ROSETTA STONE VISUAL LAYER Illustrated Panel Architecture

The Archive of Redundant Coding (ARC) is a standardized, passive payload that encodes Earth’s geneticlibrary across six independent storage pathways for deployment on routine orbital launches. Five ofthose pathways carry data; the sixth is an electromagnetic broadcast. None of the data pathways isself-describing: a finder with no shared cultural context cannot decode synthetic DNA in silica, 5Doptical quartz, solid-state memory, or desiccated natural DNA without first acquiring the conventionsused to write them.This document specifies the visual decoding primer that bridges that gap. Nine etched analog panels(Pathway 5), readable with the unaided eye, bootstrap a finder from universal physical constants tothe file format on the solid-state memory. The sequence proceeds: hydrogen as length, time, and massanchor; tally and binary number systems; arithmetic and π; chemical units; the six elements of life;covalent bonding and amino acid structure; DNA bases, pairing, and the codon table; binary encodingand a file format with a hydrogen-derived magic number and a derivable checksum; and a master indexof all six pathways with a suggested recovery order. A verification fragment from Escherichia coli K-12(thrL leader peptide) is intended for Panel 7; the finder decodes it via the codon table and locates thesame sequence in the synthetic and natural DNA compartments, confirming coherence across pathwayswithout circular trust. The exact bases will be determined by sequencing the procured biological sample.The architecture distinguishes four categories of content. Physically discoverable items (hydrogenwavelength, π, atomic structure) are universal — the same for any technological finder regardless oforigin. Biologically anchored items (the terrestrial genetic code, the structure of DNA, the twentyproteinogenic amino acids) are physically real and empirically recoverable from preserved organisms inthis archive, but they reflect Earth’s evolutionary history rather than universal physics; an independentlyevolved biosphere could use different conventions. The finder confirms them by experiment on thepreserved material, not by calculation from first principles. Declared conventions (the binary mappingof DNA bases, byte order, file header layout) are choices the archive’s authors made, marked in thisdocument with square brackets like this and grouped together visibly so the finder knows where toexpect arbitrariness. Archive-specific structure (pathway numbering, recovery order, species index) isa fourth category that exists only because this particular archive exists.The architecture assumes no shared language, no shared notation, no surviving technology, and nosurviving institutions. It does assume that hydrogen exists, that physics is universal, and that a findercapable of detecting the object is capable of counting.