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By Corey S. Powell
When Israel's space shuttle Beresheet was directed to the moon last week, it was carrying a mysterious cargo. Mission planners called it a time capsule, but hinted that it was not the whole story. The truth is now revealed: the small lunar probe contains an archive of 30 million pages of human knowledge engraved on a metal disc the size of a DVD.
The lunar library, as its archives are called, is a "safeguard of civilization" to ensure that our distant descendants never lose the collective wisdom of humanity, according to Nova Spivack, co-founder of Arch Mission Foundation, # 39; nonprofit organization at the origin of the project based in Los Angeles. project. The foundation is building spatial archives designed to survive for 6 billion years or more, a million times longer than the oldest existing written archives.
"One of the major evolutionary challenges we face is our amnesia about our past mistakes and the lack of active countermeasures to repeat them," Spivack said in an email. "For the survival of our species, we must find ways to become more aware of what has worked and what has not worked, and we must ensure that it is shared with the people of tomorrow. "
Paul Davies, director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Physics at Arizona State University, considers the lunar library to be essentially symbolic, but nonetheless important. "It encourages people to think about the place of man in the universe," he said, and to rethink the way we look for evidence of non-human civilizations.
"If we can leave records on the moon for a very long time, maybe AND will have done the same," said Davies, adding that it would make sense for humans to search for extraterrestrial artifacts on the moon or at night. from other places.
The world in disc
Sending a library in space is not entirely new to Arch Foundation. Before Elon Musk launched last year a Tesla Roadster around the sun, Spivack and his team placed in his glove box a quartz disk containing the entire text of the famous trilogy of science fiction books "Foundation" of Asimov, which strongly influenced the thought of Spivack. .
For the lunar library, the scope had to be much wider. "We are building a Rosetta stone for the beings who will inhabit our solar system in the future," said Spivack.
The time capsule was mentioned by the creators of Beresheet: a collection of songs, children's drawings and writings on Israeli culture and history. But the rest is really encyclopedic. The lunar library contains more than 200 gigabytes of data and includes the full English version of Wikipedia. tens of thousands of fiction and non-fiction books; a collection of textbooks; and a guide of 5,000 languages with 1.5 billion examples of translations.
All this information is engraved on 21 nickel disks of a thickness of 40 microns each (about 1 / 600th of an inch).
Since people in the far future will probably not have a DVD player handy and may not speak any language, the top of the lunar library's disc is engraved with tiny pictures of books and other documents explaining human linguistics, as well as instructions on how to read the library below. The introductory layers can easily be visualized when they are magnified 100 times under a simple microscope. Then it is up to our clever descendants to create the reader so that they can read the rest of the library.
Built to last (almost) forever
All this content will not mean anything if the physical object does not survive. The Arch Foundation has therefore helped develop an extremely sustainable data recording technology called Nanofiche for the lunar library disk. "It can withstand 10 times the warmth of the moon without damaging the data," Spivack said of the disc, made of nickel because of its extreme durability and modest cost.
The lunar library is protected by a protective layer and insulation, as well as by the structure of the Beresheet LG itself. All this should help protect him from the micrometeorites that hit the moon regularly. Even then, Spivack may not have the same lifespan as 6 billion years ago. "These objects will not survive for a billion years without degradation, but they could be intact and without burial after 10 million or maybe 50 million," Davies said.
Spivack acknowledged it, but pointed out that the Lunar Library was only one element of an even more daring project called the Archive of Billions of Years – an effort that should to live up to his name. Tesla's disc, a spaceship, is a test of this archive, as is a prototype Arch Library launched on Earth's orbit last October. Many other collections are yet to come, each replicating the contents of the lunar library.
"We want the archives to last longer than the moon itself," he said. "If we place enough copies in enough places, some will reach in the distant future, no matter what will happen on Earth, Moon, Mars or any other place."
Enter now into the age of immortality
The beginnings of Spivack's extensive space library already exist, of course, starting with the cosmic maps aboard NASA's Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft and the Golden Record affixed to Voyager probes in the 1970s.
The goal of Spivack is to flood the solar system with other versions of the lunar library: in the caves and mountains of the Earth, at other places on the moon, on Mars and in the depths. The Beresheet engine recently encountered a problem that delayed its trip to the moon, but Spivack is not worried. Even though Beresheet fails, the Arch Foundation is already in discussion with other organizations about their upcoming space missions, including a lunar landing planned by the Astrobotic company.
Spivack can only speculate on the lessons to be learned from humans in the distant future that they will have to relearn when they find the libraries, and on the type of crisis that the knowledge of the lunar library could help to avoid. But he already sees the benefits of his project.
"By placing an archive of all past and present civilizations on the moon, we can now say that civilization itself is on the moon," he said. I want everyone to be able to look at the moon and realize that humanity is now multiplanetary. It's a small change of perspective with deep implications. "
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