Paper, it turns out, is a very reliable backup medium for information.  While it can burn or dissolve in water, good acid-free versions of paper are otherwise stable over the long term, cheap to warehouse, and oblivious to technological change because its pages are “eye-scanable.”  No special devices needed. Well-made, well-cared for paper can last 1,000 years easily, and probably reach 2,000 without much extra trouble.

We can not say the same for digital storage. Pages stored on plastic DVDs are neither stable over the very long term, nor readable over the long term. Unless digital information is ceaselessly migrated from one fading medium to another new one, it will quickly cease to be accessible. Two decades ago the floppy disk was ubiquitous. Most personal digital information then was stored on this format. Today, any information stored only on a floppy disk is essentially gone.  Imagine the incompatibility of today’s DVD in 1,000 years.

As durable as paper is, its inherent limitations in storing digital data are clear. Pity the person who would need to find something if the only backup of the web was a paper printout that filled several airline hangers.  What we need are media that have the durability of paper and the accessibility of a floppy disk (or better!).

This problem of long-term digital storage seemed a crucial hurdle for any civilization trying to act generationaly. How could a society think in terms of centuries unless there was a reliable way to transmit and store its knowledge over centuries? This puzzle was the focus of a conference hosted by Long Now in 1998, dedicated to technical solutions for Managing Digital Continuity. At this meeting Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive suggested a new technology developed by Los Alamos labs, and commercialized by the Norsam company, as a solution for long term digital storage. Norsam promised to micro-etch 350,000 pages of information onto a 3-inch nickel disk with an estimated lifespan of 2,000 -10,000 years. 

Might it be possible to etch an entire library onto a set of disks? It might be worth trying. All we needed was a finite data set that a society might want to have backed up.

During a Long Now field trip to a southwest archeological site, the idea of a modern Rosetta Stone came up — a backup of human languages that future generations might cherish. At a winter retreat in 1999, Long Now board member Doug Carlston suggested that for the parallel common text of this modern Rosetta Stone we should use the book of Genesis, since it was most likely already translated into all languages already. We hatched a plan to produce a 3-inch non-corroding disk which contained at least 1,000 translations of Genesis and other linguistic information about each language.

Following the archiving principle of LOCKS (Lots of Copies Keep ‘em Safe) we would replicate the disk promiscuously and distribute them around the world with built in magnifiers. This project in long term thinking would do two things: it would showcase this new long-term storage technology, and it would give the world a minimal backup of human languages. We thought it might take a year to do.

Long story short, it took eight years. Last night at a ceremony at the Long Now museum in Fort Mason, one of five prototype disks Rosetta disk was presented to the Oliver Wilke Foundation, a Frankfurt-based linguistic center, who help support the project.  The disk is 3 inches in diameter, and mounted beneath a glass hemisphere.

One side of the disk contains a graphic teaser. The design shows headlines in the eight major languages of the world today spiraling inward in ever-decreasing size till it becomes so small you have trouble reading it, yet the text goes on getting smaller. The sentences announce: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.”

This graphic side of the disk is pure titanium. A black oxide coating has been added to the surface. The text is etched into that, revealing the whiter titanium. This bold sign board is needed because the pages of genesis which are etched on the mirror-like opposite side of the disk are nearly invisible.

This business side of the disk is pure nickel. Picking it up you would not be aware there were 13,500 pages of linguistic gold hiding on it.  The nickel is deposited on an etched silicon disk. In effect the Rosetta disk is a nickel cast of a micro-etch silicon mold. When the disk is held at the right angle the grid array of the pages form a slight diffraction rainbow. You need a 750-power optical microscope to read the pages.

The Rosetta disk is not digital. The pages are analog “human-readable” scans of scripts, text, and diagrams. Among the 13,500 scanned pages are 1,500 different language versions of Genesis 1-3, a universal list of the words common for each language, pronunciation guides and so on. Some of the key indexing meta-data for each language section (such as the standard linguistic code number for that language) are displayed in a machine-readable font (OCRb) so that a smart microscope could guide you through this analog trove.

