Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society

April 18th, 2006

The Rosetta Disk

The Rosetta Disk is a very Kircherian creation from the Rosetta Project, “a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers building a publicly accessible online archive of ALL documented human languages.”

The design consists of an Earth map at the center with spokes radiating outward holding 27,000 language data pages- 27 pages for each language. The center Earth map has the geographic origin of each language marked with a number that corresponds to the location of the language data in the spokes. An external band of Genesis texts in 8 major world languages (English, Russian, Hindi, Spanish, Hebrew, Mandarin, Arabic, and Swahili) begins at eye-readable scale and slowly tapers down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of major regional languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the disk, as well as implying the directions for using the disk - “get a magnifier and there is more”. The visual image of the disk will be laser etched, with the data pages micro-etched between the spokes with a process by Norsam Technologies.

The Rosetta Disk is held in a four inch spherical container that both protects the disk as well as provides additional functionality. The container is split into two hemispheres with the three inch Rosetta Disk sitting in an indent on the flat meeting surface of the two hemispheres. The upper hemisphere is made of optical glass and doubles as a 6X viewer, giving visual access deeper into the tapered text rings. The bottom hemisphere is high-grade stainless steel. We have machined a hollow cylinder into the bottom hemisphere that holds a stainless steel ribbon for disk caretakers to etch their names, locations, and dates - hopefully creating a unique pedigree for each Rosetta object as it travels through time and human hands. A small punch tool is included for future caretakers to add additional information.

The Rosetta Project is affiliated with the Long Now Foundation, creators of the Clock of the Long Now.

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The Rosetta Disk

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