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Rosetta Disk Designed For 2,000 Years Archive
Hugh Pickens writes "Kevin Kelly has an interesting post about an archive designed with an estimated lifespan of 2,000 -10,000 years to serve future generations as a modern Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta disk contains analog 'human-readable' scans of scripts, text, and diagrams using nickel deposited on an etched silicon disk and includes 15,000 microetched pages of language documentation in 1,500 different languages, including versions of Genesis 1-3, a universal list of the words common for each language, and pronunciation guides. Produced by the Long Now Foundation, the plan is to replicate the disk promiscuously and distribute them around the world in nondescript locations so at least one will survive their 2,000-year lifespan. 'This is one of the most fascinating objects on earth,' says Oliver Wilke. 'If we found one of these things 2,000 years ago, with all the languages of the time, it would be among our most priceless artifacts. I feel a high responsibility for preserving it for future generations.'"
Among the 13,500 scanned pages are 1,500 different language versions of Genesis 1-3
I'm sure they picked bible passages because the translations were mostly done for them already but I'm a little embarassed that future generations are going to think how amazingly superstitious we were. I mean, Genesis 2 alone...
Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.
They're going to think we were cuckoo!
I'm a big tall mofo.
To mass produce them? If they really want them to last that long, why only make two of them? I'd shell out some cash for one, but nowhere near the 25,000 it cost to make the one displayed on the website.
- Aetheral Research -
It's contemporary, and already translated into almost every language on Earth.
OTOH The Bible is about the only book that wouldn't have earned them a DMCA slapdown affidavit.
No sig today...
write everything to a bluray disk and put it in rosetta stone. 2012 bam bam!
This would be a logical thing to put into deep space - on the Moon or on Mars, say. It is a good environment to preserve things, and any future civilization is going to look up our space probes sooner or later.
Assume an utterly alien audience. How exactly do you give them a pronunciation guide to any human language?
than carving it in stone
It has been two thousand years since some girl claimed that she got knocked up by a burning bush rather then her boyfriend and millions of people worship her as a virgin.
One person's cuckoo is another persons prophet. When everyone has forgotten Ron Hubbard was a bad Sci-Fi writer his novels may one day serve as the basis of a religion.
Nah, that could never happen.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This thing will end up in 2000 years on someones altar as they make sacrifices to some weird god thinking it's a source of untold power. Then some nut with a hat and whip will come along and steal it for a museum only to have it end up on a coffee table somewhere.
Or...
2000 years from now some primitive creature will be trying to crack some kind of nut for food and end up using this as a fancy nut cracker.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
we invent a hard disk designed for 2000 years of storage and we stick bible stories on it?!
come on, surely we could upload 4chan instead..
Good people go to bed earlier.
Okay, so they include a 6x glas sphere. How nice, but you need a 500x microscope to read it. The sphere has a large base and it can be opened. Why not include the tool to read the document with the document?
Who is to say that whoever finds it in the future has access to such a powerful microscope? For most of history we haven't.
Nice idea, but geez, think things through, this could be found by the same kind of people who made the original rossate stone. Do you really want them to wait hundreds of years to develop magnifcation good enough to read it?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
That's a lot of Phil Collins - three Genesis albums!
Surely a greater variety would have given a broader view of our world! Maybe some Elton John, and Boney M at least!
I gotta say this is something special. Just imagine having a transcript of Roman Senate debates. Pictures of Inca ritual. Blue prints and plans of how they made the monuments of Easter Island. As almost the complete entire collection of current knowledge and experience will fade in all it's current forms, very little of our lives will survive for 2000 years. Only scraps of buildings and monuments will survive. Oops I take that all back. I forgot about Google cache.
Just so long as they didn't do what the BBC did in the 1980's with the UK's modern "Doomsday Book" history archive project. The archive went on a Laserdisc, and what hardware today can read that format (not the machines on ebay)?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/07/11/bbc_domesday_project_saved/ or
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/preservation/research/domesday.htm/community.htm
Take Nobody's Word For It.
This is really cool. Long LONG term backup for a huge number of languages. I approve of the long-term thinking behind it.
I hope they can bring the price down, though -- the article says it currently costs $25,000 for a copy, which is a bit steep for a thing where you can't even read most of it without an extremely high-powered microscope. The article also refers to the LOCKS principle which archivists use: Lots Of Copies Keeps 'em Safe. At 25K a pop, it's going to be hard to get the "Lots" part of that working. Get the price down to a hundred dollars and I bet lots of geeks all over the planet would buy one as a conversation piece.
If they could get permission, it might also make sense to bury one of these in a waterproof enclosure at the Georgia Guidestones - the huge Monoliths in Georgia in 8 different languages.
The Romans managed to preserve their language and culture for 2000 years completely by accident. Do you really think all the stuff we're doing today will vanish in the same time span.
