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Rosetta Disk For 10K-Year History 212

Posted by CmdrTaco from the but-can-I-store-potions-in-it dept.
fleener writes: "The BBC reports and SiliconValley.com comments on the Rosetta Disk, a 2" nickel nano-analog, optical storage disk that records text and images at densities up to 350,000 pages per disk, designed to last 10,000 years. It will be unveiled at the 10,000 year Library Conference, in a discussion of how to store our history and culture for the future, given that current digital storage formats degrade quickly and are platform dependent. The prototype contains the first three chapters of Genesis, in 1,000 languages. What information do you think is valuable and relevant to give future archaeologists?"
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Rosetta Disk for 10 Year History More

Rosetta Disk for 10 Year History

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  • It would be simple enough to have a diagram of a person looking at one of the disks through a microscope. One of the biggest benifits of this is that there is no need for any other power source then the sun.
  • "The prototype contains the first three chapters of Genesis, in 1,000 languages. "

    What a waste of storage. Why not all the Subgenius that's fit to print?

    .{redmist}.
    -------------------------------------------------
  • It is now 10,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age. The writing on the disk is expected to last for up to 10,000 years more, during which time human society will no doubt have changed dramatically.

    They should archive the fact that Windows had bugs in it, because it's possible that Windows 12000 will be bug free. We mustn't let the younger generations forget the things we went through to bring them stable computing.

    Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.- George Santayana

  • Hate to burst your bubble, but Genesis is believed by Christians, Muslims, and Jews. There would be no need to include text from the Quran or Talmud to include these groups.
  • The whole point is to provide language translation, not to teach math. 1+1=2 seems to be the same in all languages.
  • Yes but the Encyclopedia Brittanica is out of date within a year. They want you to buy year books, or buy a whole new set.
  • As a snapshot of our times, we should include something that communicates our relationship with technology. I would suggest the text of the nuclear weapons FAQ [fas.org], photographs of mushroom clouds, and the text of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty [navy.mil] (which the United States has yet to sign). Follow this with photographs of man walking on the moon, an exerpt of the human genome project, and perhaps one of those colorful maps of the World Wide Web.

    We have lived for half a century with technology enabling us to wreak complete destruction on ourselves and our environment, yet we have demonstrated a similar capacity to work towards a common good. This has, to a large degree, defined us as a people and how we cope with these technologies will form an important part of our historical legasy. Which facet of the human animal will win out in the end is unclear, and how we will apply this technology to solving our current problems will be for historians of the future to determine.
  • It's not as much of a censorship issue to me as it would seem to be to you. It's a matter of disturbing the peace. IRL, that is a valid charge for people who are making some pretty obvious trouble for themselves. That is NOT the same as casually talking to your friends about the "evil governemnt" and hence being removed. Were that the case...I agree with you completely...but that isn't the case at all. It would be more like you go out one sunny morning casually start screaming about the "evil government" from a rooftop while other people are trying to go about their lives. Odds are it would annoy the people around you....whether they even agree or not. Hell...get real. You can climb onto a rooftop and scream about how GREAT our government is...I would still want you to shut up for it. Why? Not because I agree or disagree....but because it's annoying.

    How would I stop it? Well...I could ask nicely. (Would that have stopped OSM? Hmm...I really doubt it...be real here.) No...I'd probably call in the "evil establishment" government of ours...who would probably resolve it by dispatching an officer to investigate. I am glad that option exists personally.

  • How exactly can They be sure that this capsule won't be opened until around 12k AD? Put a bumber sticker on it asking future generations to kindly wait until the appointed time?

    --

  • The quote attributed to Voltaire above was actually paraphrased by C.S. Tallentyre

    Thank you for the correction. I have had difficulty finding definitive confirmation. The best I could do was this comment

    The statement with witch Voltaire is most identified--"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"--is a twentieth-century invention. It was made up by Beatrice Hall (pseudonym: S. G. Tallentyre) in a book puplished in 1907.

    from this site [tamos.net]. Maybe I'll have to break down and go to a physical library. *smile*

  • The Rosetta stone allowed those who understood one language to understand two others which were previously not understood, right? So take some of the art our society values most - perhaps one piece from each country or language - translate it into every language we can find, and stick it on a durable disk! Wouldn't that be a godsend to archaeologists? The medium would even allow us to put movies on there and subtitle or dub them. Just a thought....
  • Didn't it occur to you that the word 'analog' in the first sentence of the article might mean that the disk is NOT DIGITAL?
  • Please read. [io.com]
  • E=MC^2

    (fission, fusion, or antimatter, it doesn't look too good for a planet with a technological society on it)
  • Why is it that every time the Bible or anything relating to it is posted on slashdot you people go fscking crazy?

