Last Thursday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk by the head of the Long Now project at Xerox PARC. The Long Now is a project to get people to think in 10,000-year timeframes, inspired by the story of Oxford New College’s oak beams: After the giant oak beams in the New College’s great hall rotted out, the Dons of the college were at a loss to source replacement oak timbers of sufficient size. The college forrester came to the rescue — it turned out that when the New College was built, 500 years previous, the Dons of the college had planted oaks in Oxford’s forest. Now, 500 years later, they were ready to be harvested and put into service in the great hall. The modern-day Dons thanked the forrester, chopped down the trees and sold the forest.

The first Long Now project, the 10,000 year clock, has received a lot of press, including a great feature in Wired a couple years back, but that was just a warmup. Now, the Long Nowians are working on the Rosetta Project, in which 1,000 translations of Genesis are micro-etched in coins that will remain microscopically legible for millennia. When linguists in the year 12,000 discover the Rosette Coins, they’ll have a crib that will unlock every human language now known (including some artificial languages, like Vulcan).

The Rosetta translations were gathered over the Internet, using a site in which professional and amateur linguists translated the text and peer-reviewed each other’s translations. 600-dpi images of the 27,000-page Rosetta text are available on the site as well. Link Discuss