In far less than 100 years the whole of today's Internet will fit on a single USB stick - smaller than a single shard of Roman pottery.
No sig today...
http://www.longbets.org/
With the way things are going very soon the Bible will be the only book that's out of copyright....
Some versions of the Bible are copyrighted. Any translation undertaken in the last eighty years or so.
Oh, and in Britain the Authorized King James version is subject to Crown copyright, which is perpetual. It's never going to enter the public domain. Probably not even if the monarchy were to be abolished -- any British government which saw fit to abolish the monarchy would likely retain its privileges for the state. Not that it seems like the monarchy's going away any time soon.
replicate the disk promiscuously
Only nerds too long in their basements would use this kind of terminology !
The rest of us would say "make a lot of copies".
This sounds great. Now we need one with a copy of Wikipedia on it, so that all human knowledge can be preserved as well.
because, I would make sure I made myself look really good. Maybe something like RemoWilliams84 had millions of followers that would bow down with a simple waive of his giant, throbbing... well you get the idea.
"I don't have to think. I only have to do it. The results are always perfect, but that's old news." - Meat Puppets
I hope they put some sort of DRM on it - this could be dangerous if it falls into the wrong hands!
This idea has been around for a few years - I remember reading about it back in 02001 or so.
I'd love to buy one, however they aren't actually producing or selling them - if you want one you have to cough up 25000 USD to support their foundation - no idea if anyone actually has one yet or if this is just a hypothetical. Which means they're not going to be ubiquitous any time soon, and undermines their whole purpose.
In my opinion this is far more useful than anything else they're engaged in, including the clock. Even if they made disks with a cheaper process that lasted only 1000 or so years in normal conditions, and could sell them for 100 USD, they'd be a great asset for future archeologists and a very provocative statement in our society, which more than ever values the present over the future.
"We have machined a hollow cylinder into the bottom hemisphere that holds a stainless steel ribbon for disk caretakers to etch their names, locations, and dates - hopefully creating a unique pedigree for each Rosetta object as it travels through time and human hands."
And the first one to write something on it will write ... http://xkcd.com/269/
Typical BBC thinking. Have a BBC Micro as the only way to access it.
I'm sure this was a pet project of somebody at the BBC rather than a serious attempt at preserving culture.
PS: If you're a geek and you haven't seen the BBC series "Making the Most of the Micro" then get a copy today. Seriously!
No sig today...
Already artifacts from eg. egyptians allow us to go more than 2000 years back in time.
For something impressive, I'd expect atleast 1 million years, then it would not just be a *blib* in time.
Yes, I read too much sci-fi, see eg. http://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-Zones-Thought/dp/0812536355/
To have any hope of surviving and being found in thousands of years, they need massive replication. Oh, I am sure they picked the best of materials, and they will last, but at $25,000 per, there just aren't going to be many of them left in 2,000 years because there weren't many of them made.
I would favor a cheaper mass produced product. Maybe something that on average doesn't have much hope of lasting more than a few hundred years, but if you make millions of them and shill them on the home shopping network - maybe somebody will have a hope of finding one in the distance future perfectly preserved in a redneck's hermetically sealed grave.
I'd suggest using something like a CD mastering process to stamp an analog message into a gold foil disk, that is then embedded in high quality, impact resistant glass. The glass seals against corrosion and moisture (if you are too cheap to go with the gold foil), and acts as a sacrificial surface that can take scratches bumps and dings and still be polished up by future archeologists.
if you treat this disk the way the original rosetta stone has been treated, nobody will be able to decipher it afterwards. The only reason we were able the rosetta stone: The chars were relatively big. High information density and long lifetime (in any conditions) are contradictions....
Yours, Martin
Speak for yourself, man, all the geeks in us already found a better way long time ago. We store our important stuffs for long term archival in newsgroups.
We are making an assumption the can even understand our technology by then. They could be light-years ahead, or behind.
At least with a stone tablet, all you have to do is look at it. ( ad figure out the language, another barrier future readers will have )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Of course you'll need Windows Vista and a OOXML compliant reader to read it...
'Cause yep, Rosetta Coaster.
This is certainly an interesting project from the perspective of something interesting to nerds and all, but what is newsworthy here?
This disc project has been going for nearly a decade, and they have been gradually collecting information for its design for some time. This disc has been in production for awhile as well now.
So what has changed to make this something that is "news for nerds"? From a journalistic viewpoint, this web page and related information is about as stale as it gets. The blog entry fills in some interesting details, but even that doesn't give anything newsworthy. I've certainly seen information about this project referenced here on /. for some time as well.
You'd know that information replication can lead to viral outbreaks of learning, unplanned knowledge, and not voting Republican.
http://goatse.cz/
You nerds love it!
Says the guy who has goatse bookmarked.
