The Rosetta disk is actually cool-looking. I wish they sold them (and at a reasonable price) because I’d buy one for my desk. And at what point will such a technology be commercialized, so that anyone could have a custom disk made with their own text on it?
For a good example, google up some image results on Pythagoras’ Theorem in ancient manuscripts - OK, it’s a diagram, not just a wall of script, but it’s immediately obvious what it’s talking about, and that’s a start at deciphering it.
And we’re talking about creating a document with the express purpose of it being decipherable. It’s definitely possible.
There are some things that would be hard, maybe impossible to convey - for example, the spoken form of the written language.
That’s my feeling too. The big difference between old dead languages on the one hand, and preparing for the future on the other hand, is this: We will at least attempt to leave clues for the future. Many of the clues might be misunderstood, but others will work, and eventually, there are good odds that they’ll figure it out, provided they make the attempt. Even the smallest clue would be of immense help, and it seems that the plan is to leave many big clues.
Not if the “waste” is fused into glass. I agree 100%-we should focus on using nuclear waste-it is a valuable fuel source.
10,000 years from now: “We believe these disks were some form of currency for the very elite. We have yet to decipher any of the very small writing on them. We believe it to be a series of prayers to their gods or loyalty oaths to their primitive societal leaders.”
Mathematicians in the future might rob the time capsule of the ones and zeros to use them in their own equations.
Indeed - “Some kind of ritual purpose” has always been the refuge of confounded archaeologists thus far - and may always be.
Not neccessarily! Again we are vastly underestimating humans, especially language experts. When I was studying latin I found out that we learned how certain things were pronounced by finding Latin poetry that had rhyme schemes, so we knew that word X is prounounced one way, and it rhymes with word Y, so word Y is pronounced a certain way.
True, but there’s still got to be some kind of common context (in this case, the concept of rhyme, I guess - and we still need to know what one of the things should sound like (it’s interesting, but useless, to know that X rhymes with Y when you still don’t know what either one sounds like).
True but maybe we know with high probability what X sounds like…because it’s related to a word still in use Z, and we know it’s related to Z and rhymes with Y, we would have a dang good idea of what it sounds like. Or puns can also give you clues what a word sounds like.
Assuming the text is natural language and not a cipher, there are hundreds of tricks to get meaning and insight into the text from almost nothing, and the more material you have to go over, the better…but obviously context trumps sheer mass of material hands down, since we had tons of Ancient Egyptian writing but a single tablet with the translation of the same text in ancient Greek was what was needed for a breakthrough.
It’s my belief that if we INTENTIONALLY make a time capsule that actually does last 10,000 years and it’s designed for humans to be understood BY humans, they will figure it out, people are only going to get smarter, computers are understanding language better and better even in our current day. I don’t address if the material will be readable in 10,000 years out of ignorance, but the extraordinary claim IMO is that if those humans CAN read what we set aside to be easily understood by them, that they wouldn’t be able to.
Yeah, I am not nearly as pessimistic as some on this thread about the ability to make ourselves understood to human beings with no cultural similarities to us. Given the ability to provide libraries and libraries full of text, and given that we’ll actually be designing the text with the intention of helping the future readers piece together the meanings of our texts, I’m surprised if it’s a very difficult goal. It’s hard to say, though, since nothing like that has ever been tried before to my knowledge.
The sentence you quoted absolutely is true. Read the second clause. Most of your post concerns itself with stuff that falls under the qualification I made in that clause. And yes, once you have some clues, some places to start, the more text you have the easier it will be to decrypt.
The examples you give of clause, such as lists, depend on a continuity of cultural tradition, like I said. You are assuming that people 10,000 years ago will recognize a list because they will still format lists like we do. That is not a safe assumption over 10,000 years.
Actually it’s not my assumption. My assumption is not that they will use lists the same way, it’s that either they will use them or recognize WE used lists or page numbers, or that they will detect patterns to figure out that every ten pages or segments, the first digit in number “X1”, “X2,” etc changes, so they would see that the pattern of our numbers follows base ten counting and they would easily figure out “Those things at the bottom of the page are numbers” even if they don’t personally use the concept of a “Page” all that often (I can see pages becoming more and more irellevent with ebook readers for example).
Again we can agree to disagree but I think you are underestimating our descendants. I don’t expect they will figure out what “lulz” and other things mean, but it would take a post apocalypse and a breakdown in society for them to not have linguists, archaeologists and computer scientists to not figure out numbers, especially given the example someone else posted where we put one dot, and then a “1” by it, 2 dots and then a “2” etc. There are ways to transmit data that are not culturally biased, and starting with that groundwork our highly intelligent descendants are more likely than not going to be able to understand a whole lot of what we send to them, if they can read it.
As to the OP: There are many presumptions that come to mind.
Will our species still be ‘human’ or ‘posthuman’?
If the latter, then would they (we) not have direct access to distributed networks of information that would be continuously updated over the course of all those years?
Will there have been a discontinuity in our history, as in a ecological or nuclear disaster?
And, what of the homogenization of natural languages? As we become a more global culture, will not a universal patois come into existence? One with known roots and antecedents? We are stymied in our study of lost languages by the lack of touchstones as our earlier cultures were considerably more isolated one from another than they are now. Minoan Linear-A is apparently untranslatable, but the later Linear-B is translatable.
I do expect our languages to change over time, if only because teenagers will always exist, but the shift from Old English to Middle to Modern was more of change in cultures and the introduction of foreign elements (those dang French!) A person, 1000 years from now will be more capable of intelligibly reading texts written now, than we are of reading those written 1000 years ago, if only because of the promulgation of readily available reading material and the associated continuity of culture and language.
That is assuming nothing like a supervolcano/asteroid strike/zombie apocalypse occurs.
And don’t laugh. According to the Toba catastrophe theory, a vast volcanic explosion caused the planetary population of our species to diminish to just a few tens of thousands of individuals, perhaps even as few as a thousand(!) breeding pairs. And asteroid strikes have occurred and will occur that have huge impacts upon the biosphere. Zombies, maybe not as probable, but who can tell?
If we fail to move a significant percentage of our population to somewhere beside Terra, we may not even make it 10,000 years and the entire exercise becomes moot.
As I said, there are too many indeterminate variables to make a reasonable analysis of the posited query.
“Readings are off the scale, Captain. I have never encountered this phenomenon before.”
I’d be interested to know if Language changes have slowed down since the widespread ubiquity of books and mass media would tend to “fix” the language. Slang might change quickly, but the formal form of the language doesn’t. Especially for languages which have a formal academy (almost all of them except english).
Theres also religious reasons for “fixing” a language. Arabic from the Quran written in 700AD is apparently comprehensible to a modern arabic speaker. The Quran must be studied in it’s original current form for believers, not a translated version. As long as even a small group of Islamic believers exist, there will be people that can read and understand arabic. Hebrew has similar religious reasons for preserving its form.
Arabic is one of the languages on the Rosetta disk, so thats covered.