It looks like there are two main bottlenecks to reading more: the need for manual intervention in segmenting the scanned scrolls, and the cost in scanning new scrolls.
As for scanning: $30mm doesn't seem like a ton of money to scan 800 scrolls with untold history and other works, compared to other uses of that amount of money I could name now. Maybe someone will donate that cost and perhaps all the scrolls can be transported at one time or in a few bigger groups to be closer to the particle accelerator. Another million bucks and I bet you could build a climate-controlled container to take them all at once, or something. If I had $30mm I would definitely donate to this cause, it seems like one of the best uses of that kind of money I can think of. That would bypass the need to research and develop a bench top scanner or another solution. You could even crowdfund this!
As for segmentation: get some sort of collective solution going, like the Seti@Home did, but for people who are bored as hell, instead of them scrolling Reddit or Twitter all day. Maybe do it like a CAPTCHA so you get it done for free? I'd segment for a few hours a month if I had the ability to do so.
This is a cool project that has taken a community to build to this point, why not try and open and expand the collective of humans working to understand the scrolls? Get millions of people involved and you don't need to rely on technological crutches and development, though that is not the worst way to go either.
Funding is a huge one as well. Funding is the wheel that drives the project (source, have been hanging around the project people for a little while).
If you know anyone that would help chip in for the Phase 2 of the project (scaling up, please let Nat know! (not directly affiliated with the project management team, just pointing to him as a great contact for that.... <3 :')))) ) )
It seems "weird" none of the mega rich has committed a few million dollars for this, it looks like a very good way to build a legacy while benefiting humanity, and e.g. Bezos would probably find a million dollars behind the couch pillows.
Bezos funded the reading of the Archimedes palimpsest, didn't he? I guess this would be up his wheelhouse then. Unless, of course, he is only willing to finance of the decryption of his own property...
it's almost nauseating to me that every month or so our nation deminstrates it is capable and willing to collectively chip in enough money to turn one random nobody into a near-billionaire, muvh of which gets promptly vaporized on drugs and tacky status symbol purchases for themselves and maybe some immediate family, when the same money would fund a hundred Vesuvius Challenges a year at several times the scale of this project.
Yes. Now it can be done, but costs too much. Once they get a scanning unit near the scrolls, it will be much cheaper. The data reduction will probably get cheaper, too.
Scanning unit? Seems like the scanning was done using a synchrotron beamline. Maybe there is a suitable beamline at Elettra. I haven't looked closely why the synchrotron is needed. A Sigray instrument might work here, or even something simpler.
The 2019 scans were done at 7.91 micrometer resolution with 88KeV monochromatic x-rays. Synchrotrons like DLS can also use their uniquely coherent x-rays to do diffraction imaging but I see no evidence they've tried that with Vesuvius scrolls. (Because the object is too thick?)
That scan is 5.5 terabytes of .tif files. The 2023 scan apparently is at 3.24 micrometer resolution and four separate scans of 53/70/88/105KeV each, which should produce a vast, data processing-chokingly wad of data. If all x thousand scrolls need to be scanned at that detail then the Vesuvius Challenge people are going to be juggling a lot of hard drives.
It looks like there are two main bottlenecks to reading more: the need for manual intervention in segmenting the scanned scrolls, and the cost in scanning new scrolls.