>> including versions of Genesis 1-3,
What a dumb idea. Do we really want to send the incorrect message to the future that everyone really beleived stupid stuff like the world was created in 7 days?
Personally, I'd probably place the things into a number of satellites and keep them in orbit around the earth with just enough to keep the orbit from decaying. Then, tie the controls for maintaining the orbit to a series of earth based beacons. In the event that every beacon on earth fails, the satellites could then be instructed to enter into decaying orbits to seed the discs onto the earth's surface contained within a protective shell to prevent burning up on re-entry. This would increase the odds of the discs being found by keeping them closer to the earth's surface and their landing points would deform the surrounding land enough to warrant investigation.
8==8 Bones 8==8
If they wanted to make a true artifact they would load it up with Chuck Norris jokes and lolcats.
Whether we like it—or agree with it—or not, the Bible is something that is very important to a very large number of people on Earth. Genesis, in particular (and much of the rest of the Old Testament) represents a creation myth believed to lesser or greater extent by 3.8 billion of our 6 billion-odd people (Wikipedia's estimate of the number of believers in Abrahamic religions).
Just because we agnostic or atheist geeks think that such things are embarrassing doesn't make it any less representative of the world we live in.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Anybody who owns a TV set, house, car, etc. will be turned away from the pearly gates ( http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew%2019:21;&version=31; )
Anybody who's eaten a hot dog? Sorry. ( http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus%2011:7;&version=31; ).
Anybody who doesn't hate their family? Nope. ( http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke+14:26 )
I could go on... but that's pretty much the whole of the USA already.
No sig today...
In the case of Mary, I understand the word is "venerate" not "worship".
Sounds like a distinction without a difference to me.
A better idea would be to send it into space on a path that has it crash landing back on earth in a glorious fireball in 2000 years.
For bonus points coat the satellite in layers of different materials/metals so when it enters the atmosphere the air friction burns of the material in a controlled manner. Having a repeating series of distinct equally spaced flashes of color and a lingering smoke trail would hopefully attract enough attention to encourage a recovery.
Hmmm, now where to aim for re-entry?
In other words: backups are for wimps ;-) _really_ important stuff just gets mirrored by half the world.
Have scientists taken into consideration the effect these artifacts will have when discovered by our future ape overloads?
You are an troll and a serious coward but this was too much fun to pass up.
The point that you're missing entirely is that there is NO SUCH THING as a good person.
Which is a premise that I fundamentally disagree with and why I'm not a christian. If you want to convince someone of your logic you might want to start with a premise both parties agree to. Furthermore you'll have to come up with a definition of "good" so that we can be sure we are talking about the same thing.
Even your hypothetical "good atheist's" actions were tainted with self-righteousness.
Helping others == "self-righteousness"? Can be but certainly doesn't have to be. Are you trying to say we shouldn't help others because that would be "self-righteous"?
Better to be a sinner and know it than a pompous ass who thinks that he's perfect.
I'm not aware of anyone who thinks they are perfect though I do know some people who try very, very hard to be. The fact that no one is perfect does not and never will logically equal "no such thing as a good person".
the plan is to replicate the disk promiscuously
Ok, perhaps technically the word works, but I don't think it was the best choice. As everyone knows, promiscuity refers to human replication, not digital.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
The Long Now Foundation is really a cover for the Second Long Now Foundation. But don't tell anyone, it won't work if anyone knows about it.
Read 90% of the article. Paper can last 1000 to 2000 years. Probably longer in space. So the answer is they should have just made copies on paper right?
But it was not the very first disk. That one is in space. In 2004 the Rosetta Space Probe was launched by the European Space Agency. This small craft was created to land on a comet in 2014. Before it blasted off, the ESA contacted us because we share names. They asked if we'd like to mount a version of the disk on their probe. Of course we would! We had manufactured a pure nickel disc with a subset of 6,000 pages of language translations, which was mounted on the payload section of the probe.
The 3000-year long gyptian civilization and writing was almost totally forgotten for 1300 years until rediscovered in the 18th century. Dittot for some other middleeastern civilizations which were millennial giants in their days.
"A piece of the action".
When archaeologists of the future come across one of these suckers loaded with all the porn from the late 20th/early 21st century, they're going to be glued to their computers for decades! Either that, or they'll be sorely disappointed, because the women in the pics won't have four breasts with eight nipples and and purple skin,... =)
Do you really want to see the majority of the human race worshipping Dumbledore as God and Harry as Jesus two thousand years down the road?