Our hope is that at least one of the eight headline languages can be recovered in 1,000 years. But even without reading, a person might guess there are small things to see in this disk.

All this took eight years because back in 2000 the Norsam technology could not handle the size of our library, and there was in fact, contrary to our assumptions, no library of already completed Genesis translations. There was no central depository of language information, either. So in order to gather 1,000 translations of Genesis and related linguistic information for those 1,000 language, Long Now created the Rosetta Project.

Heading the project was artist/linguist Jim Mason, who ran Rosetta at first like it was an art project. Which it kinda was. Working under the radar of the academic linguistic community, Mason began collating and scanning all known versions of Genesis, and later regional and ethnic creation stories in native languages. He collected maverick linguists and bridged the feudal factions in the academic linguistic community. Under Mason the project quickly morphed from art project into a major linguist initiative. Mason steadily won the support of the world-wide professionals as the Rosetta website grew into the “All Language Archive.” Eight years down the road, after major NSF grants and other funding the Rosetta Project now has a unified (such as it exists) set of information in 2,300 languages. At several points in its evolution, the Rosetta’s tiny non-profit offices were crammed with dozens of grad students scanning pages of wonderfully obscure languages as fast as paper could move. Over 100 people contributed work in the office and thousands more on the website. The intention all along has been to cram this all language archive onto a few disks. Or a tiny cube. Or maybe, art project at the core, etched onto a long wall.

This is a Long Now project, which means it is okay if it takes a while. It took 8 years to gather the scanned Genesis texts. During that time Norsam perfected their production. Now we have a disk.

But it was not the very first disk. That one is in space. In 2004 the Rosetta Space Probe was launched by the European Space Agency. This small craft was created to land on a comet in 2014. Before it blasted off, the ESA contacted us because we share names. They asked if we’d like to mount a version of the disk on their probe. Of course we would! We had manufactured a pure nickel disc with a subset of 6,000 pages of language translations, which was mounted on the payload section of the probe.

Rosetta Space Probe

So assuming the mission continues well, in 2014 the Rosetta Probe will land on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, where it will measure the comet’s molecular composition. Then it will remain at rest as the comet orbits the sun for hundreds of millions of years. So somewhere in the solar system, where it is safe but hard to reach, a backup sample of human languages is stored, in case we need one.

Or you can have one on earth, if you want, acting as an additional node in the distributed archive. There are still two disks available from this prototype run. Currently, for all its high techness, each disk is hand crafted, and so they have a corresponding high hand-crafted cost: $25,000. Contact the office if you are interested in caretaking an archive of all languages. Long Now hopes to produce additional copies in the future, so that these small globes will be scattered across the world in nondescript locations; that way at least one will survive their 2,000-year lifespan.

There’s a small hidden cavity inside the globe where owners can inscribe their name, with room and encouragement to have the next owners inscribe theirs. This is a multi-generational device. As Oliver Wilke said when he picked up his glass sphere last night, “This is one of the most fascinating objects on earth. If we found one of these things 2,000 years ago, with all the languages of the time, it would be among our most priceless artifacts. I feel a high responsibility for preserving it for future generations.”

Standing in front of sample pages from the Rosetta disk, Oliver Wilke holds his new sphere and Laura Welcher, Rosetta Director, holds the nickel disk.

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Yesterday at the Long Now Museum, board members, staff and guests raised a glass to celebrate the completion of the first version of the complete Rosetta Disk. Over eight years in development, the Disk is a physical, microscopic library of information on over 1,500 human languages. 14,000 text and image pages are etched into the surface of a 3” diameter nickel disk, which can be read with approximately 750x (optical) magnification.

The nickel disk has a high resistance to corrosion, and can withstand temperatures of up to 300 ^oC with little to no change in legibility of the text. Kept in its protective sphere to avoid scratches, it could easily last and be read 2,000 years into the future!

