The Rosetta Mission Rosetta Disk:
A contemporary Rosetta Stone of the languages of the world

The Long Now Foundation's Rosetta Disk (sponsored by Charles Butcher of the Lazy Eight Foundation) has been launched successfully. See Here for pictures, video, and news from the ESA website.

See the European Space Agency Website for webcast and satellite broadcast information:
- General Mission Information
- Live Webcast Information for Rosetta Mission Launch

At the invitation of the The European Space Agency, The Rosetta Project has contributed a custom low mass version of the Rosetta 1,000 Language Archive Disk for the ESA Rosetta Mission. For this occasion, we have crafted a special thin disk of pure nickel with 7,000 pages of micro-etched text offering parallel translations of the Biblical Genesis story in 1,000 languages as well as other creation stories from around the world. The disk will be mounted under the thermal blankets of the orbiter and hopefully live on with the craft for thousands of years after the comet rendezvous.

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.

For more information contact Simone Davalos at The Long Now Foundation 01-415-561-6582 or at services@longnow.org