Anyone can "stand up for what they believe", but it takes a very brave individual to change what they believe. - Loundry
Within the next hundred years or so we will have a total, worldwide economic collapse leading to wars large and small everywhere. World population will shrink by one order of magnitude or more. Then things will settle down on a much simpler level, with only basic industry, most people working in agriculture, religion either forgotten or diversified into meaningless local customs. Centuries come and go peacefully. Then, one day, some bloke finds that rosetta thing and finally manages to read it somehow, even if badly and full of errors. He instantly declares that this has to be of divine origin (since man cannot write that tiny) and ALL STARTS OVER AGAIN! Arghhh!
I mean, I'm all for conserving knowledge. But I don't care for all that cultural and religious stuff. People are fully able to come up with their own myths and their own culture and fiction and stories and music everywhere, at any time. But *knowledge* (as in hard scientific, medical, physical, biological knowledge) is our real treasure. *This* has to be secured, not all this religious and cultural stuff. You can whip up a religion and good stories from nothing, but the scientific knowledge we've accumulated takes generations of hard work (and often equipment you can't produce from stone and wood). If this is lost at some point in the future the chances are high that it will be lost for good and we will be back into the stone age.
To me, even the most basic medical knowledge is worth more than the whole fucking bible. People have been coming up with creation myths and religions since ages and none of these is better or worse than any other. The most basic antibiotic is worth more than all of them together. Wasting efforts to conserve useless myths for thousands of years is a sure sign of us being just a bunch of mad apes.
The nice thing about this is that like has mentioned before is that the story of Genesis is likely to survive for the next 2000 years. The 1500 languages will not and much like the Rostetta Stone will provide assistance in deciphering these then dead languages. I think its a great idea and choice, regardless of the religious connotations.
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
...is also out of copyright and in the public domain.
Godwin invoked: this story is now concluded.
If they could manufacture them cheaply enough for people to buy them for that purpose, they would be very well distributed, indeed.
Further, if there are millions of "worthless shiny coasters" cluttering up the archives, eventually someone's going to be curious enough to look at one of them in more detail.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Your critique of pharisaical religion is good, and there's certainly a lot of that around among professing Christians. But two cautions for you:
1.) Make sure you stay humble as you critique "Pharisees", or you'll be acting holier-than-thou. I think those tendencies are present in everyone. I hate that, and pray that God will be changing my heart. But it's important not to forget that it's there.
2.) When you say that "Christianity is about self-sacrifice, living as Christ lived, and loving as Christ loved," make sure you maintain the difference between (1) walking in the Spirit, being transformed to be more like Christ, and (2) the good news. If you walk up to someone and tell them, "Look at Jesus! Live like he lived!", then you haven't given them good news. Because, as you said, we can't measure up to that standard.
The life of a Christian is about what you said. But the gospel is forgiveness, salvation, adoption, and the receipt of the Holy Spirit--by faith, not by working to be like Christ.
How many other stories have remained in oral culture for as long? Gilgamesh was lost. Hammurabi's Code was lost. Beowulf is recent. The Iliad is still around, but it is certainly not as widely known. The Upanishads and Confucius date only slightly before recorded history (~500 BC). I am no expert, but Job (older than Genesis, but also biblical) is the only thing I can think of that has lasted more than 5000 years.
The story of Genesis has been around for longer than the idea of written language! It seems reasonable to guess that it will still be around when our current idea of written language begins to falter. It seems the only reasonable guess.
Which versions of Genesis? Which religion's translations? What will mark the original version (Hebrew)? Seriously, the language a person thinks or writes makes significant difference in their view of the world (and universe). Just look at how two differences in the translation of one word in Isaiah 7:14-16 - the description of the messiah's mother ('virgin' or 'young woman') or the passage in Exodus 21:22, describing the punishment for causing a miscarriage (which constitutes the basis for the thoughts on abortion - bad or murder argument), have such radically different results.
If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?
Hey, why don't they use one of the great online storage providers or a RAID1 setup (maybe RAID3)? Google Docs would probably fit that.
H. Beam Piper had a story about recovering a lost language, on an alien planet; Omnilingual .
Going through a school/university, they come across a periodic chart and a chemist explains to a linguist why elements will always be the same, regardless of who 'discovers' them. Is good story about a cunning linguist.
I drank what? -- Socrates
... that the finders of such disk, A) have the ability to read the media. and B) are intelligent enough, IE not chucking spears, to know what it is.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
That's why you would hide it in an intuitive place. In the middle of the biggest crater on the moon, for example, inside a big, obviously artificial thing. A black monolith, say.
Not only that, but it'd be in the cellar of the monolith, where you need a flashlight, with no stairs, in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.
Let me get this straight: you think that 1) Christ is someone whose life we should emulate, and 2) all the accounts we have about that life are unreliable?
How, precisely, can we follow the example of someone we know nothing about?
And if the accounts about him ARE accurate, He claimed to have the authority to forgive sins, to call the dead forth from their graves, and plenty of other statements that would be lunacy coming from a mere mortal.
