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posted by Fnord666 on Monday February 25 2019, @02:46PM   Printer-friendly
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."


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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by fritsd on Monday February 25 2019, @04:57PM (1 child)

    by fritsd (4586) on Monday February 25 2019, @04:57PM (#806393) Journal

    You're right.
    We could even turn that around, and ask, how many people found interesting super heavy meteorites, and thought: "hey this meteorite contains the extremely rare and expensive Iridium! C00l! Let's melt it!".

    Whereas they could be inert alien scout ships with micro etched instructions "attach 3.03 Volt battery at contact points 0 and 1, input signal at contact poins 2 and 3, output signal at contact points 10 and 11." (assuming they have 2 hands with 2 fingers (and that they settled on Volts in the same way as we)).

    Sigh. It's monday.

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Tuesday February 26 2019, @03:20PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 26 2019, @03:20PM (#806958) Journal

    Hey! Look! We've found this resource rich planet. It does not appear to have any higher forms of life nor any signs of intelligence.

    But has lots of long-chain hydrocarbon critters running around.

    It has easily minable concentrations of metal and concrete structures focused in tight clusters, more densely around the coasts and more sparsely in the continental interiors.

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.