Rosetta Stone II
January 13, 2003 9:31 PM   Subscribe

The Rosetta Project In Spaaaace. Agh, it's a great concept... I just wish they'd made the text something a little more secular. The aliens will probably take it all too literally.
posted by Pretty_Generic (6 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
I can see it now--"Take us to your...yahweh."
posted by amberglow at 3:00 PM on January 14, 2003


I for one welcome...ok.
Didn't any of these people see 'Contact' with Jody Foster. If they want to create any kind of message that will survive the test of time/distance it needs to be based on mathematics and then tied in to science/(the physical world) through the periodic table and then ultimately 'foggified' a bit as inexact linguistic concepts are pictorially represented.

Finally although they have information on American (and other) Sign Languages at their site why did they not include it as one of the 1,000 or at least have it as the 1001st since it, of all languages, has the best chance to be the key to unlocking all the others. I am learning ASL
and it is a very intuitive language since it grounds concepts in physical reality as much as possible. I imagine the difficulties would be in representing all the movements but these could be represented by a series of diagrams. I figure it would be worth dumping a couple hundred of the more obscure languages and including this most universal of languages.
posted by nasim at 7:20 PM on January 14, 2003


A section of Newton's Principia Mathematica would have been a better choice. Just my opinion, of course.
posted by botono9 at 7:48 PM on January 14, 2003


Bad news for Rosetta--they're now going to look for a different comet to land on.
posted by amberglow at 4:24 AM on January 15, 2003


My first reaction was also to the religious content—but then I remembered that Bible bits are the only things that have been translated into so many obscure languages.
posted by languagehat at 7:04 AM on January 15, 2003


Good point languagehat, but they could perhaps add the second-most translated work, the phrase "any similarity to any real persons living or dead is purely coincidental".
posted by Pretty_Generic at 10:22 AM on January 15, 2003


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