    Grow up...
  • > Yeah, they can take some cues from Star Trek. >They're always finding 1,000+ year old >electronics that not only work, but have been >left on the whole time! Luckily for them the computers weren't running Windows.
  • Why do we need to kick start civilisation? Humanity managed to sort out civilisation (assuming we are civilised, there are plenty of good arguments and examples to say that we aren't) without any form of kickstart You also seem to assume that whoever/whatever was to replace us in the event of a Life Extinction Event would be of hominoid, or at least hominid origins. I would suggest that the odds of this are fair, but not great. Cheers Hacman

  • What to put on there? (Score:3)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Monday July 03, 2000 @02:38PM (#960916) Homepage Journal
    How about...

    All the Metallica songs, in MP3 format?

  • Re:How will they read it? (Score:3)

    by nstrug ( 1741 ) on Monday July 03, 2000 @02:38PM (#960917) Homepage
    You didn't read the article did you? Come on, own up. The disk is analogue - all you need is a microscope and a knowledge of the written form of one of the 1000 languages it is engraved in.
  • 1. samples of our language that help the readers to understand it quickly
    2. hello world :-) and why we did this
    5. philosophy (what we think of atom bombs and feudalism and many of the original wirtings) 4. scientific knowledge (how to build atom bombs and the like)
    3. history (what our civilization looks like and what we have found out about the past)
    6. manymany comments of all the people who liked to write some (without filtering them :-)
    7. culture: show them what we've got, what we like! How we express and celebrate, fine lyrics, drawings, theatre and everything that is not too boring on a "static, nano-carved" disc

    I consider the personal comments the most important cause I disklike the standard view of our society (modern, good, sensible, fair) and want to tell my view.

    ...if they care :-)
  • This *ALMOST* wasn't in last months wired. Atleast they had pictures.
  • hey, that's some not-right shit there! WTF? I thought you guys said that you wouldn't ever censor? like its ok to say that mp3s are cool and put up copies of microsoft stuff, but we can't make some offtopic stuff once in awhile?
  • ah, sorry guy, i just haven't been reading slashdot lately, but when i do, it seems the only thing worth reading are the troll posts in the comments section, and they're too long and my attention span dwindles, so i just compulsivly check my web-based email instead
  • First something like the rosetta stone, so that our languages can be understood. e.g. an illustrated dictionary. With say an English HOWTO.
    Decimal system.

    We should include male + female DNA + blueprints for sperm and egg, for various popular creatures including humans ;).

    And some physics constants+measurements just to see if things changed :).

    Some stuff about our various cultures. newsprints, magazines, with rankings for fiction, nonfiction, debatable etc :).

    Guiness book of records maybe - so we can see the limitations, and what are regarded as "achievements".

    If possible the sort of stuff that was holographically stored in the alien ship in Arthur C Clark's Rendezvous with Rama.

    And tons of stuff which should not be patented again- talk about prior art ;).

    Cheerio,

    Link.
  • I got the impression it was more like a microfiche and they could examine it with a microscope.

  • While we cannot make a perfect decision about what to record for our decendants/replacements, we can make an educated guess. Go to your local book store. Look for books on aboriginal people. Count the number of books in the following subjects: art, religion, technology and history. You should find that the most common subject is history, followed by art, religion and technology. Repeat for Phonecians, Greeks, Chinese and Europeans.

    How should this guide our decisions when makeing such and artifact as the Rosetta Disk? I would propose that we give them that which we value in our own ancestors.

    We should explain our history. Let our future archeologists understand us through our history, maybe (wistful thinking, I know) they will avoid some of our mistakes. Give them dates, give them events. They will find artifacts, so why not give them a context with which to understand those artifacts?

    As for art: what is the one remnant of 'cave-men' everyone is aware of? Paintings and arrow heads. Art is universal. A child can understand a painting. Art stands on it's own merits.

    Religion, philosophy and technology I group together. Why? Not because I think of them as alike in any way, rather, I imagine that a 10,000 year distant archeologist would have trouble distiguishing them. We don't have all of the answers, and these three diciplines all attempt to answer the same fundamental questions. In 10,000 years, we have come from no philosophy to metaphysics. We've come from arrowheads to high yield laser guided nuclear bombs. We've come from huge, impersonal, hierarchical, bumbling religion to...huge, impersonal, hierarchical, bumbling religion. And hell, why should we bother explaining the difference? We should just present them as different theories addressing the same issue.

    P.S.: These damn things will not last if they're on the earth. Terra Firma is awful on artifacts. The ice caps, mountain tops or the moon might not be bad ideas. My vote goes for the moon. Why? Because we can make it highly visible. Just imagine a few high albedo plains aranged in a straight line, like an elipsis... It would at least give tourists something to see if society doesn't collapse. And any developing society would know what to do when they got to the moon, if they got to 1960-ish technology.

  • My favorite was "That's All", but I also liked "Home by the Sea". I hope they included these. Of course, I would have preferred to send Billy Joel down through the ages.

    What? You meant the book from the bible, not the album? Oh. Sorry.
  • Besides the usual information of history, I saw other posts indicating that it might be used to build a civilization from scratch. If this is so, textbooks about _everything_ would be useful.

