Listening to: Kick, Push - Lupe Fiasco

For a while now I have been watching the Long Now foundation… post 2000 I have been looking for a new horizon. I like the Long Now because they do a number of things to change your perspective. Simple stuff like writing years with a leading 0 - 02008… or seriously hardcore things like the Rosetta disk. For the first time in years the future unfolded with the story of where the first disk was sent:

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.

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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 8:39 pm and is filed under Space. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.