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Rosetta Project

The Rosetta Project is an initiative of the Long Now Foundation to create a comprehensive, publicly accessible digital library archiving all documented human languages, emphasizing the preservation of endangered ones amid the risk of extinction for approximately 90 percent of the world's roughly 7,000 languages.^[1] Launched as the foundation's inaugural effort in very long-term archiving, it counters digital obsolescence and linguistic loss by compiling parallel texts, grammars, and recordings, currently spanning over 100,000 pages across 2,500 languages.^[1] A hallmark achievement is the Rosetta Disk, a three-inch nickel artifact etched with 13,999 pages of multilingual text—primarily parallel translations designed as a "decoder ring" for deciphering unknown scripts—readable only under 500x magnification and encased in a protective stainless steel and glass sphere engineered to endure for thousands of years.^[1] The project fosters global collaboration among linguists and native speakers, promoting open access to resources that support language revitalization and cultural continuity.^[1]

History

Founding and Early Development

The Rosetta Project was proposed by Brewster Kahle in February 1998 during the "Time and Bits: Managing Digital Continuity" conference at the Getty Center, organized by The Long Now Foundation to address challenges in preserving digital information over millennia.^[2] This initiative emerged as the Foundation's inaugural effort in very long-term archiving, inspired by the ancient Rosetta Stone's role in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, with the aim of creating durable records of human languages to combat extinction and obsolescence.^[1]^[2] Development commenced in 1999, focusing on analog solutions like micro-etched metal disks capable of enduring 2,000 to 10,000 years, as digital media degrade rapidly.^[2] Early efforts involved assembling parallel texts across languages, including the collection of nearly 900 translations of the Book of Genesis over four months to support a Long Now conference at Stanford University on 10,000-year library concepts.^[3] Under the direction of Laura Welcher, the project collaborated with linguists, native speakers, and technologists to prototype the Rosetta Disk—a three-inch nickel disc etched with microscopic text readable at 500x to 1,000x magnification.^[4]^[1] A preliminary version of the disk, containing about 6,000 pages in multiple languages, was completed and attached to the European Space Agency's Rosetta orbiter spacecraft, which launched on March 2, 2004, from French Guiana, serving as a test of extraterrestrial archival viability.^[2]^[5] This phase established the project's dual approach of physical artifacts and digital libraries, laying groundwork for expanded linguistic documentation while highlighting the need for redundancy in preservation strategies.^[1]

Key Milestones and Expansions

The Rosetta Project was launched in 2000 by the Long Now Foundation as an effort to create a permanent archive of human languages, beginning with the compilation of parallel texts serving as a "decoder ring" for linguistic recovery.^[6] Initial development focused on the physical Rosetta Disk, a three-inch nickel plate capable of storing 13,000 to 14,000 micro-etched pages etched at 500x magnification resolution.^[1] ^[2] In 2008, the final version of the Rosetta Disk was unveiled, documenting approximately 1,500 languages across 14,000 pages, including primers and parallel translations designed for long-term readability without reliance on digital media.^[2] This milestone marked the project's shift toward durable physical archiving inspired by ancient artifacts like the original Rosetta Stone, with the disk engineered using nanotechnology from collaborators such as Norsam Microtechnology.^[7] Subsequent expansions included growth in linguistic coverage, with the archive expanding from an initial focus on 1,000 languages to over 2,500 by incorporating additional pages, audio recordings, and contributions from linguists and native speakers, reaching more than 100,000 total pages.^[1] ^[8] In 2012, the project collaborated with the Endangered Languages Project and PanLex to enhance digital accessibility, integrating translations across 6,000 languages and 17 million lexemes.^[9] Further milestones involved digital and physical extensions: the establishment of an open-access online library hosted as a special collection at the Internet Archive, enabling broader contributions and preservation against digital obsolescence.^[1] A copy of the Rosetta Disk was included aboard the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft, which achieved orbit around comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014, extending the archive into space as a potential interstellar record.^[10] In 2016, a pendant-sized wearable version of the disk was released, maintaining the same content in a portable format for personal or institutional use.^[11] These developments have sustained the project's aim of comprehensive language documentation amid projections of 50-90% language loss over the coming century.^[12]

