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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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
Put a massive repository of scientific and mathematical knowledge on it and I'd buy one for £100.
XP is basicly 98 with a lot more extra features to hunt down and disable. --Dram
Also, part of the purpose of the Long Now Foundation is to make current scientific knowledge available to our descendants in the event of a global catastrophe. By the time they've (re)developed the technology required to retrieve something from space, there isn't a huge amount more we can teach them.
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I would think that it would be some kind of incentive for someone / something to invent a way of reading it. There is already a 6X lens on there. Using that concept, they might reach the 100X mark in a short time period. The better they get, the more they will learn.
One would imagine they'd have included instructions for making said 100x or 750x lenses that were readable with the 6x lens. A form of boot-strapping, if you will.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
For something that's actually intended to be an archive, perhaps. But this is expressly designed to be merely a curiosity, not an archive. So why bother going to the tremendous effort of sending it to a different planet?
The information that interests the archaeologists is, more often than not, the information that no one is particularly interested in preserving. Things like records of lawsuits, records of amounts of produce, textbooks used for education ... that kind of thing. Sure, mythological documents are interesting too, but they're likely to be preserved in multiple copies anyway.
Hence, Petrushka's Made-up-on-the-spot Rule One: The documents that a society most wants to preserve are exactly those documents that archaeologists will be the least interested in. Because they know that stuff already. (Sure, there are exceptions for truly ancient civilisations where literally nothing else survives except for official documents, but ...)
The plan is to mass produce them, eventually. I expect that if they do find a way to manufacture these cheaply, other projects will want to manufacture their own discs, esp. with stuff like Wikipedia. It would be nice if they became popular with publishers and the like. Having a couple of these around is good, but having a more heterogeneous collection of high-density durable information repositories scattered around would be priceless.
And as a fan of dystopian future scenarios, the very idea of future primitives occasionally happening across these valuable information artifacts as they rummage through ruins for scrap metal makes me all warm and fuzzy. In fact, I'm slightly miffed that they can hold so damn much information. This way we'll never have a gatherer returning to his village with a small shiny globe, that upon inspection turns out to be an artifact of the ancients that reveals the schematics for building a more powerful coil gun, which gives them an edge in fending off the attacks of the neighbouring tribes. Having the best of Wikipedia, or maybe the archives of a couple of good research journals is much more helpful and versatile of course, but not nearly as romantic. ;-)
In a fair world, refrigerators would make electricity.
Is your name Hari Seldon?
Do you really know the meaning of the words "day" in the original language? No, it's only the Catholic Church and some other prominent so-called "christian" organizations that promote that idea.
On the other hand, Genesis is one of the oldest book in the world that has survived thousands of years with minimal to no copying or translation differences across translations (only difference is in interpretation) since it has been written down. It's also available in almost all religions (the Christian, Jewish and Islamic religions) and languages (anywhere there was an influence of the before mentioned) of this world, it can be found in more than 90% of the world, most likely a translation will survive within 2000 years.
It's also one of those books that has the basic/simplistic/root names (in all those languages) for members of the universe we can see with the naked eye (planet, moon, sun, stars, earth, life, male, female, sea, animals, vegetation) all in those 3 chapters as well as some abstract (religious/social) passages like cursing, naming, unions of man and woman, God, clothing.
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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.
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".
Actually, if it's the first three Genesis albums, there's not a lot of Collins. He didn't join them til the third album. It is, however, a lot of Gabriel, Banks, and Rutherford.
End of line..
Would it be any worse than this?
Ignore this signature. By order.
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.
i can see plenty of people worshiping the flying spaghetti monster by then, remember harry potter isn't marketed as religion, and while the FSM is marketed as how stupid real religion is, because of the way it parallels real religion we're not far off from people actually worshiping the FSM as real, it's hard coded into our brains, when certain stimuli eg:Near death experiences, specific EM shocks to the brain, disease and hunger and drug induced hallucination.
that or people will start worshiping the 'invisible pink unicorn' not quite sure which one i would 'rather' have replace the 'one true god'
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html