    Another thing they could include is "everything", the website! What other place offers exterme insite into the way a geek thinks, about absolutely everything? Everything2 as well :).
  • Yeah, they can take some cues from Star Trek. They're always finding 1,000+ year old electronics that not only work, but have been left on the whole time!
  • Genesis is older then christianity.
    Wow, that's just like I said above. Yes I know that the three semitic-based religions believed the story, and yes I know it is pre-everything. Genesis exists in one form or another in most semitic texts. The Quran may not have it in the same form.
    Now to my point. There is more wisdom than genesis out there. Whatever you may make of the story of Adam(adapu) and eve(forgot for the moment), there are other things that are honestly christian, muslim, judaic, buddhist, etc. I agree with your statment towards linguistics. It would give them one heckuva rosetta stone.
  • How can a digital storage media not be media dependant? Please explain.

    You still need a protocol or method of decoding/encoding the data. Granted standard IDE HD's with a FAT file system are platform dependant, but who can't get the specs on them and use them for whatever?
  • Right, since you don't need anything else to get a strong basis of what religion X,Y, and Z are by the first three chapters. What makes them unique? Wouldn't it be better to include some of the later teachings? something outside of the semitic (actually pre-sumerian) realm?
    The Talmud and the Quran are both important, as is the new Testament of the bible in defining their respective groups. To state we don't need anything else because we have a creation myth is an argument based on shaky ground indeed. Keep in mind that these religions keep this story as a tradition and a myth, not as literal truth. To some fundies, the earth is 6,000 years old. This doesn't even jive when you consider there are stories even older still than the first recorded semitic histories (in the talmud) .. You simply can't make it fit. That is part of the reason you need to include other stories from all three books. A history of law from Hammurabi or the Middrash would be nice. This is a function philosophy, and it would translate well.
    Anyways, here's hoping they don't get to centered on one or two points of view..

  • Hey, CmdrTaco:

    If you're going to post a link to Genesis, please post one that isn't so thoroughly flawed. ;-)

    The King James version of the Bible has been shown, time and again, to contain hundreds of translation and transcription errors. It's study should be relegated to historians and theologians, not average Christians.

    Probably the cleanest Christian rendering is the New International Version. However, being Jewish, I'll stick with the Jewsih Publication Society's version! *grin*

    Follow this link [breslov.com] to an excellent translation of the Bible.

    Cheers!


    ~wmaheriv
  • If this thing is going to last 1,000 years, why not include something useful, like the location of all the nuclear waste dumps containing plutonium and other radioactive elements with multiple thousand year half lives. (24,000 for plutonium?).

    There was recently (a few years back) an architectural design contest for storage of radioactive waste. The idea was to design a container that would not only last tens of thousands of years, but transmit (by it's structure - since no language used today will still be around - almost certainly) that the contents are dangerous - "Keep Out!"

    There should be some interesting ideas from this contest that would help these Rosetta Disk folks make sure that someone actually figures out what this thing is for.

    Now where is that URL...?

  • Aren't there lots and lots of babylonian documents written way before genesis?
    --
    "HORSE."
  • Because the choice of the bible indicates a possible lack of thought into the alternatives to store.

    tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
  • Most important, I think that we need to record the progression of technology. I think that the best way to do this is to store a meta-event that caused a major impact on human-kind. Geez -- I didn't even mention its effect on the planet... One way to do this is by recording all media on some device similar to this. Another alternative is to store everything published by all the major research centers. We might want to raise the filter and just store technological advances that made it into the mainstream, like the effect of the moon landing, and the mars probes. And there is always that little piece of software written about 7 years ago by a young guy at CREN which has pretty much changed the face of knowledge distribution as we know it. I guess what I am getting at is that if we were to store this kind of meta-event, then the other changes which are so well covered and perviasive in the media would make sense.
  • A copy of the original Rosetta stone.
  • A good reason to use a section of Genesis is that it's already been translated into virtually every language on earth, so that much of the work is already done. A good reason not to use math is that the whole point of the exercise is to provide a cross-reference of textual language, as the original Rosetta Stone did. The idea is that if future historians have an inkling of how to translate, say, Cherokee, into their own language, so they can translate ancient Cherokee texts, and then they find this disk, they will be able to cross-reference what they know of Cherokee with the other languages on the disk, allowing them to translate texts from other languages as well. The contents of the text are unimportant. What's important is that it's long enough to give plenty of context, vocabulary, and sentence structure, and that the meaning is consistent across all the languages represented on the disk. The only text I can think of that might have anywhere near as many translations already made is Shakespeare's plays, but I suspect the language of Genesis has been modernized, which would make it more useful for the project. -Bill
  • You are all hopelessly childish and can't spell. I don't even know what you were trying to say there. I'm done with this thread.
  • Yes you are right, They made one and put part of the Bible on it. Who says that they CAN'T make more???

    You need to follow your own advice in the future
  • When people say nukes will "destroy the earth", they don't mean it literally. Our puny bombs only scratch the surface of the earth. We can destroy the biosphere (which is something like 0.00001% of the total mass of the earth) but don't think that a little hydrogen bomb can split the earth in half or anything.

