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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?"
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
This was tried before in 1700 BC in Minoan Crete. Unfortunately no one today knows what version of Word they used...
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.
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
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
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."