Humanity’s 30-million-page backup plan is heading to the moon

Everything is information and it's easy to see how a powerful computer can easily simulate all of human history.

When SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket took off on Thursday night, it carried humanity’s entire backup plan with it. It was headed to the moon, the world’s ultimate cold-storage unit.

The Arch Mission Foundation (AMF) created the Lunar Library, a 30-million-page long compendium of humanity’s greatest cultural offerings, encoded it on a specially designed disc meant to last a billion years, and sent it to the moon to keep it safe. The disc is being carried to its final resting place on the moon’s surface aboard Beresheet, the Israeli spacecraft (and Google Lunar XPrize contender) that was carried to space by the Falcon 9, CNET reports.

The Lunar Library contains a vast archive of human history and civilization, covering all subjects, cultures, nations, languages, genres, and time periods. Everything from the contents of Wikipedia, to a compilation of human languages, the Rosetta Project, books selected by Project Gutenberg, as well as genome maps, 60,000 analog images of pages of books, photographs, illustrations, and documents, and much of the world’s greatest art, music, literature, and scientific knowledge. It’s all encoded on a disc that is composed of 25 nickel discs, each only 40 microns thick, made for the AMF by NanoArchival.

The Lunar Library is the third installment in The Arch Mission Foundation’s Billion Year Archive initiative, which aims to deliver cultural backups to many locations around Earth and out in the Solar System. “We can definitely preserve our unique cultural heritage and biological record in a way that will survive for millions to billions of years,” Nova Spivack, co-founder and chairman of the Arch Mission Foundation, said in a statement about an earlier mission.

www.fastcompany.com...

It ends with:

“Through massive replication around the solar system, we will be able to guarantee that the Arch Libraries will never be lost — even millions to billions of years in the future.”

If you could simulate a universe today, the people in the universe would share our history. For this reason, you don't have to run an entire history of the universe in your simulation. With files like these, you can always upload a back history into the simulation.

One way we can find out if we live in a simulation is look for the latency of space-time. If we were to find this, we can then see if the latency is the same everywhere. A smart Programmer will do what we do now and what we will do with 5G.

With 5G, there will be some areas that will always maintain the lowest latency. Things like self driving cars and medical procedures. Things that will be allowed to reach a higher latency is watching movies or playing video games. This way if the network is crowded the higher latency doesn't affect things that are very important like a self driving car going 100 mph on the freeway with other self driving cars.

So, if you're creating a universe simulation, you would want to make sure that around people you always have the lowest latency so things are rendered instantly. In some distant exoplanet system with no people, it could have high latency. This would mean a moon near exoplanet HD 20781 c may take time to be rendered and if we were on that exoplanet we might even notice it.

If we were to make a discovery like this though, I'm sure we would get a visit from the creators of the simulation because if we were to discover something like this there would be very little doubt that we live in a simulated universe.

Sounds like ST "All our Yesterdays" with the library

a reply to: neoholographic

I have only one question: what's the point?

originally posted by: ArMaP
a reply to: neoholographic

I have only one question: what's the point?

None considering mico meteorites continually bombarding the moon.

originally posted by: ArMaP
a reply to: neoholographic

I have only one question: what's the point?

Good point. I don't know an exact number, but it seems to me like 99.9 percent of all of Earth's accumulated knowledge and data is essentially deleted every day and replaced by something new. We are rapidly approaching the point where the past becomes inconsequential, and for good reason. It used to be that if you knew something, it could help you your whole life. Now by the time we're old we don't know how to run any of the computers anymore. The expiration date of knowledge is becoming shorter all the time. In a billion years, the aliens will unlikely find our VCR programming instructions very useful.

Love it. Sort of a belt and suspenders approach to ensure the survival of human civilization. Can't have too much insurance!

Would love it if they launched multiple 'knowledge bombs' into low Earth orbit, all with various orbital decays scheduled to crash back down to Earth every 1000 years or so, just in case...

Just imagine, some terrible natural disaster wipes out 90% of humanity, knocking us back into the stone age, and then some enormous library of human knowledge comes crashing back down to Earth to reboot civilization!

Wait, that could be a good plot to a sci-fi novel...well you heard it here first!

originally posted by: ArMaP
a reply to: neoholographic

I have only one question: what's the point?

I would say it's because we can and human curiosity. Somebody somewhere said what if we spread human history around space that could be kept for millions or even billions of years and some future civilization found them. From that point, the human imagination takes over.

