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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: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Monday February 25 2019, @05:34PM (4 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 25 2019, @05:34PM (#806424) Journal

    But, it needn't be all that very high tech. Take all the horny teens out of any high school, and send them to the moon, or Calypso, or Ganymede, or wherever, along with a habitat, and a lot of food to get them started. Send all the automation possible, equipment to extract water, a breatheable atmosphere, and lots of seeds, and animal embryos. You'll have a helluva backup right there!

    Yeah, I know, we ain't ready for that yet, but that is STILL your ultimate backup.

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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday February 25 2019, @05:59PM (1 child)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 25 2019, @05:59PM (#806453) Journal

    That is, indeed, a much better backup...except that the group you proposed wouldn't survive in an environment that needs care or it will kill you.

    This *is* a real problem, and a modification of that *is* the correct answer. But, as you indicate, we can't do it yet. (For a number of reasons, only some of which are stem-science specific.)

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 26 2019, @01:41PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 26 2019, @01:41PM (#806902)

      That is, indeed, a much better backup...except that the group you proposed wouldn't survive in an environment that needs care or it will kill you.

      But their remains will serve as an excellent study object of the state of human civilization. The aliens will have no trouble figuring out why humanity failed.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Monday February 25 2019, @06:27PM (1 child)

    by bob_super (1357) on Monday February 25 2019, @06:27PM (#806477)

    You don't need all of that.
    If the goal is to backup human existence, just send many corpses to dark spots on various bodies beyond the Earth. They'll just stay there intact, deep-frozen, until the aliens find them and study them.
    Write the ten numbers on the fingers. Mount the quartz disc on a granite/quartz tablet with human-scale drawings getting smaller towards the spinning disk ... I found the Golden Record instructions far from intuitive, which tells you how likely someone thinking a different way would be to figure them out.

    Anyway, it doesn't matter, because a passing Xzlkzbrg will just mindlessly eat the disk because quartz is a delicacy

    • (Score: 2) by fritsd on Tuesday February 26 2019, @04:54PM

      by fritsd (4586) on Tuesday February 26 2019, @04:54PM (#807038) Journal

      How to demonstrate that the quartz disc is related to human culture:

      african CD player [freakingnews.com]