Objectives and Methodology

Core Goals

The Rosetta Project, initiated by the Long Now Foundation, seeks to create a comprehensive digital library archiving all documented human languages as a safeguard against linguistic extinction, with projections indicating that up to 90% of the world's approximately 7,000 languages may vanish within the next century.^[1] This objective addresses the accelerated erosion of cultural and linguistic diversity by compiling over 100,000 pages of documents, including grammars, dictionaries, phonetic alphabets, and audio recordings, targeting documentation for more than 2,500 languages, with a particular emphasis on endangered and minority tongues.^[1] A central aim is to enable long-term preservation through innovative methods resilient to digital obsolescence, exemplified by the development of durable physical media like the Rosetta Disk, which encodes nearly 14,000 pages of essential linguistic data in micro-etched nickel for readability over millennia.^[1] The project promotes open access to its structured language datasets and contents, fostering public engagement, scholarly research, and comparative linguistics via parallel texts inspired by the ancient Rosetta Stone, thereby facilitating translation and revival efforts for at-risk languages.^[13] By prioritizing empirical documentation over interpretive narratives, the initiative underscores causal factors in language loss, such as globalization and assimilation pressures, while avoiding unsubstantiated claims of equivalence among languages; instead, it privileges verifiable primary sources from native speakers and linguists to ensure archival fidelity.^[1] This approach aligns with the Foundation's broader commitment to 10,000-year-scale thinking, positioning the archive not merely as a repository but as a tool for sustaining human intellectual heritage against foreseeable civilizational disruptions.^[13]

Documentation and Archival Approach

The Rosetta Project employs a dual archival strategy combining digital accessibility with physical durability to preserve linguistic data against obsolescence and extinction. Digitally, it maintains a publicly accessible online library hosted on the Internet Archive, featuring structured, downloadable datasets encompassing texts, recordings, and metadata for over 1,500 languages.^[1]^[14] This approach prioritizes open collaboration, soliciting contributions from linguists, native speakers, and institutions like the Summer Institute of Linguistics to compile parallel corpora, including translations of foundational texts such as Genesis 1-3, alongside grammars, phonologies, orthographies, and lexical lists.^[3] Materials are organized using standardized ISO language codes from sources like Ethnologue to facilitate cross-linguistic comparability and future decoding.^[3] Physically, the project centers on the Rosetta Disk, a 3-inch nickel disk micro-etched with approximately 13,000 pages of content, designed for readability over millennia with minimal maintenance. Etching utilizes focused ion beam technology adapted from scientific instruments, transferring data from silicon masters to durable nickel via electroplating, ensuring legibility at 500-1000x magnification using optical or electron microscopes.^[1]^[3] Content selection emphasizes "decoder ring" parallel texts in up to 2,500 languages to enable reconstruction of lost scripts or tongues, drawing inspiration from the ancient Rosetta Stone while addressing projected losses of 90% of human languages within a century.^[1]^[3] This methodology underscores long-term causal realism in preservation, countering digital ephemerality through redundant formats and minimal intervention requirements, such as encasing the disk in protective stainless steel and glass. Collaborations extend to etching partners like Norsam for technological fidelity, with ongoing expansions incorporating audio and additional languages via crowdsourced inputs.^[3] The approach avoids reliance on volatile media, favoring etched permanence to safeguard empirical linguistic records for potential future archaeologists or scholars.^[1]

Physical and Digital Components

The Rosetta Disk

The Rosetta Disk is a micro-etched nickel disc created by the Long Now Foundation as a physical counterpart to the Rosetta Project's digital language archive, designed for preservation over millennia. Measuring approximately 7.5 centimeters in diameter, it contains over 13,000 pages of etched text covering more than 1,500 human languages, including grammatical primers, vocabulary lists, and parallel translations of universal declarations such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.^[15]^[5] Developed using high-resolution micro-etching technology akin to next-generation microfiche, the disk's content is inscribed at a scale readable only under optical magnification, such as a microscope. The etching process involves creating a silicon mold, onto which pure nickel is electroformed, ensuring resistance to corrosion and environmental degradation for thousands of years.^[16]^[17] The concept originated in 1998 as a durable medium to safeguard linguistic diversity against extinction, inspired by the ancient Rosetta Stone's role in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs through multilingual parallels.^[3] A key feature is the "Rosetta key" or primer etched on the disk's reverse side, providing instructions in eight major languages—English, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, Swahili, Esperanto, and Ancient Greek—for interpreting the microscopic archive without prior knowledge of the encoding. This self-decoding mechanism aims to enable future civilizations or scholars to access the data independently of digital infrastructure.^[15] Multiple prototype disks have been produced, with some embedded in artifacts like the Rosetta spacecraft launched by the European Space Agency in 2004 and others displayed in institutions for public access.^[5]^[18] The disk's analog format contrasts with volatile digital storage, prioritizing permanence over capacity; while it captures a snapshot of endangered languages circa early 2000s, it does not include audio or dynamic elements. Production involved collaboration with engineers at Creo Inc., utilizing laser-based etching for precision at 200,000 dots per inch resolution.^[3] As of 2025, the Long Now Foundation continues to refine variants, including smaller wearable versions etched with subsets of the archive for personal or exploratory use.^[11]