    Of course the earth will be around for billions of years. It's so huge that we can't hope to even deviate it from its course, let alone destroy it.

  • Well I am not part of any list, and I certainly don't think I fit the definition of "moronic". Why are you so confident in your assertion that this is a troll?

    I mean that as a genuine question. You are in possession of no more facts than the rest of us, yet you won't even open to the possibility that there is something to this. Why?

  • All the stories, articles and comments ever posted on slashdot. Is there anything more suitable for this?

  • This is an easy one, a full archive of /.
  • I sure hope they don't make the mistake of saving the text files as MS Word. We all know how often that file format changes.

  • You, or Gregory Benford is absolutely right. Compare this to the way scholars have been studying the middle ages recently. Noone really cares about the brilliant scholastic discussions hunchbacked medieaval monks have spent a lifetime committing to paper..what we are interested in is the "junk" that creeps up through the dogma in their books, i.e. brief moments in which something of daily life in their time shows through, for example when they're attributing behavioral patterns to Jesus or his disciples that we know can't have been exhibited by them because we now have a fairly solid understanding of life in ancient Palestine. Based on this knowledge, we can figure out that what those monks described in works that were meant to live through eternity must've been the fad of the day in 13th century Avignon.

    The point is this: there is no way for us to know what future generations will want to learn about us, so we can only hope they'll find enough 1990's trendiness in this to make it interesting for them.

    Or consider this: to us, the fall of the Berlin Wall was a monumentous experience. But over a long period, it won't be important. "Thousands of years ago, there was a 50yrs cold war going on..there was a wall and then it fell and the war was over." Doesn't the 100 years war between England and France seem insignificant to us now, after only 5, 600 years?

    This endeavour will only benefit our ego's. "See, we've left our mark." 10000 years from now, humans will be studying AOL cd's (as another poster pointed out), and they will consider them to be much more important as artifacts of late 20th century life than any Bill Joy article or time capsule.
  • At the pace we're growing now, the disck would reach all of 20 people who care, and that's just because they're the only ones who found it.

    Go watch futurama, see how they screwed it up? :)
  • IN order to read it, on "hacker" operating systems like "linux", download DeCSS and place the disc in you DVD-ROM drive....

    ...oops, wrong subject
  • Someone put a "K" on the "10" in the article title and put me out of my misery.
  • I know! Just yesterday, I had to run to Fry's and get Microsoft English 2000 Pro so I could read this book (dead-tree) I bought at Amazon.

    Meesa be thinking yousa should be reading the link [longnow.org] before commenting.
  • sealand? like in the chrysalids?
  • English today and english 500 years ago aren't comparable in this context because they didn't diverge. (I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying that's a bad example) Anyhow, what is the criterion for determinining if it's a language or a dialect? Mutual comprehensibility? (kinda like the EASY definition of a species)
  • Never mind that anyone who had the tools to read 350000 pages off a 2 inch disk would probably already have a pretty good grasp of mathematics, or would at least know somone who did.

  • Yes, but are people still studying them?

    Genesis is important, not just for its age, but for the influence it has had upon Judaism, and by extension, the rest of Western Civilisation.

    It is still avidly discussed and studied, and will continue to be so long as there are Jews in the world.

    Oh, and whilst I'm on the subject- Genesis is widely regarded by us Jews as being alegorical. Chances are very good that it was ^never^ taken literally. It certainly isn't now, save in the most extreme personalities.

    For all of you who are bashing it as 'quaint mythology,' I challenge you to read it objectively and with an open mind. It is filled with valuable lessons, and thousands of books have been written expounding upon these lessons. Genesis is there to teach us things that few are patient or honest enough to hear...

    I, for one, applaud their choice of Genesis. I only hope they include a good commentary with it, just in case our descendants don't "get it" any better than the average /.er *grin*


    ~wmaheriv
  • Humanity won't be wiped out by an ice age, it wasn't the last twenty times, and it'll take a good few million years for any current non-hominid to evolve into something capable of reading nanotext on a little disk of nickel. There are some however who believe that an extensive human civilisation was wiped out in the last ice age leaving almost no trace of its passing. I don't want that to happen to us, but I think this rosetta disk doesn't answer all of the problems. ps. I love the "rosetta boot disk" comment, DrPsycho [slashdot.org]!

  • Phaistos Disk (Score:3)

    by ElderBrother ( 161320 ) on Monday July 03, 2000 @04:05PM (#960955)
    This was tried before [fh-trier.de] in 1700 BC in Minoan Crete. Unfortunately no one today knows what version of Word they used...
  • Way off topic, but that's okay...
    Anyhow, what is the criterion for determinining if it's a language or a dialect? Mutual comprehensibility? (kinda like the EASY definition of a species)
    Actually, it's exactly like defining "species", with all the same pitfalls. If you you're determined to come up with an unambiguous way of differentiating them, you inevitably come to one of two conclusions: everybody speaks the same language, or everybody speaks a different language.

