The Long Now Foundation was founded in 1996 (or ‘01996’ in their stylized rendering) to foster greater long-term thinking. Their spin-off organization, The Rosetta Project, is interested in very long term archiving. As a starting point, take a look at their websites at https://longnow.org/about (Links to an external site.) and https://rosettaproject.org/about (Links to an external site.). Meanwhile, our neighbors to the west in Felicity, California have spent better than 20 years creating a giant “Museum in Granite” to record the history of humanity. They have gone so far as to create a “Felicity Stone” in eight languages to enable those in the far future to decipher the inscriiptions. Their charmingly retro website can be seen at http://www.historyingranite.org/. (Links to an external site.)
Once you’ve done looked at these links, please write a 2-3 page, double-spaced essay that considers The Rosetta Project’s stated means of achieving an archiving system that reaches into the far future. Given what we know about subjects like ‘bit rot’ and ‘bit decay,’ do you think their plans are sound? In contrast, how likely is it that the Felicity experiment will be the last silent spokesmonument for humanity at some point in the far distant future? What assumptions do each contrasting experiment have about human nature and the distant future (if any) of human society? What does each project suggest about the society they originated in?
