Over at the Long Now Blog, Kevin Kelly writes on the challenges of preserving human knowledge over long periods of time – thousands of years. The Long Now Foundation has come up with one possible way of doing this, by micro-etching up to 350,000 pages of information onto a 3-inch nickel disc with an estimated lifespan of 2,000 -10,000 years. As a proof-of-concept experiment, they have created a disc that is a modern day equivalent of the Rosetta Stone – it contains the text of Genesis written in over 1,500 human languages.
While part of me appreciates the fact of trying to preserve a record of these languages beyond the civilisations and societies that produced them, I can’t help but feel that there’s a missed opportunity in the choice of text. I’m not sure that I would use a creation myth dating from around 2,500 years ago – it’s likely to confuse future readers (human or otherwise), rather than illuminate. I can see them now (shades of Vroomfondel and Magikthise) voicing the thought: did they actually believe this rubbish? It reminds me of the short story in which alien explorers puzzle over what human society must have been like based on the sole surviving artifact that they have – a Walt Disney cartoon short.
Mind you, I’m not sure what I would substitute in place of Genesis. Perhaps I would not substitute, but supplement. I would have included the blueprints of the Large Hadron Collider on the disc.
Geoff Coupe's Blog 