Online Digital Library

The Online Digital Library constitutes the digital archival component of the Rosetta Project, operated by the Long Now Foundation, designed to create a comprehensive, publicly accessible repository of linguistic documentation for all known human languages. Launched as a collaborative effort involving linguists, native speakers, and institutions, it aggregates diverse materials including phonological descriptions, grammatical analyses, Swadesh word lists, ethnographic texts, scanned grammars and dictionaries, audio recordings, and lexical databases to facilitate long-term preservation and scholarly access.^[19]^[20] The library emphasizes parallel texts, such as translations of Genesis chapters 1-3 across multiple languages, to enable comparative linguistics and aid in language reconstruction or revitalization efforts.^[20] As of its development through Rosetta V2.0, the library documents materials from over 2,500 languages, surpassing the initial target of 1,500 set for the physical Rosetta Disk, with contributions drawn from sources like Tryon’s Austronesian Dictionary and Usher’s Indo-Pacific lexical database.^[20] Users can browse contents via an interactive online interface, including a fully digitized, microscope-simulating viewer for the etched pages of Rosetta Disk 1.0, which contains approximately 13,000 pages of core data readable at 650x magnification in its physical form.^[19]^[21] This digital accessibility, hosted on the project's website and mirrored on the Internet Archive, supports open repurposing of data through integrations with platforms like Freebase and ensures redundancy via LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) protocols.^[19]^[22] Key features include community-driven submissions for expanding coverage, particularly of endangered languages, and tools for searching parallel corpora to highlight structural similarities and differences across linguistic families.^[20] While the library prioritizes raw documentary evidence over interpretive analysis, it has evolved to incorporate multimedia elements, such as audio from the Alan Lomax Global Language Archive, to capture phonetic and prosodic data not fully representable in text.^[20] Access remains free and unrestricted, though advanced physical replicas of the disk are available for purchase to Long Now Foundation members, underscoring the project's dual commitment to digital immediacy and analog durability.^[19]

Content and Linguistic Coverage

Languages and Materials Included

The Rosetta Project's physical archive, embodied in the Rosetta Disk, documents over 1,500 human languages through 13,000 pages of etched content, while the accompanying digital library has expanded coverage to more than 2,300 languages.^[23]^[19] These languages represent a broad spectrum of the world's linguistic diversity, including many endangered varieties, selected to enable comparative analysis across phonetic, grammatical, and lexical features.^[23] Materials archived include ethnographic overviews of speaker communities, geographic maps, details on orthographies and literacy levels, structural linguistic descriptions encompassing sound systems, word formation, and sentence patterns, and standardized Swadesh lists comprising approximately 200 basic vocabulary items for each language.^[23] The collection also incorporates transcribed samples of spoken narratives, excerpts from religious texts such as chapters from the Book of Genesis translated into multiple languages, and renditions of international documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.^[23] This content is formatted as analog, human-readable scans of scripts, diagrams, and texts, ensuring accessibility without reliance on digital decoding, with pages measuring 0.019 inches square and viewable under 650x magnification.^[23] The disk's structure organizes materials radially, beginning with macroscopic elements like an image of Earth and a multilingual dedication in eight major languages—English, Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, Swahili, Greek, and Latin—spiraling inward to the microscopic linguistic data.^[23] The digital components, hosted via partnerships like PanLex for lexical data and the Internet Archive for broader collections, supplement the physical archive with additional resources such as audio recordings in select languages.^[19]

