) - such as the many texts of the Hindus, some of which influenced the writing of the bible.
The only thing I was trying to state is that in general, when naming texts of significance in human history, the Bible is one that takes little thought to name for westerners, as it is in the popular conscience, where as most important texts are not (hands up who knows what a Veda is). This states nothing about the truth or falsehood of the bible.
I have put a large amount of thought into the possibility the Bible could be true, thank you very much - I was raised a Christian for a fair few years. You are reading things into my statements I have not said.
tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
postmoderncore - art and creation are a higher purpose
So how do they figure out where each language version begins and ends? I mean, except for changes from French to Japanese where the change would be obvious, it could be confusing.
Of course that's just for me, and I'm not too smart.
load "linux",8,1
Great. Let's make sure we look like idiots.
(sigh)
Yeh, and maybe we could have it emit an excruciating high-pitched tone when the scientists come to look at it. That would be perfect!
Numbers 31:17,18 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man,but save for yourselves every virg
That's a VERY original name don't you think??? Anyway, at least it's appropriate... I think the best thing to put in there would be pictures of key events in the past centuries... you know... things that have made this earth and the monkeys on it look as big a mess as they really are... Imagine 1,000 years from now, someone digs up this disk and reads it... what would he think? I certainly wouldn't be all THAT proud abut my ancestors... That of course happening relies on the fact that we have to survive the next 1,000 years! unfortunately, the human kind has a very low self-preservation rating these days... -- and remember: "Mean what you say... Say what you mean
--
Genesis ain't it.
Does anybody see parallels with Clarke's '3001' here? Over any given long period of time, what is likely to survive? What paradigms for interacting with data with exist?
Will they even care, in (n)k years?
I think the best way to decide what information is relevant is to plunk some anthropoligists down at an archaeological site where there is no written record whatsoever, and ask them, if they had their wish, what they most like to see written on 10 stone tablets (1 GB data, whatever).
What do you want to know about the past? Do you want to know what I had for breakfast? Where I work?
Problem is, textual data can only hold facts - emotional content is severely degraded. Given enough storage and detailed imaging equipment, I think I'd prefer a 3-D walkthrough of the planet. But again, this runs up against data paradigms; VRML, wonderful as it might be today, will probably not persist as a standard in (n)k years.
Maybe Hari Seldon's Time Vault would be best - too bad our present technology rules this out.
neublo
If people really believe that we are on the brink of a "Digital Revolution" ... we should replace the myths/legends of the previous analog millenia with more recent digital lore. Some suggestions:
Genesis: Instead of first there was light, why not "first there was the command line" (I know, stealing a book title) ... or if we want to go even further into our analog lore ... why not the first dial tone? Alexander Graham Bell and all.
David and Goliath: Rise and Fall of Bill Gates? Alternatively Napster vs. RIAA?
Exodus: Linus Torvalds/Richard Stallman and the open source movement?
Judas and his bag of silver: all the VCs trying to corrupt the idealistic hacker youths into selling out for the quick IPO buck?
You get the drift ...
Or you can save the hassle and just put a link to a slashdot archive on the Rosetta Disk ...
That answer your question?
This would not be the first time this has happened on Slashdot, and the last time it scared someone off this site permanently becuase they genuinely feared for their life.
As for your comment about trolls running games, you have no idea what malicious trolling can do. Slashdot has been suprisingly lucky so far. Be thankful that they are only spamming with this ascii crap.
Genesis is only 6000 years old, and humans have existed for much longer than that. But it's the oldest form of history we still have. I would have loved to know what happened BEFORE the times of the genesis, but they had no Rosetta disk at that time so all the history before that is lost.
So I think the best thing to do would be to record all of history we have, starting at the oldest texts we have, until today's history. Then also include technical/scientific information and the DeCSS source so they can play our round silver mirrors and learn even more about us
Perhaps these could help with describing to future people, what devices we used to read data, and how that data is formatted and stored.
If they are expecting this analog technology to help side step the limits of aging and disapearing digital and mechanical technologies, shouldn't we write a few of them down in the meantime ?
>One thing I can honestly say is - why the fuck would we want to put Genesis on this thing, in 300 languages???
Although the article mentions 1,000 languages, I agree with your sentiment entirely.
