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?"

Comments

What to put on it?

[carlos_benj]

I think it should include transcripts from 'War of the Worlds' followed by 'Planet of the Apes'. The rest should say, 'This space intentionally left blank'.

carlos

Re:Genesis???

[Cuthalion]

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.

Why make it so small!??

[grahamsz]

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.

Discernability

[KFury]

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