Parallel Texts and Primers

The Rosetta Project incorporates parallel texts as a core element for facilitating cross-linguistic comparison and potential future decipherment of archived languages. These consist of identical content translated into multiple languages, mirroring the structure of the ancient Rosetta Stone. Key examples include the first three chapters of the Book of Genesis, collected in over 150 languages to provide narrative continuity for analysis, and excerpts from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, selected for their neutral, declarative style and broad applicability across cultures.^[15]^[23] Such texts enable researchers or hypothetical future discoverers to identify syntactic patterns, vocabulary cognates, and semantic equivalences without relying on extinct interpretive keys.^[15] Complementing the parallel texts are primers, which serve as foundational documentation for individual languages to support basic comprehension and reconstruction. Each language entry typically features a standardized Swadesh list of approximately 200 core vocabulary words, grammatical sketches outlining morphology and syntax, phoneme inventories, orthographic samples, and ethnographic notes on speech communities.^[15] These primers, etched microscopically on the Rosetta Disk alongside over 13,000 total pages of content, prioritize essential, high-frequency elements to maximize utility for low-resource or endangered languages.^[19] The 300 Languages Project extends this approach digitally, compiling parallel public-domain texts and audio in the world's 300 most spoken languages to create a searchable corpus accessible via the Internet Archive, emphasizing volunteer-sourced materials for scalability.^[24] This dual framework of parallel texts and primers underscores the project's archival methodology, aiming for durability over millennia by embedding redundancy and universality in the data structure. While the physical Disk targets long-term physical preservation, digital primers in the online library allow iterative updates and community contributions, though coverage remains uneven for highly endangered dialects with limited native input.^[15]^[25]

Achievements and Impact

Preservation Efforts and Collaborations

The Rosetta Project's preservation efforts focus on compiling a comprehensive digital library of all documented human languages, drawing from contributions by linguists and native speakers worldwide to ensure public accessibility and redundancy. This includes the PanLex initiative, which aggregates vocabulary data across languages to facilitate cross-linguistic analysis and preservation. Physical preservation is achieved through the Rosetta Disk, a nickel-based medium etched with over 13,000 pages of linguistic material from more than 1,500 languages, readable via magnification and engineered for durability over millennia.^[19] To enhance redundancy, the project developed the Rosetta Wearable Disk, employing LOCKSS technology for distributed digital archiving. A replica of the Rosetta Disk was incorporated into the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission, which successfully landed the Philae probe on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko on November 12, 2014, positioning linguistic data as a potential long-term extraterrestrial record. The digital collections are hosted by the Internet Archive, providing open access and backup storage.^[19] Collaborations underpin these efforts, involving a global network of language specialists, native speakers, and interdisciplinary experts under the Long Now Foundation. The Rosetta Disk's design emerged from partnerships among artists, designers, linguists, and archivists, including Kurt Bollacker, Stewart Brand, Paul Donald, Jim Mason, Kevin Kelly, Alexander Rose, and Laura Welcher, with primary funding from Charles Butcher and the Lazy Eight Foundation.^[15] The project integrates with broader initiatives, such as participation in the Endangered Languages Project launched on June 20, 2012, alongside the PanLex Project and supported by the Alliance for Linguistic Diversity, to accelerate documentation, aid community revitalization, and leverage resources like PanLex's database of 500 million pairwise translations spanning 17 million lexemes in 6,000 languages.^[26]

Contributions to Linguistics and Long-Term Thinking

The Rosetta Project advances linguistics through its systematic compilation of parallel texts, primers, and lexical data across more than 1,500 languages, enabling researchers to conduct cross-linguistic comparisons and analyze structural similarities without relying on fragmented or ephemeral sources.^[1] This includes over 13,000 pages of etched content on the Rosetta Disk, encompassing basic grammars, phoneme inventories, and sample narratives that serve as foundational resources for typological studies and historical linguistics.^[19] By prioritizing endangered languages—estimated at around 7,000 total spoken worldwide, with half at risk of extinction—the project provides empirical baselines for tracking phonological, syntactic, and semantic evolution, countering the accelerated loss where 457 languages have fewer than 10 speakers as of recent assessments.^[27]^[28] In terms of long-term thinking, the project's physical archiving on durable nickel substrates, engineered for readability over millennia via electron microscopy, exemplifies a causal approach to knowledge persistence amid potential civilizational disruptions, such as data degradation or societal collapse.^[13] This "backup" strategy, integrated with the Long Now Foundation's broader ethos of extending human foresight beyond immediate horizons, positions linguistic preservation as a hedge against irreversible diversity loss, where unarchived languages could preclude future recovery efforts.^[1] The initiative's dispatch of a Rosetta Disk aboard the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission to Comet 67P in 2014 further underscores this orientation, embedding human linguistic heritage in extraterrestrial contexts to transcend terrestrial vulnerabilities.^[29] Such measures not only document but provoke reflection on intergenerational responsibilities, fostering institutional and scholarly practices that prioritize archival redundancy over short-term accessibility.^[30]

