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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: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Monday February 25 2019, @04:08PM (2 children)
An archive of so much human knowledge must include many discoveries and results of trial and error research. Such as how to make fire, the best shape for wheels, discoveries of better sexual positions and devices, etc. Not to mention sound and video recordings of music and culture, literature, poetry and Reality TV episodes.
Can you imagine the IP litigation minefield and liability this would represent for any alien species who would discover this artifact of our civilization?
Can we be called a civilization if we are not civilized?
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday February 25 2019, @05:05PM (1 child)
>Can you imagine the IP litigation minefield
Umm... none whatsoever, unless that future civilization believes in perpetual protections? (in which case they've already got far worse problems) *And* extends those protections retroactively to ancient works by alien civilizations.
It also seems rather unlikely that aliens would have any use for sexual positions developed by bipedal hominids with groin-mounted reproductive organs.
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Monday February 25 2019, @06:03PM
Globulux(R) would like to point out that their patent on oxygen respiration expires in 140M years, and therefore the humans(TM), a unlicensed product of Galatonix(R) will have to be removed from the market in all systems, and all existing copies will be recalled and destroyed.