Few documents in the history of mankind are as overvalued and under-read as that collection of myth and history we call the "Bible." What an embarrassing legacy to leave to our descendants. I imagine they will say: "How quaint. We'd nearly forgotten that our ancestors had their beginnings in such superstition and silliness."
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
One thing I can honestly say is - why the fuck would we want to put Genesis on this thing, in 300 languages???
If we actually want to leave an indicator of our culture, WHY, WHY would we leave the text of a book that's thousands of years old?? Why would we want to leave a book specific only to Western religions? Why would we want to leave it in several different Romance languages? Do you think future civilations and/or space aliens are really going to have an easier time with French than Spanish, or Italian? Why give them 300 ciphers when we could give them, say, 3 or 4?
And, I know I might be offending peoples' religious sensibilities here, but WHY THE HELL do we want to look like our society had never discovered the scientific method and instead based all its dogma and beliefs on guesswork???
Fuck, Fuck, Fuck!
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
And you are entitled to your opinion, as is OSM. If you don't want to hear what he has to say, don't read his posts. Set your threshold higher. If he gets moderated up, obviously someone wants to hear what he has to say and to do what the editors are being accused of would be a direct assault against the entire community.
Obviously people cared enough to post responses, and moderate it up. It may have little to do with the article, and the author of the post states why he posted it here (he feels that it would not be posted as a story). By your logic, if you are given a treat, you are obviously a good boy. The post got moderated up. Take your own advice: don't whine about it.
I agree whole heartedly. This is what our old-timer, #276, above argues for to. /. seemed to pride itself on having open forums, and never forcing censorship upon its users. When the /. staff start betraying its users, in order to "protect us" as some posters have claimed (does this not sound like the entire mandated censorware debates we so vehemently fought against?), they have not only betrayed our trust, but violated their own rules of non-interference.
I may not agree with what everyone else says, but you certainly have the right to say it, and I have the right to ignore or read it at my leisure.
Perhaps this didn't really happen, but it is certainly possible. I am aware of a friend who was threatened with an IP block--of an entire institution--because of his posts. This person created another account days later and reached a three digit karma rating over the weekend. Is moderation a bit skewed? Perhaps. But we don't need editors doing our work for us. Let the community handle things, not the establishment.
--
Never trust anyone over 90000.
Besides just the disk, here's what I think should be included:
1. Some sort of reader, made from extremely durable equipment. This reader must have the capability to display the information on a screen and on printout (thermal transfer, probably) so that people can decode the information.
2. Some sort of power source. A solar cell, or somethign along these lines would work well. It should not require any fuel from outside the time capsule.
3. Some sort of simple language guide, such as the one placed on various deep-space probes which helps with the number system and various mathematical operands. Combined with a pictographical system equating words to images, this could teach the language to far-future archeaologists and allow them to figure out the rest of the system.
4. Any easy interface. We're not talking E or Sawfish here; the system will need to be web-browser like but extremely simple and offer pictographical hints for difficult words.
Any other ideas about what would be required for usage of this disc?
Good points. I'll have to think upon the 'disturbing the peace' angle and how, or if, it really applies to message boards. IMO of course.
Heres a question: how 'annoying' does one have to be? In my example, some one who is talking about the 'Evil government' may be annoying to a few, but is that enough?
sure, running my power saw at midnight is obviously annoying, but what if I do it at noon and disturb someones napping child?
Although I fell it would not have helped, I still think OSM should have been asked to stop first. Perhaps in the form of an informal eMail.
I wonder what kind of responsibility Slashdot will have once they start doing this sort of thing. If someone where to post off topic rants about you, will they now have an obligation to remove them if you asked them to?
What a tangled web we weave.
once again thanks for the good points. It's nice to have a thought out response once n a while.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Keep a copy of the cover of every major news publication in the world, possibly a copy of the front page article.
-- From my Best Friend (Written to me over ICQ): "i was gonna go to a party...but i had to reinstall windows"
It's all very well creating a disk that will last for 10 millennia, but what are the chances that they will be able to read what's on it? Indeed, what are the chances that they will think that there is anything to read on it? What will differentiate it from any of the other "prehistoric mirrors" that we obviously feel it so necessary to mass produce?
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty