Thirty-Million-Page Backup of Humanity Headed To Moon Aboard Israeli Lander (cnet.com) 168
Last week, 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. From a report: 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 CNET via email.
The disc aboard Beresheet is about the size and thickness of a DVD, but consists of 25 stacked thin nickel films that AMF insists can resist radiation, extreme temperatures and other harsh conditions found in space for billions of years. There is, of course, no way to test how long it will last, but if it survives as long as hoped, the disc may even be around longer than the moon itself. The top four layers are actually filled with 60,000 pages of tiny analog images that can be viewed with optical microscope technology that's been around for centuries. The images include a sort of users' guide explaining human language, the contents of the disc and how to access the deeper layers containing compressed digital data.
The disc aboard Beresheet is about the size and thickness of a DVD, but consists of 25 stacked thin nickel films that AMF insists can resist radiation, extreme temperatures and other harsh conditions found in space for billions of years. There is, of course, no way to test how long it will last, but if it survives as long as hoped, the disc may even be around longer than the moon itself. The top four layers are actually filled with 60,000 pages of tiny analog images that can be viewed with optical microscope technology that's been around for centuries. The images include a sort of users' guide explaining human language, the contents of the disc and how to access the deeper layers containing compressed digital data.
So When Humanity Crashes... (Score:2)
...we just fly to the moon to learn how to reboot?
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Someone's gotta be there to tell them to turn it off and turn it back on again.
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It's not ideal, but ironically, it's less likely to be turned into a smoking crater than the place it came from.
Billions of years (Score:2)
Idiocracy is here. No one even questions that statement.
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Gees, dude, last time I looked at the moon it was covered in these round objects, I think they are called craters, supposedly created by impacts of all sorts and sizes. Well, I guess those pages are playing atmosphere free impact roulette, how long will they last, a hour, a day, a week, a year, who knows but definitely a whole lot less longer than the moon itself, it can take millions of impacts of varying sizes, from microscopic to sizeable boulders, routinely and it only takes one to blow away collective
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During the moon landings themselves the astronauts were able to locate a lunar surveyor that had been there for two years. It was fully intact except for one leg.
Of course that doesn't mean something could survive a billion years or more but it does mean that every square inch of the moon is not getting constan
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Let me break it down to you: this disk isn't even going to be readable in 50 years.
Apollo retroreflectors are still in operation (well, good enough to bounce a laser off them anyway) and they're 50 years old and exposed to the vacuum on the lunar surface.
If the disks aren't directly exposed then micrometeorite erosion could take a few tens of thousands of years to get to them.
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Off-site backup? (Score:4, Funny)
So off-planetary backups will be a thing now?
Beyond what? (Score:5, Interesting)
If the moon were beyond the grasp of earth's gravity, it wouldn't be the moon.
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Really? Because I thought that if the moon were beyond the grasp of Earth's gravity, it wouldn't be in orbit around it.
Re:Beyond what? (Score:4, Informative)
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To be fair the spacecraft did need to escape from Earth's gravity well, reaching a speed where it won't fall back down, before being subsequently captured by the Moon's gravity. So for the middle part of the trip it is beyond the "grasp" of both, as far as that analogy works.
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Being in orbit definitely means you're still in the orbitted celestial body's sphere of influence. You can't orbit without a gravity well to bend your trajectory into an ellipse.
What I think the article means to say is that the disc has been placed in a location where the local gravity well is not dominated by the Earth.
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I guess it depends how you interpret "grasp". I think your interpretation makes a lot of sense too.
Cool (Score:2)
That's going to make a great story plot for the movie made by the alien archeologists who will find the disc.
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That's going to make a great story plot for the movie made by the alien archeologists who will find the disc.
Millions of years later, an alien race finds a dead, sterile planet and, on the moon orbiting it, a bunch of junk and a data reserve, some of it still readable. Yet:
"The digitized layers include a full copy of Wikipedia, more than 25,000 books and data for understanding over 5,000 languages."
"They didn't include any of their own genetic information, so they were either incredibly arrogant, or remarkably stupid."
The ultimate air-gapping your backup (Score:2)
This might be taking the need to air gap your backup disks a bit too far. On the other hand, I wonder how long it will be before the disks are hacked and 30 million pages of data found lying around on the moon are exposed?
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There's nothing to 'hack' because the data is not encoded (digitized) or encrypted in any way. Like the Long Now Foundation language disks, it's just text rendered at minute size. It can be read with any sufficiently good optics.
Lost .... or inaccessible? (Score:5, Interesting)
enough backups in enough places around the solar system, on an ongoing basis, that our precious knowledge and biological heritage can never be lost
So if civilisation does crash, the sum total of human knowledge won't be lost. We will know where it is: on the Moon. But until we regain that knowledge we will not be able to get back to the Moon to read it.
And by that time, it will be rather irrelevant as we will have already rediscovered it!
Re:Lost .... or inaccessible? (Score:5, Interesting)
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According to the linked site, it's an archive of history and culture. Not technology. It'd be kinda like going (back) to the moon, and finding the dinosaurs had already been there and left a record of their culture and history.
This. It's a time capsule. [wikipedia.org]
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It is probably all written in Hebrew ... how many people can read that? 5million? 10 million? 20 million?
