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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: 1) by khallow on Monday February 25 2019, @05:08PM (8 children)
On the other hand, if a tree falls and there is someone to hear it, then it does make a sound.
Probably not very long. Next.
They would care enough to get to the Moon after all. If present-day humanity stumbled across a similar artifact, it wouldn't take them long to decipher those things you spoke of, particularly with thousands of researchers working on the task (as well as one or two orders of magnitude more laymen). And of course, there would be plenty of funding to throw at the matter. We obviously have many cultures from history who would be at best completely disinterested, at worst likely to destroy new information that threatens their world-view, but they often showed a similar disinterest in going anywhere where they'd be exposed to such information.
Got to get that emo dig in. We've already figured out that intelligence isn't perfect. I imagine other beings would make similar discoveries on their own time.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Monday February 25 2019, @06:03PM (7 children)
That sounds like a vulnerability just waiting to be exploited.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 25 2019, @06:16PM
And I thought I was cynical.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Monday February 25 2019, @06:35PM (5 children)
How? Is this a The King in Yellow [wikipedia.org] scenario where reading past a little bit drives the reader to madness? Or perhaps a A Fire Upon the Deep [wikipedia.org] or Species [wikipedia.org] where the knowledge comes with a hidden trap? In each story, humans stumble across knowledge, the first in a vast, billion year old archive in a distant star system that gives instructions for the manufacture of nanotech that happens to eventually resurrect a billion year old intelligence bent on consuming the entire universe, the second, instructions for creating a species that would drive Earth humans to extinction.
Sorry, but calendars and history lessons don't do that.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Monday February 25 2019, @07:26PM (3 children)
> How?
My exploit was much simpler. If finding an alien artifact would divert such much scientific attention, across many disciplines no doubt, away from what they were working on, it sounds like a good way to troll a species.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday February 25 2019, @11:46PM
It's not that much scientific attention. And you're not going to divert more than that for any length of time without a really good troll that has some substance to it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 26 2019, @01:45PM (1 child)
You mean, all the disk contains really is a Rick Astley video?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 26 2019, @03:08PM
Maybe. But only buried in layers of obfuscation, puzzles, fictional historical and cultural information.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Tuesday February 26 2019, @04:39PM
Yeah, I also thought about the Blight in "A Fire Upon the Deep".
Brilliant book!!