[extropy-chat] The Rosetta Disk by the Long Now Foundation

[Amara Graps]

(Another Rosetta news item)

Besides carrying the instruments of my work groups,
the Rosetta  spacecraft is carrying a 'Rosetta Disk'
mounted under the thermal  blankets of the orbiter,
made by the  Long Now Foundation:

http://www.longnow.org/about/RosettaMission.htm

{begin quote}

This broad collection of creation stories is intended both as an icon
for the mission as well as a functional language recovery tool for
potential finders in unknown futures. As an iconic object, the creation
stories suggest a mythic frame for the Rosetta Mission as it journeys to
the Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko to elaborate our understanding of
the scientific story of planetary genesis. And as a linguistic tool, the
1,000 parallel Genesis translations creates a contemporary version of
the historic Rosetta Stone, enabling finders to work from known
languages to decipher those on the disk unknown at the time of finding.
Whether the finders are human or otherwise, this broad archive of human
languages will hopefully offer a glimpse into the range and diversity of
vernacular symbolic systems used by the peoples and cultures that have
collectively sent the spacecraft.

This Rosetta Mission Rosetta Disk is a small platter of pure nickel,
70mm in diameter and 0.3 mm thick, weighing 6-7 grams. The 7,000 pages
are micro-etched into the nickel as physical images (think engraving at
a very small scale), with each page about a half millimeter tall.
Reading the texts on the disk requires a 500X microscope. This
high-density analog storage technology avoids the operating system,
application and format dependencies of digital storage systems as well
as the fast material decay rates of typical digital storage media.

{end quote}

-- 

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Amara Graps, PhD
Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario, INAF - ARTOV,
Via del Fosso del Cavaliere, 100, I-00133 Roma, ITALIA
tel: +39-06-4993-4375       |fax:  +39-06-4993-4383
Amara.Graps at ifsi.rm.cnr.it  | http://www.mpi-hd.mpg.de/dustgroup/~graps
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I'M SIGNIFICANT!...screamed the dust speck. -- Calvin