    Mutual comprehensibility is usually the benchmark. Language has an additional problem, though: comprehensibility isn't transitive. For example, apparently Romanians can understand Italian, but Italians can't understand Romanian.

    We spent a whole day on this in my Typology class. It's a mess. :-)
  • As far as I know we have less
    than 200 languages on planet earth.

    This includes navajo, strange
    african dialects and south american
    indio dialects.

    Well, just read that in Scientific
    American, german version, some 10
    years ago...

    Any idea?

    angel'o'sphere
  • ... and as chad exchanged his coin for three fish and a donkey he unwittingly oblittered the entire works of Shakepeare...

    schoolkids may rejoice
  • Genesis is older then christianity.
    It's is also one of the most widely distributed texts in the world. Since the disk is to be used to help future linguist figure out what will then be dead languages, using a widley known text will help emmencely.
    Will Genesis be around in 10,000 years? I don't know. But it is more likely to survive then the latest copy of wired.
    Ignorance alert -- This question will display my ignorance of the Jewish theology --
    Isn't Genesis in the Quran?
  • If nothing else Im sure it is pretty easy to find translations of the Bible in many laguages. If you are about to do this kind of project you dont want to spend half your money on translating "Planet of the Apes" God (couldn't help it ;)) knows how many times.

  • I don't know what Scientific American said, but Ethnologue [sil.org] is probably a better source, and they list 6,703 languages at the moment.
  • I like the Moon idea but a 2" disk is going to get lost pretty quick in all that dust.

    I think a 9-meter tall slab of black rock, situated in a major crater like Tycho would be more obvious.

    k.
    --
    "In spite of everything, I still believe that people
    are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
  • But surely the point of a rosetta disk is to do the same as the original rosetta stone ie offer a translation of a dead language. What's on it doesn't matter - chances are there'll be some other writings laying around where future generations can learn all about how to blow themselves up.
  • I take it everyone's seen one of those BaGua things, you know those octagon looking things with Yin-Yang at the middle. Well, there's long been a theory in the Chinese culture that the BaGua was THE KEY to infinite knowledge, the key to unlock all wonders of the universe, the only piece of information left to us by an advanced civilization prior to uh, I guess Genesis in this case. I think that makes more sense than this stupid micro-disk thing.
    Otherwise, put it ancient chinese/egyptian hieroglyphics makes more sense ^_^
  • So what you're basically saying is that we need some sort of Rosetta Boot Disk in order to get civilization up and running sufficiently to read whatever we manage to put on the other "permanent" media.

    I wonder how big the kernel would have to be? :^)

    (please leave your Civ jokes at the door)

  • Yep.

    Why would it not be considered one?

  • Why Genesis? was my thoguht too but it looks like they were after a rosetta stone which allows one to decode one language in one that might have survived and the claptrap in the Bible has been translated into more languages than any other info and there is no denying that it still influences our modern world. For example Egypts history (the 20th centruy version). The country was named "Egypt" by the french less than 200 years ago. A Hewbew word meaning "accross the water" is something like Aegept and the place with the pyramids must have been the people involved with Mosses so their kings are called Pharos and the Egyptians get blamed for enslaving the Jews over 5000 years ago which resulted in a war in the 1960s where Isreal tooke over the Sini and conducted huge archology surveys and determined that the exodus didn't go through the sini desert. In the last 20 years its starting to look like the jews were in northern Iraq before they were in their current homeland.
  • Future Archaeologist: "So, Joe, I've been searching through this huge archive of chatter about some petrified girl named Portman and a lot of discussion about some really bizarre copyright law issue--I still haven't found what that means, or what this "Windows" thing is, but I did read in it about this really cool storage...hey... did you bring that coaster back from a dig? ...um...could I look at it? with a microscope?"
  • I agree - I was simply saying that this is why "you people" go "fscking crazy". You were talking the general case, and so was I.
    I do not agree with Chiasmus_, and am not trying to defend him - simply giving a reason why your generalisation may be true.

    In fact, looking at the responses to Chiasmus_, I wonder if s/he was a troll.

    tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
  • If you had bothered to read the articles, you would know why: Like the original Rosetta Stone, the disk will take a single text and record translations in many languages and scripts. Our goal is as many currently extant languages as possible. For the core text, we are leaning towards combination of creation myths - from Genesis to the Big-Bang.

    Stop and think for just a second before flying off the handle. You're giving the rest of us atheists a bad name.
  • Forget the planet-destroyer, we've just built a system-destroyer! Woo hoo!

    On second thought, forget that, go watch Gunbuster. They turn Jupiter into one big bomb and nuke the galaxy center!

    In all seriousness, you're thinking of 1950's weapons. What do you think people will be fighting with 10,000 years from now?

    If you think humans will never have the capability to destroy planets, you're not thinking far enough ahead. I think we could easily build a single bomb that would crack the crust and kill everything on the planet right now, in fact, I think we could have built it since the 1960's. Once we get going on the antimatter thing, we'll probably be able to vaporize the planet with one bomb.