I wouldn't want to follow the example of someone who said stuff like that unless I thought it were true. (Which I do.) You can't have it both ways.
The point of this project is not the preservation of part of the bible, it's a Rosetta stone for the future, a way to decrypt what's otherwise undecryptable. If the language is unknown by any living persons and there is nothing like this around then it's as if the message is written in an unbreakable code. The Code Talkers of WWII used this concept to great success. Many of the codes of this era were broken but not this one because they were speaking Navajo. Imagine finding this item and having a library of books that were in an unknown language - you could then find the language and translate the books to a known language and therefore gain the knowledge contained in the books. As they say in the article - if we had one of these from the past it would be one of the most valuable artifacts in existance.
... archaeologists uncover a treasure trove of 2000 year old p0rn archives.
Have gnu, will travel.
Just how do you propose to preserve the language(s) needed to read all of that scientific data?! The intention isn't to provide a scientific archive, but a linguistic archive. It's a pretty safe bet that there will be at least some modern-era text that survives that long, but will anyone still be able to read it? This provides some hope of being able to decipher modern languages at some point in the distant future.
Moreover, what scientific knowledge do you encode? It's constantly changing and improving: consider just how laughable much of pre-Victorian science is to modern readers; even the Victorian scientists sound pretty quaint to the modern ear. The science available in 50 years will most likely be enormously advanced from modern knowledge, but basic linguistic knowledge will most likely still be relatively stable.
I think this is an entirely appropriate project - and I don't think it's that they don't plan to preserve other texts, but rather that something like this is a prerequisite to encoding anything else.
Come on folks, all you Rosetta people could think up was a religious text? There were no secular texts that were suitable for this purpose?
Much of that was obviated by the New Testament. Thus that's why it's OK now to wear clothes made of two different fabrics, etc.
..........FULL STOP.
Disks are made out of nickel.
Which is rather resistant to corrosion.
http://www.key-to-metals.com/Article18.htm
From TFL:
Nickel-base alloys are used for corrosion resistance or for combined corrosion resistance and high temperature strength in a wide range of commercial applications. These various applications may demand resistance to aqueous corrosion mechanisms, such as general corrosion, localized attack, and SCC, or resistance to elevated temperature oxidation, sulfidation and carburization. Many nickel-base alloys have been developed to resist these and other forms of attack. The alloys often find application in areas outside the specific industry or process for which they were designed.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
At least the Windows PE format will be well documented 10,000 years from now, when they discover massive deposits of AOL disks all over the world.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
We've already unintentionally preserved thousands of copies of the bible in hotel nightstand drawers.
I can't imagine that the US is the only country that does this...
and I agree about the smaller and smaller print becoming an eroded mess in 2,000 years. What we need to do is not just give future cultures a disk with no system that can read it. Give them linux, and maybe Windows will never happen again.
Let me know in 2,000 years. And CC that email to ReactOS.
Someone may end up laughing at this post in 300 years, but I really don't think English is going to change much at all in terms of the ability for people in 300-2000 years to understand.
Perhaps, though I think global economic collapse would probably be more likely than nuclear winter to cause cultural separation and language drift, if for no other reason than that things like that have happened so many times before.
English is certainly in a much better position to survive for the long haul than most ancient languages because it's spoken and read by so many people in all parts of the world, either as a first or second language. However I think if we were talking about this subject 2000 years ago, we would both be astounded to hear that few people nowadays can read or understand either Latin or Koine Greek, the two most common and widely-dispersed languages of that era.
2000 years is a long time.
The Romans managed to preserve their language and culture for 2000 years completely by accident
Umm.. no.
Having an Empire that covers most of the world (at the time) kinda sets your language as the main language by default.
Also, having it the main language of the church that kept the practice of torturing and burning alive everyone who didn't bow down to it's heavenly mandate.
And... when both of those fade... You still get to keep it through law and medicine - cause your empire officially invented those.
Or at least, that is what you have been telling everyone for the last 2000 years.
Do you really think all the stuff we're doing today will vanish in the same time span.
All the stuff? No. Lots of stuff? YES!
I still have some of my C64 tapes around, despite the fact that I've given my C64 to a cousin long ago.
And there was no DRM on those tapes.
In far less than 100 years the whole of today's Internet will fit on a single USB stick - smaller than a single shard of Roman pottery.
Soo... a lot of information, will be able to fit on a very small, proprietary medium in less then a twentieth part of time their spheres will last. OK...
What does one have to do with the other?
Rosetta disk spheres are imagined for the purpose of keeping VITAL pieces of information for MILLENNIA to come. Readable using only eyes and magnifying lenses.
Kinda like those talking rings in The Time Machine (1960).
NOT for storing porn.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
they should have worked a deal with AOL to engrave the information on AOL cds. What better way is there to ensure the long term preservation of information than billions of cds scattered from one corner of the globe to the other.
Taken from Roger Water; Amused to Death
And when they found our shadows
Groups 'round the TV sets
They ran down every lead
They repeated every test
They checked out all the data in their lists
And then the alien anthropologists
Admitted they were still perplexed
But on eliminating every other reason
For our sad demise
They logged the only explanation left
This species has amused itself to death
No tears to cry
No feelings left
This species has amused itself to death
Amused itself to death
Load New Commander (Y/N)?
I went through that website and it really is kind of silly.
I read 15 pages of quotes in virtually every one the quote itself disproved the thesis of the page....I especially like the "Jesus is a liar" page. Every single quote said if you are absoultly certain you have faith then (and only then) god will do as you pray. Thoes quotes that didn't say that included the word "may." I AM a christian and I can tell you that I struggle with doubt every day. In addition God doesn't give a time frame for the prayer to be answered.
Yes, the bible was set in a very violent time. Yes it offends our modern tastes. However I have yet to find a place in the bible where god did not warn people over and over again BEFORE bad things happen.
The closest is Israel occupying the promised land. But did you notice that God didn't instruct the Israelites to hunt down and kill everyone who voluntairly left Cannan? Yes, taking the land (which had already belonged to Abraham in the past) was a mean (but not uncommon for all cultures) thing to do, but God did not order the extinction of the local inhaitants, only their removal. Only the people who refused to leave were to be killed, and they knew they could leave.
I hope you re-read the "evilBible" and keep a copy of the actual bible next to you when you do.
Or better yet, read the bible. At the very least it is a remarkable historical document and provides insight into theological thought. Just remember that the bible is a single tale and dicussus the cultural evolution of man through it's volumes.
I just checked my library an I have an American Heritage Dictionary with over 1,500 pages and a Bible with over 1,300 pages. At full size, you should be able to print the entire 13,500-15,000 pages in nine or ten volumes. You could mass produce these with acid-free paper and sell them to every library in the world for under $500/set. Or, you could print 10 reduced size pages on each page and produce a single volume for under $25 which would require only moderate magnification (and probably could be read without magnification for someone with good eyes.) At that price it would even have a home in my own home library. Paper can last just as long and will be much more readily usable and at a low price it would ensure that millions of copies could be distributed making it even more likely that a copy would still exist in thousands of years.
That's why the Rosetta stone was so useful: the other two languages on the stone were still known, allowing scholars to realize that they said the same thing and that it was likely that the third, Heiroglyphs, said the same thing.
When the Rosetta Stone was first discovered around 1799, only 1 of the three languages was known. It was however a pretty good guess that the other two said the same thing, and one of them (Demotic Egyptian) was deciphered fairly quickly because of its similarity to Coptic - however it would be a big stretch to say that it was "already known" at the time. At that point it became a pretty safe bet that the tablet had the same message written in hieroglyphs.
Not that I disagree with the main thrust of your argument, which is a good one.
Where the "moties" build museums in hardened buildings with locks that are openable only when you have a basic understanding of mathematics, because their civilization collapses (due to population pressure) every few years.
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The real test of whether a design for a 10000-year archive can work would be to find a 10000-year-old archive of a similar design. This is assuming the possibility of an advanced civilization long ago that disappeared for some reason. Books from ancient India talk about advanced technologies that disappeared. Possibly modern people are reading them wrong.
But the earth is several billion years old, and humans about 30-50,000 years old. And a lot can happen in that time. If a disease arose that killed all humans except the mentally retarded, it would have thrown evolution back at least 10000 years.
And if an archive done in an unknown and undecipherable language had been created, we wouldn't know about it.
They flash a mathematical sequence of lights at the alien ships, right before a giant death ray blasts the city into oblivion.
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Nothing incentivises geeks of the future like antique porn!
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Infect one of these copies with goatse and let people copy it. You will be remembered.
If properly stored, silver halide microfilm (a century-old technology) will last 500 years, and the viewing technology is pretty simple (magnifying glass). ;-)
Why would you need a single physical artifact, unless you are assuming the complete destruction of the internet in the timeframe.
It goes like this:
If Internet survives, you don't need some pathetic tiny-capacity physical storage archive. You have all or most of the info on the net, highly redundant and globally distributed.
The net today is already almost economically indispensible. We are transforming our production and distribution processes to rely on it. In 50 years, losing the internet will be like ripping the arteries out of something and expecting it to survive.
If that net is gone, it implies total and complete global destruction of civilization,
and probably extinction of humanity, because any even tiny subset left that had any memory would attempt to cobble together a miniature replica of the net to help themselves re-organize and restart.
So in that scenario, I'm not at all sure who the target audience is for these tablets. Maybe it's the raccoon or elephant sapients of 10 million years from now.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
What you're describing isn't intelligent self-interest (which is the most basic element of economics). It also isn't either atheism or religion (of whatever kind).
