My background is in linguistics, and my graduate research involved

documenting some of the most endangered languages in the world. I also

worked in a small language archive where we had been given field notes

by people who’d researched languages with few speakers left. In some

cases, archival materials are the only materials that remain for

spoken languages.

If you’ve ever had that experience of holding something in your hands that is the only one of its kind, you begin to realize how precious and perishable this information is. I would sometimes travel to archives to examine books and manuscripts that had no copies made of them, and hold these precious manuscripts in my hands–this was all before digitization–and in some cases they were crumbling away.

If you’re making an archival relic for future generations, it’s very

important to have “signposts” directing people to know that it exists,

how to find it, and how to access the information on it. One kind of

signposting we built into the Rosetta Disk is spiral text surrounding

the microscopic archive. The text starts out at eye-readable scale and

gets smaller and smaller, so people know to examine the disk very

closely. The information on the disk is parallel--the same information

repeated for each language--like the Rosetta Stone which enabled the

decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. It also stands as a

record of the variety of human languages at the beginning of the 21st

century--about 7,000 of them currently exist. This diversity of human

language developed through thousands of years of very slow change.

Now, however, due to the development of a few languages that have great

local or even global economic power, we will likely see this number of

languages reduced to only about 500 in total over the next century.

The Long Now Foundation takes the span of human civilization as its

scope: 10,000 years in the past from the dawn of human civilization,

and projecting that 10,000 years into future. The Rosetta Disk is

therefore designed for future human beings with bodies about like

ours, and minds that think and probably have roughly the same capacity

for language that we do today. The Rosetta Disk is a thin metal disk

made out of nickel, about 3 inches in diameter; it contains over

14,000 pages of information, like pages of a book, only microscopic,

and written in raised relief. Nickel as a material isn't going to

degrade or corrode, and it can withstand high temperatures so it can

last a very long time. We aren’t creating the Rosetta Disk

specifically with an apocalypse in mind, or for a society that's

undergoing major upheaval, but over the span of millennia, I think you

have to expect that to happen occasionally. In that case, the Rosetta

Disk is a good long-term backup. You might think of it as a “secret

decoder ring” for information we leave for the future in human

language form.