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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?"
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.
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
E=MC^2
(fission, fusion, or antimatter, it doesn't look too good for a planet with a technological society on it)
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
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!"
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
A copy of the original Rosetta stone.
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.
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
This was tried before in 1700 BC in Minoan Crete. Unfortunately no one today knows what version of Word they used...
I don't know what Scientific American said, but Ethnologue is probably a better source, and they list 6,703 languages at the moment.
MSK
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 ^_^
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'?"
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.
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 agree - I was simply saying that this is why "you people" go "fscking crazy". You were talking the general case, and so was I.
I do not agree with Chiasmus_, and am not trying to defend him - simply giving a reason why your generalisation may be true.
In fact, looking at the responses to Chiasmus_, I wonder if s/he was a troll.
tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
postmoderncore - art and creation are a higher purpose
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.
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.
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.
carlos
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
"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."
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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?
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
...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.
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
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
--
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."
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?