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posted by takyon on Tuesday May 15 2018, @11:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the I'd-buy-that-for-a-nickel dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow0245

This nonprofit plans to send millions of Wikipedia pages to the Moon — printed on tiny metal sheets

A nonprofit with grand ambitions of setting up a library on the Moon is planning to send the entire English archive of Wikipedia to the lunar surface sometime within the next couple of years.

Don't worry: there won't be reams of Wikipedia printouts sitting in the lunar soil. Instead, the organization says it will send up millions of Wikipedia articles in the form of miniaturized prints, etched into tiny sheets of metal that are thinner than the average human hair. The nonprofit claims that with this method, it can send up millions of pages of text in a package that's about the size of a CD.

The unusual mission is the brainchild of the Arch Foundation (pronounced "arc," short for archive.) Formed in 2015, the nonprofit's goal is to set up archives of humanity's culture in different places throughout our cosmic neighborhood, as a way to inspire people about space. "We thought of this project to archive human civilization around the Solar System — to create a permanent off-site backup of all our cultural achievements," Arch co-founder Nova Spivack tells The Verge. "So, our knowledge, our art, our languages, our history — all the stuff the human mind has produced." The idea is that these archives could last for millions to billions of years in space, where they might be found and read by future humans.


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  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday May 16 2018, @12:06AM (5 children)

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Wednesday May 16 2018, @12:06AM (#680230) Homepage Journal

    A while back I emailed all my relatives to request that if I die or am incapacitated I want them to ensure that my writing stays online - forever.

    My brother-in-law is into computers; he said he'd take care of it.

    But Stan is several years older than me; if I die first it's unlikely that Stan will be around to look after my essays for very long.

    I recently contemplated asking an Estate Attorney to set up a trust that I could fund with all the Samoleon's I'm getting out of Portland Custom Software Development [soggywizards.com]. That money will be invested in some way so as to ensure I don't spend it all on hookers and blow before my Tick expires.

    Hopefully the domain registration, web hosting and webmastering could all be paid for out of the earnings of that investment. All those are cheap but they do cost something.

    Now I'm puzzling over how to ensure that trust really _does_ spend those earnings on publishing my writing and nothing else.

    I am well aware that my domains are unlikely to survive a nuclear war. But provided you're not directly exposed to the blast you won't even be deafened by a nuclear explosion because The Bomb is not very brizent. That is, it's not "shocky".

    So I will as well publish collections of my essays in books composed of acid-free paper. Extra credit if I can find a printer that can print them on hemp.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday May 16 2018, @12:26AM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday May 16 2018, @12:26AM (#680235) Journal

    https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.warplife.com [archive.org]

    https://web.archive.org/web/20160320200933/http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/schizoaffective-disorder/strange.html [archive.org]

    Internet Archive [wikipedia.org]

    For the long term, they could store data on something like this, which was linked in TFA:

    https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/16/11018018/5d-data-storage-glass [theverge.com]

    If Internet Archive is about 15 petabytes, it would take just fourty-two 360 TB quartz discs to store. Depending on how cheaply the discs can be created and written, it might be no trouble to get exabytes of storage that can last "forever" and be resistant to catastrophes.

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    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
  • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday May 16 2018, @01:35AM

    by RS3 (6367) on Wednesday May 16 2018, @01:35AM (#680254)

    Oh, I'm pretty sure all of the Three Letter Agencies have all of your stuff stored and well protected far better and for much longer than most other methods.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 16 2018, @01:25PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 16 2018, @01:25PM (#680379)

    Why do you care? You'll be reincarnated as something or someone else so why bother?

    • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday May 16 2018, @01:42PM

      by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Wednesday May 16 2018, @01:42PM (#680395) Homepage Journal

      Or rather, "When you're dead, you won't know if anyone remembers you".

      She's a Shambhala Buddhist.

      To which I replied "When the end comes, to know that I will be remembered will give me a great deal of comfort".

      But that's my own purely selfish reason. Rather more charitably:

      Some of my essays have helped a great many people, not just regarding their own or a love one's mental illness, but lots of coders, business owners and webmasters as well.

      Even before the end approaches, were my writing somehow manage to avoid dropping off the edge of the Earth my articles and essays would doubtlessly help a great many more such people.

      --
      Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]