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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, @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]
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