Criticisms and Limitations

Effectiveness in Language Revitalization

The Rosetta Project's primary objective is the long-term archival preservation of linguistic data from endangered languages, rather than direct intervention in revitalization processes, which typically involve community-based education, intergenerational transmission, and cultural integration to restore active usage.^[1] While the project has compiled parallel texts, primers, and recordings for over 1,500 languages, making them available in a durable format like the Rosetta Disk and an online repository, there is no documented evidence of these resources leading to the revival of any specific language into widespread daily use.^[1] Preservation efforts, such as those documented in the project's archive hosted by the Internet Archive since 2009, serve as a foundational repository for potential future scholars or communities, but causal factors in successful revitalizations—such as the Hebrew language's state-driven revival in the 20th century—instead rely on active policy, immersion programs, and social incentives absent from the Rosetta initiative.^[1]^[31] Critics have noted the project's static nature as a limitation for revitalization, arguing that archival storage alone fails to engage living speakers or learners in real-time, delaying practical application and potentially rendering materials obsolete without adaptive digital tools for teaching.^[32] Empirical assessments of global language loss, estimating that 90% of the world's approximately 7,000 languages could vanish by 2100 without intervention, underscore that documentation projects like Rosetta contribute to awareness and data availability but do not address core drivers of decline, such as urbanization, assimilation pressures, and lack of institutional support.^[1] No peer-reviewed studies or project reports quantify instances where Rosetta materials have measurably increased speaker numbers or fluency in targeted languages, highlighting a gap between preservation and active recovery.^[33] Indirect contributions include facilitating collaborations with linguists and providing baseline texts that could inform revitalization curricula, as seen in broader endangered language initiatives; however, these remain ancillary to the project's core archival focus.^[34] For comparison, more interventionist programs, such as those developing interactive learning software for indigenous communities, have shown measurable gains in learner engagement, whereas Rosetta's emphasis on 10,000-year durability prioritizes endurance over immediate utility.^[35] Overall, the project's effectiveness in revitalization appears constrained by its passive methodology, with impact confined to symbolic and preparatory roles rather than transformative outcomes.^[32]

Technical and Practical Challenges

The production of the Rosetta Disk required overcoming substantial technical hurdles in micro-etching, as the process involved inscribing over 13,000 pages of linguistic material onto a 3-inch nickel disk at high densities capable of holding up to 200,000 page images.^[16] Achieving legibility necessitated precise laser etching with a 10-micron beam, including crosshatching techniques to fill letter interiors while maintaining outline clarity, which prolonged fabrication to more than 36 hours per disk.^[36] Integrating macro-scale, human-readable content—such as language names and navigational aids—with the microscopic text further complicated alignment and fixturing during electroforming.^[3] Although the nickel substrate offers resilience against corrosion, extreme temperatures, and submersion, ensuring millennia-long durability demands protection from physical abrasion or catastrophic events, with projected lifespans of 2,000 years or more under ideal conditions.^[37] Readability poses an inherent limitation, as the etchings demand optical magnification between 100x and 1,000x, relying on the future availability of microscopes or analogous tools that may not survive societal collapse.^[38] The analog format circumvents digital format obsolescence but introduces risks if interpreters lack contextual knowledge to bootstrap decipherment from the parallel primers, potentially rendering the archive inert without supplementary cultural transmission.^[39] On the practical front, assembling verifiable linguistic data for 1,500 languages entailed coordinating with global linguists and native speakers, particularly challenging for endangered tongues with sparse or contested documentation, leading to incomplete or static representations that may not evolve with living usage.^[1] The online digital library, intended to supplement the disk with broader coverage toward all 7,000 human languages, grapples with persistent digital preservation demands, including periodic data migration to avert bit rot and hardware decay, as conventional media like DVDs degrade within decades absent intervention.^[40] Resource constraints have limited scalability, with the physical disks produced in small quantities at high cost, restricting widespread distribution and redundancy.^[41]