Joining in the celebration was Oliver Wilke, proud owner of a new Rosetta Disk (shown reflected in the Rosetta sphere on the left, above). The disk will be a centerpiece for his new foundation in support of endangered and minority languages around the world.

So… if the Rosetta Disk is a prototype and facet of the Library of Ages (companion to the 10,000 Year Clock), what goes into the fine print next?

Check out our pictures of the event on Flickr

Also this article on the Rosetta Disk launch event in the San Francisco Chronicle, August 20, 02008

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Steven Levy has an excellent piece on Neal Stephenson’s Anathem in the September Wired.  The article includes in depth back story on the Long Now related inspirations for the book.  If you are going to be in San Francisco on September 9th 02008, we will be hosting the launch event for the book with a reading and concert.  You can sign up here for updates.

You can also see a reading and interview with Neal on Amazon.

Stephenson says the story was inspired by the real-life Millennium Clock, a project thought up by inventor Danny Hillis and developed by the Long Now Foundation. The nub of the endeavor is the construction of a clock that has the mother of all warranties: It’s built to last 10,000 years. Hillis conceived it to mitigate the mega-rapidity of the digital world. He was working on a massively parallel supercomputer, the Connection Machine, designed to scale to a million processors, and found himself obsessed with speed, slicing seconds into billions of pieces. “I was going for faster, faster, faster. But something in me was rejecting that,” Hillis explained to me back in 1999, when he launched the project. “It wasn’t clear that the world needed faster, faster, faster. So I began thinking about the opposite. Working on the fastest machine in the world got me thinking about the slowest.” How slow? Hillis’ timepiece would tick once a year, its insides would bong once a century, and the cuckoo would appear once a millennium.

Building the clock, it turns out, has been an antidote to the toxic fixation on short-term thinking that permeates our culture. Hillis and the friends who joined him—like fellow Long Now cofounders Stewart Brand (who wrote a book about the project) and Brian Eno (who composed a CD of chimes inspired by the clock)—found that its design and construction required recalibrating one’s own mental clock to envision what things would be like in the distant future. Ideally, that mindset encourages behavior that tends to preserve the environment for clock customers in the year 12000, instead of gobbling up resources and leaving behind trash that tends to mess things up for those folks. Or so goes the thinking of the project’s goofily optimistic supporters. Back at the launch, Brand marveled at the notion of looking so far beyond the temporal horizon. “It’s the only 10,000-year-forward thing I know of,” he said, “outside of science fiction, where it’s fairly common.”

Enter Neal Stephenson. He first heard about the clock from Hillis and Brand at the annual Hackers Conference, and in 1999 the Long Now asked him and a few others to share some thoughts for its Web site. “In my little back-of-the-napkin sketch, I drew a picture showing a clock with concentric walls around it,” he says over lunch in downtown Seattle the day after the book club meeting. “I proposed that you could have a system of gates where it was open for a while at a certain time of year, or decade, or whatever, when you could go in and out freely. But if you were inside it when the gate closed, you’d be making a commitment to stay in until it opened again. And I talked about clock monks who would tend the clock. I put that idea in cold storage because I was working on the Baroque Cycle. When I recovered, I decided, what the hell, I’m just going to try writing this.”

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[Daniel Suarez, originally published as Leinad Zaurus, delivered a talk on the themes developed in his (originally self published) book Daemon.  The book is now scheduled to be released in hard cover in January 02009 by Dutton.  Here is Paul Saffo’s write up of the evening.]

Forget about HAL-like robots enslaving humankind a few decades from now, the takeover is already underway. The agents of this unwelcome revolution aren’t strong AIs, but “bots”– autonomous programs that have insinuated themselves into the internet and thus into every corner of our lives. Apply for a mortgage lately? A bot determined your FICA score and thus whether you got the loan. Call 411? A bot gave you the number and connected the call. Highway-bots collect your tolls, read your license plate and report you if you have an outstanding violation.

Bots are proliferating because they are so very useful. Businesses rely on them to automate essential processes, and of course bots running on zombie computers are responsible for the tsunami of spam and malware plaguing Internet users worldwide. At current growth rates, bots will be the majority users of the Net by 2010.