    Personally, I think we'll eventually cut up all the planets to build space stations. You get a hell of a lot more living space that way.
  • ...you could try reading the article, after which you will realise that the 'reader' is a 400 year old invention called the microscope.

    Nick

  • He discusses in detail the problems encountered when attempting to communicate across millenia.

    Things like: most media don't survive, languages rarely last 1000 years intact, and so forth.
    Even if you could preserve the medium ( a disk, or
    whatever ), another problem is, of course, how to read the darned thing.

    The book also mentions the *inadvertent* communications that occur across millennia. Like the contents of prehistoric garbage heaps and so forth.

    It's an interesting problem.

    shall

  • News flash (Score:3)

    by ZorbaTHut ( 126196 ) on Monday July 03, 2000 @01:57PM (#961001) Homepage
    BREAKING NEWS: We have just been informed that the Rosetta Disk writer was hacked moments before the final disk was written. This last disk, which was originally planned to contain a summary of the world's law systems translated into one thousand languages, now contains "Y3W h4vE b3EN h4X0r3D!!!!!!!! 1 0wN Y3w!!!!!!!" in approximately ten thousand varieties of "leetspeek".

    Ironically, the officials in charge of the project decided to use the disk anyway.

  • What to put on it? (Score:4)

    by carlos_benj ( 140796 ) on Monday July 03, 2000 @02:00PM (#961008) Journal
    I think it should include transcripts from 'War of the Worlds' followed by 'Planet of the Apes'. The rest should say, 'This space intentionally left blank'.

    carlos

  • "Well Shantz, now we know why humans didn't get through the ages... Can you imagine that they believed on THAT? And to make such a damn effort to dig THIS THING so we could read it 10,000 years later? Really they should have take a more careful look at what happened the 10,000 years BEFORE."
  • "What information do you think is valuable and relevant to give future archaeologists?"
    I've got one, though it isn't a book or even text:

    Reruns of "I Love Lucy."

    I'm serious. It was the first television program to be prerecorded before broadcast, thus it was in turn the first show to go into syndication and has been available as re-runs for decades now. Turn on your 150 channel tv right now amd there's a pretty good chance that at least one of those channels is running "I Love Lucy" right now.

    I don't even like the show that much, but in many ways television defined the leisure life of most people in the industrialized world in the last half of the twentieth century, and I think "I Love Lucy" is an excellent artifact of this era.

    It would also give a decent -- flawed, but decent -- view of what a typical urban lifestyle was like for the era, not just in writing, but in movement, speech, and setting. All told, archaeologists of 10,000 years from now could do a whole lot worse. Consider all those styrofoam McDonald's boxes, for example. Surely a sitcom is just a little bit kinder than that.

    I'm not sure if this storage medium is capable (in a useful way) of storing video data, but if it is, this is my vote...



  • Perhaps I'm short-sighted. But I really don't see the Earth being around that long (Y12k). Am I alone in this? I think that 10,000 years is a little too ambitious. Making a 1000 year time capsule / rosetta stone would seem to be more practical, IMHO.
  • 1) Copies of Windows 2000 and Windows Millennium.

    2) Recordings of calls to tech support.

    3) A thread containing Blizzard's excuses for the poor performance of Diablo II.

    4) The Starr Report.

    5) Any thread on /. containing the words "Portman", "grits", or "Beowulf".

    6) pr0n. Lots of it.

    We are the first generation capable of demonstrating to our distant descendants exactly how thoroughly stupid we were. So let's do it.
  • If we have another ice age, and our civilisation fails to survive it, then 10,000 years from now there may be nobody able to read these neat little disks. We therefore also need to leave an intermediate record of how to kick-start a civilisation from scratch.

  • Christ that thesis is choice! Damn you, I hurt myself laughing!

    How happy you must be at home. You must love your charming and creative "wife" deeply.

    Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

  • with an army, as the linguists say.

    I seriously doubt it's in the 6k range. People have the bad habit of counting regional dialects as a language
    instead of stating that it's dialectic. It's like calling 'redneck' or 'ebonics', languages.

    I could communicate, albeit awkwardly, with portuguese speaking friends using my high school spanish. Probably the same is true for Dutch and German. However, I can't understand a word of a lot of English speakers from the deep US south or from the Carribean. I can understand speakers of BAE (Black American English), despite their having grafted some grammatical structures from west african languages onto English.

    To tally the number of "languages" that exist, you really have to look at the number of dialects that have specific government support and bodies that advocate normative standards (like the French parliament).
  • One thing I can honestly say is - why the fuck would we want to put Genesis on this thing, in 300 languages???

