Aliens to get an earful of the 1960s (assuming they have ears)
So it’s The Beatles making history when the track ‘Across the Universe’ is beamed into the far-flung reaches of space. Thank the gods it isn’t Britney, Celine or any of the Pop Idol brigade. If it were, we might find ourselves obliterated by ray-guns within weeks. Simon Cowell, of course, would be the first to be reduced to atoms. Who would you line up?
tags: aliens, Beatles, choons, pop culture, spaceThe Rosetta Disk
The Rosetta space probe holds a copy of the Rosetta Disk—a 15,000 page archive of more than a thousand human languages. Wired reports that the Rosetta Project, an organisation working to preserve the world’s languages, predicts that up to ninety per cent of the world’s linguistic diversity will disappear over the course of this century.
The disk contains descriptions of sounds, linguistics basics and vocabulary lists, as well as transcribed oral narratives and translated materials like the UN Declarations of Human Rights and chapters from the Book of Genesis. No special platform or format is necessary to read the disk (which is a sphere made up of two hemispheres, the top being an optical magnifier). The text is micro-etched into the nickel surface so that future humans, intelligent Earth-bred successors to the human race, or alien beings from elsewhere will only need to magnify the script 1,000 times to read the encodings, which start at an eye-readable scale and spiral down to nano-scale.
tags: diversity, language, Rosetta, space
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