Fort Mason Center: The Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Disk


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OCTOBER 2008

PRESERVING HUMAN LANGUAGES — ONE DISK AT A TIME

Long Now Foundation, Building A

In 1799, Napoleon’s army discovered the Rosetta Stone while on campaign in Egypt. Dating from 196 BC, the stone is inscribed with writing in three languages. This durable artifact helped scholars decipher hieroglyphics. Inspired by the Rosetta Stone’s legacy, the Long Now Foundation at Fort Mason Center created the Rosetta Disk to preserve more than 1,500 languages in a highly accessible format and provide keys to understanding all of them.

The Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Disk holds etchings of more than 13,000 text and image pages — a treasure trove of all the world’s wisdom stored on one incredibly tough metal disk. Like words on paper, which can still be read after thousands of years, the Rosetta disks will far outlast today’s DVDs and other digital storage systems, according to the Long Now Foundation.

On Tuesday, August 19, the Long Now Museum at Fort Mason Center (FMC) hosted a ceremony to present one of the five prototype Rosetta disks to the Oliver Wilke Foundation of Frankfurt, Germany, which supports the project. The three-inch diameter disk, made of corrosion-resistant nickel and titanium, has a bold (and permanent) graphical display on one side drawing attention to the other side, which contains thousands of micro-etched pages of knowledge.

Any culture finding such a disk need only magnify the miniscule markings 1,000 times to see everything recorded on the ultimate in enduring storage media. Rosetta Project Director Laura Buszard-Welcher, a team of experts, and academic advisors determined that the best samples to engrave on the disk included pronunciation guides, a universal list of words common in each language, and different language versions of the Bible’s Book of Genesis, Chapters 1-3.

Dozens of graduate students from the linguistic community scanned thousands of pages for the project. All of the information is also available digitally on the Rosetta Projects web site, which has become a world-renowned repository of endangered languages. Ultimately, the Long Now Foundation wants to reproduce as many copies of the Rosetta Disk as possible to distribute all over the planet in the hopes that some of the disks will survive through the millennia to be part of the world in the distant future.

For now, several of the prototype disks are still available to prospective archivists for $25,000 each. Also, an earlier version of the Rosetta Disk etched with 6,000 pages of information took off in 2004 on the European Space Agency’s Rosetta Space Probe. Scheduled to rendezvous with a comet in 2014, the Rosetta probe and disk will remain in orbit around the sun for millions of years.
For more information about the Long Now Foundation and the Rosetta Project, see www.longnow.org and www.rosettaproject.org.