    Well, for one thing, it's a piece of text you can easily find in several hundred high quality translations. This can make it possible for future scholars to reconstruct texts that are in English for a world were everyone speaks a derivative of some future dominant language. Remember modern English has only existed about five or six hundred years; English texts from 1500 CE are barely readable to a modern speaker. This period is 1/20th, and a lot can happen to a language's career in this time. Latin, Greek, Persian and Egyption may have seemed like the inevitable long term winners at various times in history, yet somehow we end up with a dominant worldwide language today which is descended from none of these.

  • The beer guy has completely worn out his thing (hey, I like ASCII art and I like beer but it's plain worn out, OK?). But to say that osm "doesn't say anything at all" is so howlingly wrong that I wonder you can get it out your mouth. The clear fact, indeed the very thing that makes him a redeyed menace to his neighbors near and far, is that osm is downright logorrhaeic.

    I know this for sure personally because he lives in the same town as me, and his wife Amy is friends with my wife, she's told her about his obsessive wordification. "He just goes on and on," Amy says, "I think it's cute," (she would, they're newlyweds) "but sometimes I wonder if maybe Warren does have a screw or two loose."

    Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

  • Re:Genesis??? (Score:4)

    by Cuthalion ( 65550 ) on Monday July 03, 2000 @03:03PM (#961046) Homepage
    Leaving the same text in multiple languages makes it fairly easy to reconstruct the syntax and vocabulary of then-long-dead languages.

    The reason to choose the bible, I expect, is not one of cultural relevance, or religious bigotry, but merely the fact that it's already been translated into more languages than any other document on the planet.

    The predictions I have heard suggest that within a century there will be less than 20 languages spoken worldwide - languages are dying out [theonion.com] very quickly. For languages that have written forms, we can at least try to preserve them for the future. I think that other items of cultural significance will be probably be all too present archaelogically, but having all these languages in one place will be invaluable to future historical linguists as the rosetta stone was to the historical linguists and archaeologists of the past.

  • Why make it so small!?? (Score:4)

    by grahamsz ( 150076 ) on Monday July 03, 2000 @01:38PM (#961047) Homepage Journal
    Why dont we just get big slabs of stone and etch it on that... i mean i'd loose nanodisk things at the rate of 20 a day. Unless of course they plan to make millions of the little buggers and hide them everywhere :)

    Or why not just put it on a server in sealand and pay up the next 100,000 years of hosting.

  • Re:Genesis??? (Score:3)

    by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Monday July 03, 2000 @03:04PM (#961050)
    > why the fuck would we want to put Genesis on this thing, in 300 languages???

    The fine print in the article mentioned that not only Genesis, but other creation myths, up to and including the Big Bang theory, be recorded and translated.

    The goal is to provide - in as many languages as possible - a set of boilerplate text, at least one instance of which is likely to survive 10,000 years.

    Creation myths are among the most enduring of human stories. They're compact and easily-understood by humans, and we have existence proofs that they can be passed down over the millennia, even without advanced technology.

    As such, if your core audience is "humans 10000 years from now", they're ideal material for a "Rosetta Stone" project.

    The inclusion of the Big Bang (and/or hyperinflation theory, etc) is also a wise idea. The absence of theories beyond this level precisely dates the "stone" as "no older than the early 21st century". (After all, had it been written in the 43rd century, they'd have realized the universe really is "all turtles, all the way down!", and written their Stone accordingly :-)

    I say "make a million of 'em, scatter 'em around the planet, drop a few over Antarctica, and stick one on every soft-landing space probe we build from this day forward."

    (Aside: I really like the space probe idea. We screw up and our civilization collapses, BFD. Once our descendants develop spaceflight, they'll know we were here, and they'll know when we were here. I can't think of a better place than the Moon for long-term preservation of micro-etched materials, and we know that big hunks of metal on extraterrestrial bodies will be the first things explored once our descendants develop the technology to detect them. Luna:WesternCiv::Desert:AncientEgypt)

  • Discernability (Score:4)

    by KFury ( 19522 ) on Monday July 03, 2000 @01:39PM (#961054) Homepage
    I like the fact that it's in analog form, showing actual type istead of binary information, but if the creators are expecting the object to be seen for what it is upon discovery, it needs some work.

    Digging up this item out of the rest of the techno-rubble, it would just look like a magnet or other piece of machinary. To be useful it must visibly represent information to the naked eye, without thousands of levels of magnification.

    Perhaps if it had some text large enough to read, then more text was embedded within those letters, etc, so that a casual observer would realize there is additional information, and would go through the trouble of magnifying and discovering just how much.

    If the creators are counting on the significance of the object to be retained for 10,000 years, as it sits in a time capsule or clean room, they're mistaken. Besides, if this was the case, all the data encoded on the object could just as easily be stored digitally, along with the equipment needed to read it.

    It would make more sense to have a series of diagrams explaining binary code and its conversion into unicode characters, audio waves, and pixel representations, then have a digital stream which can contain multimedia which has all the translation information as well as multimedia information on the actual pronunciation of dialects, etc.