We are visible to bots even when we are not at our computers. Next time you are on a downtown street, contemplate the bot-controlled video cameras watching you, or the bots tracking your cellphone and sniffing at your Bluetooth-enabled gizmos. We walk through a gauntlet of bot-controlled sensors every time we step into a public space and the sensors are proliferating.

Bots are at best narrow AI, nothing that would make a cleric remotely nervous. But they would scare the hell out of epidemiologists who understand that parasites don’t need to be smart to be dangerous. Meanwhile, the Internet and the complex of processing, storage and sensors linked to it is growing exponentially, creating a vast new ecology for bots to roam in. Bots aren’t evolving on their own — yet.

Left unchecked, bots will trap the human race because the automation they enable will make it possible for a few people to run humanity while the rest of us are unable to make decisions of any consequence. Bots are thus vectors for despotism, with the potential to create a world where only a small group of people understand how society works. In the worst case, the controls over bots disappear — for example, the only person who knows the password to a corporate bot dies– and the bots become autonomous.

We are in a Darwinian struggle with narrow AI, and so far at least the bots are winning. But there is a solution: build a new Internet hard-coded with democratic values. Start with an encrypted Darknet into which only verifiably human users can enter. Create augmented reality tools to identify bots in the physical world. Enlist the aid of a few tame bots to help forge a symbiotic relationship with narrow AI. Stir in some luck, and perhaps we can avoid the fate of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice who rashly enchants a broom to do his tedious chores and ends up terrorized by his imperfect creations. We had better succeed, for unlike the fable, there is no Master Sorcerer ready to return to break the spell and save us from our folly.

-Paul Saffo

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Image: Screenshot from Web of Fate

A startup site called Web of Fate, launched in July 02008, crowdsources a timeline of users’ predictions, goals and other ideas about the future:

Web of Fate is a social experiment that harnesses the collective intelligence of the web to visualize and uncover hidden relationships among future and historical events.

Maybe it’s the liberal use of bold type that makes this read like it belongs in the voice bubble of a comic-book’s mad scientist.

Web of Fate is ambitiously eclectic. It runs on user submissions, with four options; “make a prediction”, “quote a prediction”, “create a capsule”, or “set a goal”, thereby serving as a hybrid of prediction registry and to-do list. There is apparently a “semantic analysis engine” under the hood that produces links between the fragments of submitted content, but exactly what it does, and how it relates to grand questions posed on the site (such as “What can we learn from the past and make the future better?”) is unclear.

The visualisation tool looks extremely interesting (see the image above); a cloud of prediction stems hover onscreen in a way that promises a dynamic exploratory interface (a la Visual Thesaurus), but although you can drag the nodes around, this yields no additional insights — the function appears to have no informational referent. Also, it piles on the disparate elements (users’ predictions, reported predictions, and goals) in a way one might hope would be thought-provoking, but which in practice generates more confusion than enlightenment. So a statement like “I will go to the gym everyday” (with no username or date given) sits alongside “$200 dollar oil prediction” (by the end of this year; from Daron in San Jose) and “By 2009, more than one third of IT organizations will have one or more environmental criteria in their top six buying criteria for IT-related goods” (submitted by a user citing IT research outfit Gartner). Those interested in accessing the material primarily through the visualisation may be disappointed when clicking on any prediction takes them to back to a page of static text, and similarly, any given category (users’ predictions; quoted predictions; goals) is viewable only in lists, at this point.

A review of the site at Mashable (social networking news) says:

[M]y sense is that registered users will be quite pleased with what they’re offered. Given enough members, this place could become a real hotbed for forecasters.