Recent Developments and Future Directions

Updates Since 2010

In 2012, the Rosetta Project integrated with the PanLex database, which provides multilingual translation resources supporting the project's linguistic archive; at the time, PanLex contained 17 million expressions and over 500 million translations across approximately 7,000 languages.^[42] This collaboration enhanced the digital library's utility for comparative linguistics and preservation efforts.^[43] The project contributed to the launch of the Endangered Languages Project in June 2012, partnering to promote documentation and awareness of at-risk languages, leveraging PanLex's resources for collaborative translation tools.^[42] In 2013, Rosetta-supported initiatives included the development of the Aikuma Android app by Steven Bird and colleagues, designed for crowdsourced recording of endangered languages with time-aligned translations; field tests occurred in Papua New Guinea (Usarufa language) and Brazil (Tembé language), facilitating low-cost documentation by native speakers.^[42] A significant physical advancement came with the release of the first Rosetta Wearable Disk on November 10, 2016, following 3.5 years of development in partnership with NanoRosetta; this 2 cm nickel disk, producible via microchip lithography and electroforming, contains over 1,000 microscopic pages etched on one side (including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights preamble in 327 languages and PanLex Swadesh lists in 719 languages) and navigational instructions in eight widely spoken languages on the other.^[11] Readable under 100x optical magnification, the wearable format aims to enable broader dissemination of the archive using a LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) strategy for redundancy and longevity.^[11] In February 2023, the Long Now Foundation updated its long-term backup strategies, noting that initial prototypes of the Rosetta Disk remained allocated but emphasizing ongoing production capabilities for durable analogs.^[17] Limited supplies of wearable disks became available again on December 11, 2023, offered to donors contributing $1,000 or more, supporting further refinement.^[11] On February 18, 2025, the Rosetta Project received access to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Molecular Foundry facilities— including the Advanced Light Source and National Center for Electron Microscopy—for prototyping and scaling wearable disk production, building on prior nickel-based etching techniques to improve accessibility and durability.^[38] These efforts maintain the project's focus on analog redundancy amid digital vulnerabilities, though the core disk archive has not seen major content expansions beyond the 2008 version 1.0, which etched 13,000 pages across 1,500 languages.^[19] The digital repository at rosettaproject.org continues to host browseable archives, serving as a living complement to physical artifacts.^[19]

Ongoing Initiatives and Long-Term Viability

The Rosetta Project maintains an expanding digital archive comprising over 100,000 pages of documents, texts, and audio recordings documenting more than 2,500 human languages, hosted redundantly on the Internet Archive to ensure accessibility and mitigate digital obsolescence.^[1] This ongoing effort involves contributions from linguists and native speakers worldwide, focusing on endangered languages to counteract projections of 90% linguistic diversity loss within the next century absent intervention.^[1] Integration with the PanLex project, which joined in 2011, supports lexical data collection for global languages, enabling advanced translation resources and enhancing the archive's utility for comparative linguistics.^[44] Recent advancements include the development of the Rosetta Wearable Disk, a compact analog replica designed for personal or distributed preservation, bolstered by a February 2025 award granting access to facilities at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Molecular Foundry.^[38] Long-term viability hinges on the Rosetta Disk's analog construction: 13,999 micro-etched pages on durable nickel, readable at 500x magnification and encased in a corrosion-resistant stainless steel and glass container projected to endure millennia under stable conditions.^[1] ^[19] Funding through Long Now Foundation memberships sustains operations, though the project's "life support" designation since 2017 signals vulnerability to resource constraints, necessitating additional grants for sustained expansion.^[10] Multiple physical and digital copies, including deployments like the European Space Agency's inclusion of a disk aboard the Rosetta spacecraft to Comet 67P, exemplify redundancy strategies akin to LOCKSS principles for civilizational-scale endurance.^[19]

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[40]
Very Long-Term Backup - The Rosetta Project
Aug 20, 2025 · Pages stored on plastic DVDs are neither stable over the very long term, nor readable over the long term. Unless digital information is ...
[41]
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB991692845769540646
[42]
Blog - The Rosetta Project
The pilot projects turned out very successful and insightful in both preserving some of the stories and languages of the peoples involved as well as providing ...
[43]
https://panlex.org
[44]
PanLex joins Rosetta at Long Now
Feb 27, 2023 · PanLex is working closely with the Rosetta Project. PanLex is a wonderful realization of the Rosetta Project's original goal in building a ...Missing: connection | Show results with:connection