There is in fact a word for what you're describing, and it isn't "Nash efficiency" or "Atheism" or anything like that. It's "Kleptomania", and it's usually considered to be a mental disturbance.
Think about what conclusions we could make about the true Chrisitianity if all of the old versions/gospels were still around. When the church cobbled everything together I'm sure they tossed out anything contradictory. In 2000 years when they've altered the bible to take out embarassing falsehoods about the natural world, people will be able to reference the rosetta and call BS.
It is? How many religions from two thousand years ago are still around? Two? And one of those (Christianity) is having some serious recruiting problems.
Surely you jest. I can think of something around a dozen (!) religions from around 2000 years ago that are still around. Besides Christianity and Judaism, there's also Samaritanism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, and Jainism, which all still retain a significant number of adherents, as well as numerous smaller groups such as Gnosticism and various minority and native religions. If you're willing to go just a bit later you can add Islam and Shintoism, or even Sikhism.
And, for what it's worth, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism are all most likely still growing, at least in absolute numbers of adherents.
The world is a whole lot bigger and more diverse than the geeks on /.
I hope they have audio of Carly Simon singing "You're So Vain". That would fit this generation.
-- Jim Crigler In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return. -- Whittaker Chambers
Once Transhumans take over, humans are history - and unless some aliens arrive from somewhere to find one of these things, or a new species of primate rises on this planet, nobody is going to need a "Rosetta Stone" here. Anybody who thinks that humans will exist ten thousand years from now - or even a thousand or even a couple hundred years from now - is seriously out of touch with technological reality.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
This is what we should be doing as a society. You all know we are not going to survive unscathed. You know it in your heart. You can hear it coming ever faster. There are no more triggers to click. No more truces to ponder. No more bullshit to convince yourself of. Evil is evil. And we allowed it to happen. 4 more steps and BBAAAMM! 3 miles up and 1 miles down- your legacy is a gamma irradiated scorch mark. Oh, and don't forget those overdue asteroids. If you think Nasa can shoot them down(like they've been testing), I've got a broke condom to sell you.
This is a good idea. It's a necessary idea. We are too stupid to remember beyond 30 years, so if anyone does survive, they will be able to grasp reality sooner, and see where we didn't.
Oh, and yes, the Asian/European hybrids will own everyone because they are smarter, faster, disease immune, and super hotties. So asian/white couples, MAKE MORE BABIES! Wipe out the rest of these mediocre degenerates! Or maybe I read the wrong post before. I can never tell if it's over the top or not. No matter.
I think you miss the point. The point is no matter how good you are, all have sinned and fallen short. No mere human is good _enough_.
I haven't missed the point at all. You still haven't defined "good". There is no objective and universally held definition of what good is so how can anyone claim that no one is "good" or in your words is "good enough"?
Sure you can be good without having accepted Christ. But can you be good enough?
Define good first. But to answer your question, yes I think people can be "good enough" without any believing in any sort of mythology under what I expect most people would think the term to mean.
If Jesus asks you to follow him and you refuse, I'm not sure where your eventual destination will be.
You are not sure regardless of what my choice might be. (I'll ignore the somewhat silly idea that some cult leader 2000 years ago asked me to follow him) No one knows what happens after death. Could be nothing. Might be something none of us expect. Given that the majority of the worlds population believes in something other than the christian deity the only conclusion anyone can really draw is that no one knows.
2000 years?? Dangit...Ookla and Thundarr are gonna use it to play catch and bang the thing up. Then what good is it gonna be?
The Long Now Foundation exists to encourage "long term thinking". Projects like this one (and the clock) aren't supposed to be valuable, in themselves. They're mostly intended to inspire people to try to preserve the present for the future.
If reading about this project causes a bunch of people to have the reaction - "That's not the right way to do it! What you really want to do is...", then it's accomplishing its purpose. THey'd like nothing more than for there to be dozens of competing projects to preserve current culture and knowledge for future generations.
What is the basic difference between an atheist and a Christian, well simple : ...)
-> a Christian works to advance the glory of God ("be merry and fertile", the ten commandments, "love thy neighbour",
-> an atheist works to advance himself, without open regard for others (this does not mean he has to be a murderer, just that he does not see the need to consider the effect on strangers before deciding on a course of actio
Wow. Bad premise for an argument. I can easily argue that christians work solely to keep themselves from going to hell. The fact that this happens to advance the "glory of god" is incidental. In fact I find that to be a much more logical argument than yours. Furthermore positing that everything an atheist does is self motivated and does not consider effects on others is demonstrably wrong - not to mention offensive.