I find myself wondering whether the conditions are in place, at the moment, for this service to generate that kind of momentum. In their current form, the range of functions seems too diffuse, the quality control too lax, and the interface too unwieldy, to attract and keep a core base of users, who may find more forecasting edification elsewhere at prediction markets like Predictify and NewsFutures, and dedicated “time capsule” functionality at future email services like FutureMe or EmailFuture. There’s also the Long Now Foundation’s Long Bets project, which has since its inception addressed the quality control issue by requiring users to provide real names and front real money in support of their speculation. The tradeoff, however, is that it doesn’t act as a repository where users can freely submit other people’s ideas about the future whenever and wherever they appear. (However, Long Bets cofounder Kevin Kelly points out that such a registry has always been part of the plan.) I believe a reputable, well-designed prediction registry has long been needed and is technologically possible, but is yet to be done.*

According to a Fast Company blog, Web of Fate is the brainchild of Arizona State University student Max Yuan, who, writes Francine Hardaway, “has a head full of projects I hope he has time to complete because they all seem great to me”. I’m certainly pleased to see a prediction registry that enables submission of one’s own ideas as well as reporting the prognostications of others; the latter an important prerequisite to improving accountability and quality in future-oriented public discourse. Web of Fate makes a brave effort to tap some of the potential for such a forum, but I hope Yuan can find the time to revisit and overhaul some elements of its design. Otherwise, I venture to suggest, this web will (to stretch the metaphor horribly thin) remain too tangled to catch the prey for which it was spun.

*See futurist David Brin’s 02005 article on this topic for more.

[Also posted at the sceptical futuryst, 13 August 02008.]

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Most permanent things begin as a temporary fix. A footpath becomes a road becomes a highway. A quick hut becomes a house becomes a hotel. A doodle becomes a logo becomes a brand. A patch becomes an operating keystone. A camp becomes a city.

Very few infrastructure details begin with the idea that they will last 1,000 years. Strange as it sounds it is very likely that some basic software running inside computers  today will be running in computers 500 years from now. We see that conservation in cells, where very primitive metabolic cycles present in archaic cells are still operating in cells today. All the fancy “recent” improvements run upon them. One could imagine that in 5 centuries, parts of unix will be found operating in servers.  But it is clear that no one would be more surprised than the creators of unix. Most creations, including software, are written in less than optimal conditions. Creators always have the idea that they will go back later to fix the many known imperfections. Of course they are never fixed because the shipped rev is “good enough” — and so the temporary good enough becomes a permanent good enough.

This inevitable progression from temporary to permanent was brought to mind on my vacation visit to Washington DC this summer. While touring the large gaudy WWII memorial on the Mall, I noticed a cute bit of popular culture hidden in the back of the stone monument. There in an obscure corner of a staircase on both sides of the oval memorial, a popular graffiti from World War II has been carved into stone. (Not a prank; this is Official Art.)

The unmistakable cartoon Kilroy Was Here began in the US as a temporary chalk marker on ships. It later morphed into a more weatherproof cartoon painted on walls in many countries all over the world. And now it has moved to a lined relief deeply etched into stone, to endure for the ages.

A really lovely art piece would be a long stone wall carved with other popular world graffiti designs. For future enjoyment.

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The USS Pampanito and it’s Torpedo Data Computer are covered in the third installment of Boing Boing TV’s nifty series on Mechanicrawl.

Boing Boing TV covers Mechanicrawl (part 1)

Boing Boing TV covers Mechanicrawl (part 2)

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Brian Eno emailed this note to the Long Now list:

Yesterday I had the good fortune to find myself in Oberammergau, in Upper Bavaria.

In the early seventeenth century, as plague raced across Europe, the people of this small town made a deal with God: spare us and we’ll perform a Passion play every ten years. All of us. The whole town.

True to their word, they’ve done this every decade since. The first performance was in 1634, and ever since it’s been at the turn of the decade. It’s a startling event, because everyone in the town really is involved. All the actors, the musicians, the technical staff, the director, the costumiers, the carpenters, the singers, the stagehands, the press agents, the bartenders, the ushers - are local people. In normal life they’re the hairdresser, the postman, the dentist, the notary, the teacher, the plumber, the bus driver.

