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from the hopefully-it-includes-dilbert dept.
Submitted via IRC for chromas
Thirty-million-page backup of humanity headed to moon aboard Israeli lander
On Thursday night, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carried an Israeli-made spacecraft named Beresheet beyond the grasp of Earth's gravity and sent it on its way to the surface of the moon. On board Beresheet is a specially designed disc encoded with a 30-million-page archive of human civilization built to last billions of years into the future.
The backup for humanity has been dubbed "The Lunar Library" by its creator, the Arch Mission Foundation (AMF).
"The idea is to place enough backups in enough places around the solar system, on an ongoing basis, that our precious knowledge and biological heritage can never be lost," the nonprofit's co-founder Nova Spivack told me via email.
The AMF also placed a small test archive on Elon Musk's red Tesla Roadster that was launched in the direction of Mars aboard the first Falcon Heavy demonstration mission last year. That archive consisted of Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy encoded in a disc made of quartz silica glass made to last millions of years as the Roadster orbits the sun. The AMF has also placed a solid-state copy of Wikipedia on board a cubesat from SpaceChain in low-Earth orbit.
Part of the motivation for the far-out project is to leave a copy of humanity's knowledge not just in the cloud, but far beyond the clouds, should the impacts of climate change or a potential nuclear war do us or the planet in at some point in the future.
"While I am optimistic that humanity will rise to the challenge and develop a multinational planetary defense initiative to mitigate these planetary risks, it is also prudent to have a plan B," Spivack said. "Instead of one backup in one place our strategy is 'many copies, many places' -- and we plan to send updates on a regular basis."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Monday February 25 2019, @03:32PM (2 children)
written by the winners - that's how monarchy, religion and all sorts of horrible human activities persist today when we have *astonishing* technology.
Until we have "evidence based" politics and a devaluation of "faith over thought", which permits the complete lack of competence in government.
And let's not forget, we are all born with no choice where, when or to whom, all the labels are applied then.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 25 2019, @05:28PM
How does any of that matter to this project? There is more than political victories stored in this archive.
Even if you want to worry about how accurate the historical record is I would argue that as a species even if some of the facts were changed the overall record of humanity will remain relevant. Even historic fiction would be better than nothing!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 26 2019, @03:33AM
Better hope that the winners are not the chinese because then the rest of us will be forgotten