It's like the Immortality Drive:

The Immortality Drive is a large memory device which was taken to the International Space Station in a Soyuz spacecraft on October 12, 2008. The Immortality Drive contains fully digitized DNA sequences of a select group of humans, such as physicist Stephen Hawking, comedian and talk show host Stephen Colbert, Playboy model Jo Garcia, game designer Richard Garriott, fantasy authors Tracy Hickman and Laura Hickman, pro wrestler Matt Morgan, and athlete Lance Armstrong.[1][2] The microchip also contains a copy of George's Secret Key to the Universe, a children's book authored by Stephen Hawking and his daughter, Lucy. The intent of the Immortality Drive is to preserve human DNA in a time capsule, in case some global cataclysm should occur on Earth.

en.wikipedia.org...

China sent into space a capsule with DNA of a tiger

buzzon.live...

Chance to bury your DNA on the moon in a time capsule

www.newscientist.com...

Eventually everything about us will be seeded throughout the universe. It's just human curiosity and imagination. Also, most Scientist probably believe that extraterrestrial life exists and that life on earth isn't some one time event.

originally posted by: Subsonic
Just imagine, some terrible natural disaster wipes out 90% of humanity, knocking us back into the stone age, and then some enormous library of human knowledge comes crashing back down to Earth to reboot civilization!

Most of that knowledge only applies to the Earth as we now know it. It'll be pretty useless in some future mass-extinction scenario.

originally posted by: Blue Shift

originally posted by: Subsonic
Just imagine, some terrible natural disaster wipes out 90% of humanity, knocking us back into the stone age, and then some enormous library of human knowledge comes crashing back down to Earth to reboot civilization!

Most of that knowledge only applies to the Earth as we now know it. It'll be pretty useless in some future mass-extinction scenario.

Oh, I don't know. Maybe the humanities type information would not age well, but math and science are pretty much 4-ever.

a reply to: neoholographic

You should watch the movie The Thirteenth Floor, to see what can happen when people start figuring out they are inside simulations.

originally posted by: Subsonic
Just imagine, some terrible natural disaster wipes out 90% of humanity, knocking us back into the stone age, and then some enormous library of human knowledge comes crashing back down to Earth to reboot civilization!

And how would we, at a stone age level, read that library? We are not talking about old style books, that anyone that knows how to read and the language they were written can read, we are talking about something that needs, at least, a microscope to read the information etched on the disk's surface.

a reply to: neoholographic

I always thought the idea of "time capsules" stupid, as they are representative only of the people that chose what to put there, at the time they chosen them.

a reply to: ArMaP

I'm fascinated by historic pictures and artifacts. Honolulu was a very different place when my father was born here 100 years ago. I think there is value in learning things from the past. A newspaper from then holds my interest.

a reply to: Phage

Sure there is value in learning things from the past, but by looking at objects chose by someone we are getting a biased and limited version of how things were imposed on us.

originally posted by: ArMaP
a reply to: neoholographic

I always thought the idea of "time capsules" stupid, as they are representative only of the people that chose what to put there, at the time they chosen them.

That true, however it’s better than nothing.

I take a different approach to backups.

My approach is, there's no need to back anything up. If something ever advances to the point of full timeline traversal, they can cherry pick what they want, whether I leave it on the moon, or on a piece of paper in a trash can fire. I am the Archivalist. I back up everything, by perceiving this universe. If you want to make an Apple Pie from scratch, you must first invent Carl Sagan.

originally posted by: Subsonic
Love it. Sort of a belt and suspenders approach to ensure the survival of human civilization. Can't have too much insurance!

Would love it if they launched multiple 'knowledge bombs' into low Earth orbit, all with various orbital decays scheduled to crash back down to Earth every 1000 years or so, just in case...

Just imagine, some terrible natural disaster wipes out 90% of humanity, knocking us back into the stone age, and then some enormous library of human knowledge comes crashing back down to Earth to reboot civilization!

Wait, that could be a good plot to a sci-fi novel...well you heard it here first!

Its already been done before. we used to live on mars before they destroyed themselves with weapons so powerful it reduced all traces to red dust.

Remember this from 1977....voyager.jpl.nasa.gov... well....lol...can you even find a record player to play it on today?....lol...the discs we send today will be obsolete in 100 years never mind eternity...by the time someone else finds them NO ONE WILL LIKELY BE ABLE TO DECIPHER THEM....lol.....nice gesture though...I think a Monolith is the way to go myself...send up a Auto-Bot to build one a mile wide and three miles high .

a reply to: Nickn3

To me, a biased view is worth than nothing, as it doesn't represent the truth of the whole situation.

a reply to: one4all

Exactly, it's just a publicity stunt, and, like all publicity, I think it's useless.