    Kevin Fox
  • 10,000 years? By the time that comes, Rep. Sony Bono XVXIXIVX will have extended the copyright duration to author's life = 1e6 years. Remember, the expiration keeps getting upped *just* before the first Mickey Mouse cartoon's copyright would expire. Couple this with a proprietary file format that the EULA says is illegal to reverse engineer and I can assure you that *no one* will be reading *this* disk 10,000 years from now.
  • There is something to be said for gaining technology at a pace that allows it to be understood - and more importantly, by a civilization that has the capacity to wield it with wisdom. You can drop a truckload of dune buggys and uzis off at the primate house at your local zoo; but a more advanced bunch o' monkeys ain't what you'll get. (more like Mad Max meets the Bananna Splits I imagine:)

    With any luck, future civilizations will be evolved enough when they find any such records to recognize that they don't want to take advice from a bunch of screw-ups like us. After all, if we manage to dissapear, it will almost certainly be at our own hand. What makes us think our advice or knowledge will be anything but a curse to hypothetical future civilizations?

  • The prototype contains the first three chapters of Genesis, in 1,000 languages.


    Ohh, this is a great idea. Could we instead leave something useful for future generations?

    If there is an apocalypse and humanity needs a record of the past, wouldn't it be handier to include something other than a record of who begat who?

    I'd personally rather have a nice set of instructions on how to be decadent [subgenius.com] than listen to some 4,000 year old skewed version of reality.

    -Peter

  • ...while the future generations may find the "Rosetta Disk", it is far more likely that they will find one of the millions of discarded AOL disks, put this together with the WWF broadcasts they encounter in deep space after a long FTL trip, recognize their ancestors for the ignorant savages we are, and commit collective suicide as a species.
  • I am not saying that they shouldn't have used the bible because it is wrong. All I am saying is that when westerners are looking for significant texts of human history, choosing the bible could possibly indicate a lack of thought, where as there are many other texts of at least as much importance to human history (remember, human history, not western history) - such as the many texts of the Hindus, some of which influenced the writing of the bible.

    The only thing I was trying to state is that in general, when naming texts of significance in human history, the Bible is one that takes little thought to name for westerners, as it is in the popular conscience, where as most important texts are not (hands up who knows what a Veda is). This states nothing about the truth or falsehood of the bible.

    I have put a large amount of thought into the possibility the Bible could be true, thank you very much - I was raised a Christian for a fair few years. You are reading things into my statements I have not said.

    tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
  • That's a VERY original name don't you think??? Anyway, at least it's appropriate... I think the best thing to put in there would be pictures of key events in the past centuries... you know... things that have made this earth and the monkeys on it look as big a mess as they really are... Imagine 1,000 years from now, someone digs up this disk and reads it... what would he think? I certainly wouldn't be all THAT proud abut my ancestors... That of course happening relies on the fact that we have to survive the next 1,000 years! unfortunately, the human kind has a very low self-preservation rating these days... -- and remember: "Mean what you say... Say what you mean

  • Genesis??? (Score:3)

    by Chiasmus_ ( 171285 ) on Monday July 03, 2000 @02:30PM (#961094) Journal
    One thing I can honestly say is - why the fuck would we want to put Genesis on this thing, in 300 languages???

    If we actually want to leave an indicator of our culture, WHY, WHY would we leave the text of a book that's thousands of years old?? Why would we want to leave a book specific only to Western religions? Why would we want to leave it in several different Romance languages? Do you think future civilations and/or space aliens are really going to have an easier time with French than Spanish, or Italian? Why give them 300 ciphers when we could give them, say, 3 or 4?

    And, I know I might be offending peoples' religious sensibilities here, but WHY THE HELL do we want to look like our society had never discovered the scientific method and instead based all its dogma and beliefs on guesswork???

    Fuck, Fuck, Fuck!
  • More important I think is that it would give them knowledge of those
    1000 languages if they could figure one of them out. It all kind of
    assumes that they will be able to figure out the point of shiny 2"
    disks with lots of tiny pits arranged in a helix...
  • Besides just the disk, here's what I think should be included:

    1. Some sort of reader, made from extremely durable equipment. This reader must have the capability to display the information on a screen and on printout (thermal transfer, probably) so that people can decode the information.

    2. Some sort of power source. A solar cell, or somethign along these lines would work well. It should not require any fuel from outside the time capsule.

    3. Some sort of simple language guide, such as the one placed on various deep-space probes which helps with the number system and various mathematical operands. Combined with a pictographical system equating words to images, this could teach the language to far-future archeaologists and allow them to figure out the rest of the system.

    4. Any easy interface. We're not talking E or Sawfish here; the system will need to be web-browser like but extremely simple and offer pictographical hints for difficult words.

    Any other ideas about what would be required for usage of this disc?
  • Yes. I had a professor who was of the opinion that Genesis was written down from 585 BC onwards. That coincides with the capture of Israel by King Nebuchadnezzar (not the hovercraft :-) ) Before that it existed as an oral tradition.

    For really old written stuff, check out the Sumerian, Egyptian, Indian, and Chinese cultures. I'm probably missing a bunch of other old cultures, but you get the point.

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