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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...
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.
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.
No sig today...
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.
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.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
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.
A major doctrine of Christianity is that no one measures up to the holiness of God anyway, which is why Christ, God incarnate, came and took the sins of the world upon himself. Christianity isn't about being a bunch of holier-than-thou religious people who live in middle class suburbia, go to church once a week, and try not to sin a lot. If you read any one of the four Gospels, those are the types of people which Jesus condemned most frequently (the Pharisees). Christianity is about self-sacrifice, living as Christ lived, and loving as Christ loved. Unfortunately Western Christianity currently looks a lot more like the former than the latter. I'm not asking you to believe it or even find it rational, I'm just asking you to at least give an accurate portrayal of something before you critique it.
Its = possessive. It's = "it is"
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.
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.