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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...
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.
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.
you start simple and work your way up from there...
MP3 Search Engine
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.
Any aliens that encounter our civilization may experience life in a completely incomprehensible way. For instance, they might not speak, but rather use some form of sign language or color language like squid. But, if they are a space faring race, and presumably interested in learning about other races, they'll have the necessary intelligence to make a go at learning what the disk means.
You'd be amazed what you can tease out of a text, especially poetry. Because so much poetry depends on end rhyme, it's possible to not only figure out pronunciation, but also accent. We can be so precise as to narrow down the accent that Shakespeare wrote in by examining the songs in his plays. It's pretty freaking cool.
But again, this all hinges on the premise that aliens can comprehend a spoken language, or even a written, symbolic language. If they can't, then of course this device won't work. Fortunately, future humans (if there are any) should be able to make some sense of this thing. It will be invaluable to future researchers. Lord knows, our land fills will be a wealth of information to any future archeologist.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
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...
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".
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
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
This sounds great. Now we need one with a copy of Wikipedia on it, so that all human knowledge can be preserved as well.
Assume an utterly alien audience
Why? The foundation doesn't, they assume an audience of humans in the future. Their goal is to preserve knowledge for our descendants, not for some hypothetical alien archaeologist.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'd just send them the url to xkcd. Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.
You are welcome on my lawn.
"Emit gas from your third thoraxial smell-sac. Retract the parietal spikes in your stomach, and slightly part your mandibles. Now declench both dorsal sphincters and force the gas out by pushing into your abdomen with your tarsal claws. Make sure to close your nasal glands if the listeners hide is not resistant to corrosive acid. A smile is always free."
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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...
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".
Would it be any worse than this?
Ignore this signature. By order.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuning_fork#Calculation_of_frequency
I see where you're going, but the material the tuning fork is made of (iron) and the length of the tines isn't enough to determine its frequency.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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.
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.
I don't believe that the Catholic Church promotes the idea any more that the world was created in 7 literal days - for quite a long time now they've accepted that the story is symbolic and mythological, not literal.
There are a few Christian groups who do believe in 7 literal days of creation - but most of them tend to be fundamentalist Protestants rather than Catholics or "mainline" Protestants.
Naturally there are individual members of each of these groups whose beliefs do not match the "official" beliefs of their respective denominations - but that shouldn't be used as evidence of what the denomination as a whole believes.
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
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)?