What I went to last night was not the full-blown Passion play - that won’t happen until 2010  (they’re working on it now). I attended instead a play called JEREMIAS, written by the Jewish pacifist Stefan Zweig in 1933, which featured a relatively modest cast of 500, ranging in age from 3 to 80.  The criterion for being in a play is that you should be born in Oberammergau or have lived there for 20 years. The current director is Christian Stückl, a local man who directed his first Passion at the tender age of 28 (making him the youngest director in the long history of the play). Stückl told us that, in the 2000 Passion, a group of Muslim inhabitants of the town asked if they could be included: they’d by that time fulfilled the 20 year residency criterion. After enormous discussion during which the Muslim folk elucidated the parallels between the Koran and the Bible, they were included.

I won’t attempt a description of the content: my German is so rudimentary that I understood very little of what was going on. It was 3 hours long, but it didn’t matter: I was intrigued.There were at times several hundred people on the huge open-air stage (the audience sit inside, under cover, but the stage area is open to the sky, the elements and the changing light of evening): there was fire, rain, camels, sheep and horses, a 50 piece orchestra of local players and a 100 person choir of local singers…. all to a totally professional standard. There was nothing ‘local’ about the quality of any of the performances.

Luckily I’d brought along a little monocular, and that proved invaluable. I was intrigued by the faces - normal faces, normal children (picking their noses, being distracted), not ‘actory’ types. I kept returning to this thought: what would it do to a community to have a tradition as long and as defining as that, to know from an early age that you were, probably throughout your life, going to be woven into this incredibly rich tapestry of time, spirituality, art and craft? What would it be like to be a child growing up there, to watch your parents and grandparents learning their lines and practising their parts and building the sets and making the clothes? It must be so rich, such a powerful social binder and foundation.

Oh - I suddenly realised. It would be like tribal life. For isn’t this exactly what growing up in Bali or Mali, with their long traditions of folk art, must be like?

I tried to discover whether there had been any sociological studies of Oberammergau, to see whether this unique (in Europe anyway) situation produced any measurable results on the society that made it. I haven’t done this yet - all I gathered last night from Stückl was that deaths seem to decrease in the two years before a Passion play - as though people want to stay alive for the next one. In fact, in the 2010 there will be a 100-year old actor - the oldest in the history of the play. He was 90 last time, and inisisted on being in the next one.

Backstage there were lots of props for The Passion - some of them 200 or 300 years old. There was the wooden table for The Last Supper, made for the 1750 production and used in every performance since; ‘Roman’ shields and pikes from the early 19th century, crucifixes (enormous things!) a century old….

These people think long…

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Here’s the second installment of Boing Boing TV’s series on Mechanicrawl. They call it WWII Boatpunk!

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 Here is one of the latest efforts in the email to the future space.  This one looks to be pretty well done, and if you have faith in the company, you can send mail as far into the future as 02035.  The best part is the Useful and Not So Useful uses section…

 

Useful Uses

• E-mail yourself reminders on important dates such as anniversaries, birthdays, valentines day, etc…
• E-mail yourself reminders on important dates such as when sporting or concert tickets go on sale.
• Remind yourself of an important due date in the future.
• Send yourself an Email at the end of the day to remind yourself to buy milk, eggs or any other errands that you may need to run.
• Maybe you saw something cool on the internet and want to send yourself the link in a couple of days.
• You can send a message to yourself several years in the future such as a list of goals that you would like to accomplish or where you would like to be in life.

Not So Useful Uses

• Email your boss an automated out sick message (while you’re at the beach!)
• Emailing yourself in the past. I haven’t quite figured out how to build the flux capacitor yet to time travel. Maybe soon though!!!
• Sending emails to addresses that don’t exist….. or is it?
• Sending yourself reminders for the wrong dates. If yo can’t correctly remember your anniversary, then you’re pretty much hosed.
• Sending an email to an address that you don’t plan on having when the e-mail is supposed to be sent. For instance. Don’t send an e-mail to your college e-mail account in 8 years unless you plan on having access to that account in 8 years. Chances are, you would have alredy graduated…. I hope ;)

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