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.'"

Comments

Well that's embarassing

[bigtallmofo]

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!

Re:Well that's embarassing

[vidarh]

Well, "we" (as in mankind as a whole) clearly are amazingly superstitious.

More importantly, though, it's a text that has a reasonable chance of surviving and being updated to remain understandable. Even if religion should start declining rapidly, it's played such a significant role in history and the text has been spread so widely that it's one of very few works I'd be willing to bet will exist in a "modern" translation 2000 years from now - a work that is currently considered a sacred text by more than half of the worlds population (both christians, muslims and jews) has a good shot at longevity.

What other texts do we have that has a similar chance of surviving? There are a lot of texts that are revered to some extent, but few or none that so many people have copies of, and even fewer currently widespread works that the next generation or the one after that will still have many copies of.

Re:Well that's embarassing

[uhfdude]

I was going to say pretty much the same thing. What bothers me is how prominent religion is in American society - leaders doing their thing in the name of God, large groups of fundamentalist christian believers picketing funerals of people they deem unworthy... I'm sure many of you can think of lots of examples. I think it's time that religions be demoted to the realm of mythology where they belong. I mean, come on, it's not gospel. (Can't take credit, stole that gospel bit from comedian Dara O'Briain)

Re:Well that's embarassing

[Lachlan Hunt]

I agree, it's a shame they had to fill it with it with mythology, instead of something more useful like some sort of documentation of our current scientific knowledge, information about actual significant historical events, or something.

Re:Well that's embarassing

[KillerBob]

Because the bible is already translated, and because the bible is more likely to survive 2000 years.

Assume that none of the 1500 languages used still exist 2,000 years from now. It's a fairly safe bet that if there's still humans, there's still going to be religion. And as annoying as it is to admit for some people, Christianity is likely to be one of those religions that survives. That'll give them a translation key for 1,500 languages, which can in turn be used to translate the rest of the information contained on the plates.

A far more likely situation, though, is that several of the languages used will still be in use. Or at least, still readable. 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. The larger the sample size you have, the better the chance that it'll be useful. Again, however, having the biblical passages present serves as a translation key for the rest of the information contained on the plates. 1,500 pages out of 15,000 isn't that much.

Re:Well that's embarassing

[dubl-u]

If those people choose what economists call "Nash efficiency" as an ideology (what atheists do), improving themselves without conscious regard to others

That's embarrassingly wrong. Do you know any actual atheists?

Let's take the classic ur-atheist, the physical scientist. You're suggesting all of those people are in it for themselves? Because the ones I know could do a lot better than a post-doc's wage. The ones I've asked do it because they want to be involved in an enterprise for the ages. They want to learn and contribute that learning to human understanding. They want to teach, sharing knowledge with young minds. They are atheists, but they are not so much in it for the bucks.

Personally, I'm an atheist and very community-minded. Why? Well really, that's who I am. But if you want me to rationalize it, I'm glad to say that I value life and hope and love, and I want to maximize those things not just for myself, but for everybody, and for the ages. Yes, it's all dust eventually, but so what? Every extra moment of beauty, of joy, of wonder that we make is that much better a universe.

Should have used Harry Potter...

[Joce640k]

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.

Re:Should have used Harry Potter...

[maztuhblastah]

OTOH The Bible is about the only book that wouldn't have earned them a DMCA slapdown affidavit.

I know you said that partly in jest, but I actually got a little depressed when I gave it some thought. Think of what we could have included: the music that influenced generations, films that invoke anger, sadness, joy, books that literally changed the way that the world thought -- and not one bit of it can be reproduced, all because some assholes wanted to collect a check from an animated mouse.
 
 

We fucked up somewhere.

Re:Should have used Harry Potter...

[deanlandolt]

Or are you you arrogant and ignorant as to believe the only things that have so influenced mankind have only been produced within the last century?

That's completely beside the point. Or are you you arrogant and ignorant as to believe those things which have so influenced mankind within the last century will ever find their way into the public domain, what with the ever-increasing length of copyright terms?

Pfff

[SmallFurryCreature]

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.

Re:Pfff

[Joce640k]

Hundreds of millions of people base their lives around those stories.

Sort of.

When you point out the fine print to them, most of those people don't measure up so they're going to hell anyway. Might as well have partied.

Re:Pfff

[zippthorne]

I think some of the classic mythologies were much more fun. Some pantheons had all the drama of a weekly TV show.

Sometimes I think they maybe WERE the weekly "tv drama" and that we've imputed a little too much significance to them because the records happened to survive.

Re:Pfff

[Hatta]

People don't believe in Jesus because of Mary's claim that God made her pregnant. People believe in Jesus because of claims about his miracles & resurrection.

Isn't a virgin birth one of those miracles? By casting doubt on that miracle, you cast doubt on Jesus's divinity.

But yes, the most important question to settle is whether a "Jesus" actually ever existed in the first place. There's not much evidence for that assertion outside the Bible.

Rosetta Archive is a truly a grand achievement.

[upuv]

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.

Only 2000 Years? Pffft

[Joce640k]

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.

Re:Put it into deep space

[TheRaven64]

Space is very big, and finding stuff there is pretty hard. Designing a satellite which can keep transmitting a signal (so that it will actually be found) for two thousand years is not at all easy - solar panels degrade long before this and even radiothermal generators don't last much longer than a hundred years.

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.

Re:You need a 500x microscope to read it

[BiggerIsBetter]

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.

Re:Put it into deep space

[Petrushka]

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 ...)

Re:Should have left out the religion

[guruevi]

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.

We're in the minority here

[danaris]

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

Original sin is nonsense

[sjbe]

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".