Atheist morality is whatever any single atheist comes up with, therefore it isn't even possible to give a workable definition
Since christians can't seem to agree on a common definition of morality your logic is on pretty weak ground here. Sure they have the bible (with numerous different versions that don't match) but it gets interpreted in as many different ways as there are christians. There is no unified definition of christian morality despite whatever you've convinced yourself of.
any atheists disagree about even trivial basic parts of atheist morality. Not so for Christians and muslims. Yes there are arguments. But a lot (I'd even say most) issues are considered beyond argument, say abortion.
Hogwash. I can introduce you to countless christians (and muslims) who disagree on the morality of abortion, homosexuality, and a host of other morality topics. There are huge swaths of the American population that are on either side of the abortion fence, far more than the total number of atheists. So clearly there is nothing remotely resembling a consensus among christians on their supposed morality.
In far less than 100 years the whole of today's Internet will fit on a single USB stick - smaller than a single shard of Roman pottery.
And 4 years later the tin whiskers will short it out rendering it useless.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
What knowledge has survived unchanged from four thousand years ago?
Much of the technical writing that was around 4000 years ago (of any description) wouldn't be very familiar. The ancients before Pythagoras didn't fully understand the Pythagorean theorem (though they did know that a few specific examples were right-angled triangles). The "astronomy" was mostly observations of the movements of the stars and planets, and the precession of the sun and moon through the zodiac over the years. They had no idea what might cause these patterns. The engineering principles, such as they were, were extremely rudimentary by modern standards - they didn't know about the arch or the dome, for example.
So what writing was there from 4000 years ago that might look pretty familiar to moderns? A few stories (particularly hero stories and love stories), and business accounting (!). The modern equivalents (more or less) might be pulp fiction (Romance novels and science fiction), and Excel spreadsheets. 8-) Not exactly deep scientific insights.
FWIW.
Certain sources are unacceptable when I write a college paper. Wikipedia being the most common whipping boy for reasons demonstrated a few threads up - Anyone can write to it, and it's very easily vandalized. For example, as someone who has used Adobe Premiere for nearly six years, I might be a better source of information than my English professor, but less so than one of the people who programmed it.
Yes, some "gospels" were omitted from the official canonized Bible. If I were to sit down tomorrow and write a "gospel according to Joseph", should the Bible be ammended because I say it's a gospel? I'm sure even those who do not believe in Christianity would shun that notion since anything I write has nothing to do with the life of Christ. It wasn't a firsthand account as Matthew's was, nor was it one of a close follower like the book of Mark. No, the gospel according to Joseph would be written over 2,000 years since the events it describes. The Gospel according to Thomas, for example, was written nearly 200 years after the birth of Christ, thus the writer wasn't even born at the same time as Jesus.
Even in modern society there is a degree of filtration. Yes, I can write a blog that says anything I want, but that doesn't make it credible. How many articles get filtered out by the New England Journal of Medicine each publication? Plenty - and that's what gives it its prestige. The fact that I can go to Livejournal and make a blog gives me no credibility whatsoever, because all I had to do was give them an e-mail address and watch an ad or two. If that article were to make it into the NEJoM, it would be much more credible because many other people have read my work and can verify its accuracy. Is that acceptable in medical science and not religious texts?
Joey
I think it would be less harmful than the current crop of religions, yes.
No sig today...
The Bible is politically very sensitive so the amount of deliberate meddling/editing is bound to be MUCH higher than The Illiad and The Odyssey.
No sig today...
Just because Harry Potter rides on trains and mentions "London" doesn't mean there's a bunch of kids out there who can fly on broomsticks.
The Bible is the same. It mentions plenty of real cities and people ... but that doesn't make the magical parts real.
No sig today...
It's an embarrassment that these people chose Genesis: it's a bizarre superstition, and it's intolerant of other religions.
They could have picked the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or the US Constitution, The Little Prince, or some Shakespeare instead, all of which have been translated into many languages as well.
I like the concept a lot, i would prefer that they would limit the information to scientific data, math, chemistry, biology, physics, incl the language samples etc. So IF by some major event the world would loose that info it would be retrieved by finding this object.
And now for something completely different....(refering the the genesis part)
I would also prefer people stopping with the jezus and god nonsense, i mean we know the stories were written about 70 years after they 'happened' so come on !:$. I know it is near pointlessness to bring it up again but please wake up from the dream and step into the real world, but there is no guy with a long beard sitting on a cloud laughing his ass off while we kill, maim, mutilate, LIE, lie some more, and keep on lie-ing year in year out.
I do bet it is easy not to have to think about it and that is why it probably is as persistant as it is (that and including the owwww sins you get for free when your born.... so in other words the God creates you, in his image and so apparantly he has some sins too / creates sinners, wow, nice guy...). Anywho could go on for hours... Bottomline, for me, is that it is one big hoax and ppl are still falling for it....
Message from god, Please logoff, rebooting the Universe