Quite apart from the larger implications just contemplate how a tiny Middle Eastern country that depends on American subsidies for its very existence is able to send a rocket to the Moon.
The 'Lunar Library' backing up all of humanity: Israeli lander sent to the moon is carrying 30 MILLION PAGES of humankind's 'precious knowledge and biological heritage'
-
'Lunar
Library' resembles a '120mm DVD,' but it's composed of 25 nickel
discs
-
It
was flung into the galaxy on board Israel's private 'Beresheet'
lunar lander
-
Each
layer contains thousands of pages of books and documents, as well as
an entire copy of the English language Wikipedia and a guide to many
languages
the Daily Mail,
26 February, 2019
On board the 1,290lb spacecraft is a set of tiny disks containing a whopping 30 million pages of documents that serve as an archive of human civilization.
Called
the 'Lunar
Library,' the
record was created by the Arch Mission Foundation for the purpose of
preserving humanity's 'precious knowledge and biological
heritage' well into the future.
The lunar lander, called Beresheet, blasted off on Thursday from Cape Canaveral atop a Falcon 9 rocket.
As
part of its journey, it will orbit the Earth for roughly six weeks,
before reaching lunar orbit in early April. If successful, it
will then attempt a lunar touchdown on April 11th.
Beresheet,
which translates to Genesis, or 'In The Beginning,' is carrying
an Israeli flag, as well as the Lunar Library.
The
Lunar Library resembles a '120mm DVD,' but it's actually composed of
25 nickel film discs, each being just 40 microns thick, according to
the Arch Mission Foundation.
The
first four layers are made up of 60,000 photographs of pages of
books, photos, illustrations and documents.
The
first layer is 'visible to the naked eye,' can be viewed with 100x
magnification and contains 1,500 pages of text, images, logos and
other data.
The
next three layers can be viewed at 1000x magnification.
In
these layers are 20,000 images of texts and photos, including a
'Primer that teaches over a million concepts...as well as the content
of the Wearable Rosetta disc,' which is a guide to the linguistics of
more than 1,000 human languages.
Among
the other information included on the disc are technical instructions
detailing the scientific and engineering knowledge that's required to
access, decode and understand the digital information located further
in the Lunar Library.
There's
also an entire copy of the English language Wikipedia, Israeli
history and data from the Long Now Foundation, a linguistic guide to
5000 languages.
On board the 1,290lb 'Beresheet' spacecraft is a set of tiny disks containing a whopping 30 million pages of documents that serve as an archive of human civilization
The
Lunar Library amounts to about 200gb of data when its digital
contents are decompressed.
It
won't be the only Lunar Library that will be sent to the moon,
either.
The
Arch Mission Foundation will send another installment of the Lunar
Library into space in the next five years on board a spacecraft with
startup Astrobiotic.
'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,' Arch Mission Foundation
co-founder Nova Spivack told CNET.
It's
not the first time the Arch Mission Foundation has tried sending one
of its discs into space.
Elon
Musk's SpaceX sent one of its special data devices into the galaxy
inside the Tesla Roadster that was launched aboard the Falcon Heavy
last February.
Inside
that quartz silica glass disc was a copy of Isaac Asimov's Foundation
Trilogy.
The
plan is that should the Earth and all of humanity be destroyed by
climate change, our history will be preserved.
'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 told
CNET.
'Instead
of one backup in one place our strategy is 'many copies, many places'
-- and we plan to send updates on a regular basis.'
Thirty-million-pagebackup of humanity headed to moon aboard Israeli lander
If
the apocalypse strikes, the Arch Mission Foundation wants to be sure
all the knowledge we've accumulated doesn't disappear
Here's
their home page. scroll to the bottom and you'll see all their
projects they're working on. BTW, they're in league with Elon Musk.
"Arch
hopes to seed the solar system with millions and possibly billions of
archives into "all kinds of locations".[6] It wants to
build a permanent library on the Moon and on Mars.[ Arch
envisions its small light-weight disks might be an alternative means
of moving large amounts of data between Earth and Mars as opposed to
radio signals.[6] Longer term they envision connecting the Arch
Libraries through a decentralised read-write data sharing network
that spans the Solar System.
"Data
in the libraries will include Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, human
genomes and other large open-data sets.They will also allow
donations of money to instruct that certain data be included, and
will do so without censorship of what can be included.The
foundation cites the likelihood that a being developed enough to find
and read the information would already possess significant technology
as the reason for not prioritizing scientific data sets.
"In
February 2018, the Arch Mission successfully placed an archive called
the Orbital Library, which contains a copy of Wikipedia, into
low-earth orbit. nThe Arch Mission has also built a payload called
the Lunar Library, which contains scientific, cultural and historical
information in almost 30 languages and several encyclopedias
including Wikipedia. The Lunar Library is set to arrive on the Moon
using SpaceIL spacecraft."
THE
MEMORY OF HUMANITY
The
Arch Mission Foundation is a non-profit organization that maintains a
backup of planet Earth, designed to continuously preserve and
disseminate humanity’s most important knowledge across time and
space.
The
Arch Mission Foundation is preserving the knowledge and biology of
our planet in a solar system wide project called The Billion Year
Archive.™
THE
BILLION YEAR ARCHIVE™
The
Billion Year Archive is the largest footprint and longest duration
engineering project in human history. It is also the first practical
initiative with potential to guarantee that our species and
civilization will never be lost.
The
more locations that Arch Libraries that are sent to, the greater the
probability that at least some of them will survive to be discovered
in the distant future.
Long
after the Pyramids have turned to dust, and no matter what transpires
on Earth, The Billion Year Archive will remain.
We are now heading into a 6th mass extinction event due to several issues happening on Earth, including Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD) that is sometimes referred to as abrupt climate change. This extinction event will likely either reduce life on this planet down to mostly the bacterial level. Perhaps all surface life will be wiped out. It is extremely unlikely anything like our tragic species will evolve in the future.
ReplyDeleteNote that supporters for such projects, such as Elon Musk, tend to insist that we must always remain hopeful.