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Rosetta Disk Designed For 2,000 Years Archive
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Aug 25, 2008 06:36 AM
from the that'll-do-for-now dept.
from the that'll-do-for-now dept.
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.'"
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Well that's embarassing (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Should have used Harry Potter... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Well that's embarassing (Score:5, Funny)
With the way things are going very soon the Bible will be the only book that's out of copyright....
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Some versions are copyrighted (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Well that's embarassing (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Well that's embarassing (Score:5, Funny)
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
the man pages for emacs?
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Re:Well that's embarassing (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Well that's embarassing (Score:5, Interesting)
Even so, no one goes around saying the Greeks were idiots.
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Re:Well that's embarassing (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Pfff (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Well that's embarassing (Score:5, Informative)
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Put it into deep space (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Put it into deep space (Score:5, Insightful)
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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Re:Put it into deep space (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:Put it into deep space (Score:5, Insightful)
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 ...)
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You need a 500x microscope to read it (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:You need a 500x microscope to read it (Score:5, Funny)
Why not include the tool to read the document with the document?
That's how they make their money! It's brilliant! Give away the media for free, then in 2,000 years, sell the 500x microscope "readers" for a *huge* profit! Just make sure the teaser text and critical reviews are readable by the naked eye.
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Re:You need a 500x microscope to read it (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Rosetta Archive is a truly a grand achievement. (Score:5, Insightful)
Archive readability (Score:5, Informative)
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/ [theregister.co.uk] or
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/preservation/research/domesday.htm/community.htm [nationalarchives.gov.uk]
Only 2000 Years? Pffft (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
WTF ? (Score:5, Funny)
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".
Logical next step... (Score:5, Funny)
This sounds great. Now we need one with a copy of Wikipedia on it, so that all human knowledge can be preserved as well.
Re:Logical next step... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, that would be lovely. "Albert Einstein was a scientist who JASON MAYNOR SUCKS COCK developed one of the most important theories..."
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No 2.000 years (Score:5, Interesting)
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