What if you could have the world’s languages in the palm of your hand? You sort of do if you have smartphone because Google Translate is super helpful. I meant in a more literally way though. The Rosetta Disk is a chip that contains information for 1,500 human languages.
There’s 13K pages of information etched super tiny in nickel on this disk. Each page is 400 microns across which is about the width of five human hairs. You can’t actually read this with your naked eye.
In order to access the information on this disk you’ll need a very high-powered microscope. The front includes a number of translations of “languages of the world” in script in a swirling pattern that gets smaller which would, we hope, prompt some future human to check this thing out under a microscope after all digital data has been lost. Or you can keep it as a neat keepsake. It’s yours for becoming a lifetime member of the Long Now Foundation. Which is only a cool $10,000.