A 30 million page backup of humanity has headed to the moon aboard an Israeli lander

Thursday night, a The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was carrying an Israeli-made spacecraft called Beresheet beyond the grasp of earthly gravity and sent him on his way to the surface of the moon. Beresheet embeds a specially designed disc, encoded with an archive of 30 million pages of human civilization, designed to last for billions of years.

The safeguard for humanity has been dubbed "The Lunar Library" by its creator, the Arch Mission Foundation (AMF).

"The idea is to place enough backup copies enough times in the solar system so that our precious knowledge and our biological heritage can never be lost," the co-founder of the project told me by e-mail. Association, Nova Spivack.

The Authority also placed small test records on Elon Musk's red Tesla Roadster, which were launched in the direction of Mars aboard the first Falcon Heavy demonstration mission last year. . This archive consisted of the trilogy of Isaac Asimov 's foundation, encoded in a quartz silica glass disk manufactured to last for millions of years, while the Roadster gravitated around the sun. The Authority has also placed a copy in the solid state of Wikipedia aboard a SpaceChain cubesat in low Earth orbit.

Part of the motivation for this ambitious project is to leave a copy of humanity's knowledge not only in the clouds, but far beyond these, whether the effects of climate change or a eventual nuclear war were to hurt us or the planet 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" said Spivack. "Instead of a backup to one place, our strategy is" multiple copies, multiple locations "and we plan to send updates regularly."

The Autorité des marchés financiers has already signed up to another mission on the Moon, with the start-up Astrobotic, which is to send a new slice of the lunar library on the Moon in the coming years. It is also planned that archives will be sent to Mars, at LaGrange points around the Earth and in deep underground caves of our planet.

"The interplanetary network of backup sites that we have set up could even contribute to the creation of an interplanetary Internet." Becoming an invading civilization, we will need ways to transfer big data into the solar system and to protect in transit, location, "said Spivack.

The on-board Beresheet disk is about the size and thickness of a DVD. It consists of 25 thin superimposed nickel films that, according to AMF, are resistant to radiation, extreme temperatures and other extreme conditions in space for billions of years. Of course, there is no way to test its duration, but if it survives as long as desired, the disc may last longer than the moon itself.

The top four layers actually contain 60,000 pages of tiny analog images that can be viewed with the optical microscope technology that has existed for centuries. The images include a kind of user guide explaining human language, disk content, and access to deeper layers containing compressed digital data.

The digitized layers include a complete copy of Wikipedia, more than 25,000 books and data to understand more than 5,000 languages.

But if human beings – or maybe somebody else – will have the opportunity to use the lunar library, it has to get to the surface of the moon. Beresheet now begins a long and complicated journey that will involve a handful of movements around the Earth to increase the size of its orbit before going into orbit around the moon and possibly attempting a landing.

The first window of opportunity to land arrives on April 11th. So, if all goes well, Wikipedia will land on the moon almost exactly 50 years after the first appearance of man. All extraterrestrials who will face it in the future will certainly be baffled by a few starters of choice, such as "The Conspiracy theories of landing on the moon", http://www.cnet.com/ "Flat Earth" or "The challenge of the tide". But at least they will help illustrate why we needed a backup.