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Could be an interesting sci-fi story. Imagine that Apollo 11 had discovered an archive of data from a prior civilisation on the moon, which was at approximately 2019 levels of tech or 50 years ahead.
strange name? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:strange name? (Score:5, Informative)
thats great (Score:4, Insightful)
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someday millions of years from now some ETs will discover a disk with a bunch of old testament style begats of a bunch of dumb humans that went extinct because they could not keep their environment clean and stable
If humanity was wiped out, it would be the sole evidence of an "intelligent" life form ever existing on this planet. As a scientist, this would be an amazing find. It would prove that they were not alone (at one point!) in the Universe.
I dunno. I could think of worse things to waste money/energy on. :)
I donated to the project (Score:1)
I kicked in $20 to the project when I first heard about it. It was competing for the Google Lunar X Prize. The project doesn't have state backing, but several state owned enterprises have made in-kind and other sorts of donations, especially expertise, particularly Israel Aerospace Industries. The original cost of the project ballooned to $100 million, which shows that even a bare-boned project like this is exorbitantly expensive. To my knowledge *none* of the other X-Prize teams made it this far.
I hop
how to access the deeper compressed layers (Score:2)
Then again, they'd better watch out after decompression -- the RIAA and MPAA will be after them as well, since the copyright duration extensions will still be active.
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They had to use a lossy algorithm because they can't keep data perfectly compressed in the vacuum of space.
The moon isn't the right location (Score:2)
One needs to be on Mars, with another sunk deep into the seas of Triton. And if we ever locate Planet Nine, a third copy could go there.
Of course it'd be best if each came with some mechanism to protect the archives...
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A decade back I propose something like this on /. Except I thought that color coded stainless steel disks would be a better option. I don;t that my obscure post had anything to do with this project but I'm glad someone else had a similar ideal.
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On a couple different occasions now, I’ve tried to work a War Dogs reference into a Slashdot story discussion - but I seem to be the only one who’s read the books.
I thought they were rather good...
This reminds me of a "Scotch 3M" advertisement (Score:4, Interesting)
In the background of the slogan, the full page was filled with an image of the starting Challenger space shuttle.
Only thirty million pages? (Score:1)
Thirty million pages doesn't seem like much, really. The linux kernel source code is now over 25 million lines, which would be roughly 500,000 pages. So 20% of the entire knowledge of humanity is encompassed by the Linux kernel?
I don't think so. Thirty million pages is at best an exemplar of current knowledge, but nowhere near anything worthy of being called a "backup".
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Encyclopedia Galactica (Score:2)
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"The Star", by Arthur C. Clarke, also fits
it's not for homo sapiens species (Score:2)
If we loose all that, we are likely to perish all together. So probably that's a record for another species to discover.
Should have gone with a black rectangular monolith (Score:1)
A black rectangular monolith with sides having dimensions with the ratios 1:4:9.
Easy Data retrieval (Score:4, Funny)
At least it will be easier to retrieve than the backups on my ZIP drive.
cool! pop and EMP and reboot (Score:2)
Spacecraft carried beyond earth's gravity? (Score:2)
That's a novel way of describing orbital mechanics. Neither the spacecraft or the moon is “beyond the grasp of earth's gravity”, what they are is in orbit.
National Security Risk! (Score:1)
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from what I understand, this is a private project with no relation with the state of Israel
Re:B.D.S. (Score:5, Insightful)
PopeRatzo just demonstrated he's an anti-Semitic jackass.
He was not dissing jews. He was dissing Israel. But people like you respond to criticism of Israel with the charge of anti-semitism, because it sparks more outrage.
IMHO the government of Israel -- in fact any country's government -- is fair game for rational criticism of its policies and actions. Such criticism is not a hostility towards race, ethnicity, or religion, even if some try to imagine it to be so.
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Hostility to Israel is commonly used by Nazis and other anti-Semites to disguise their ugly bigotry.
I'm not sure they're that good at disguising their bigotry, but okay.
You may not be anti-Semitic. But you're OK with being on the same side as anti-Semites. No platform.
I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous.
I daresay that racists didn't vote for Obama. But that doesn't mean that voting for Obama's opponent means you're "OK with being on the same side" as racists. You may have disagreed with Obama's policies in good faith, and voted for someone else. That's not why racists didn't vote for him.
And for the record, you are correct that I am not anti-Semitic. Quite the contrary. I grew up worshipping a jew. And I a
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To be more precise, hostility to the *government* of Israel is not the same as hostility to Israel, Israelis, or Jews.
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Most Arab states don't even recognize the sovereignty of the state of Israel. They all pretty much refer to them as Jews.
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Hostility to Israel is commonly used by Nazis and other anti-Semites to disguise their ugly bigotry.
You may not be anti-Semitic. But you're OK with being on the same side as anti-Semites.
Yeah, right. Your logic is a pathetically obvious attempt to prevent any criticism of the politics of stealing peoples homes and land for no better reason that it says in a badly-written book that the magic sky man said it was okay.
Hey, Hitler massively and purposefully increased the ownership of guns in the non-Jewish population of Germany. I guess that means the NRA is on the same side as anti-Semites, right?
No platform.
Stick your platform up your ass you poor excuse for a human.
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Around the turn of the century, I found myself on a neo-Nazi mailing list for some unknown reason. It felt weird when it and I were saying the same thing about current events. It didn't happen often, but it happened on a few occasions.
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And so to is buying from a company (or country) because you agree with them.
Your BDS is failing miserably. In a couple years China will be a bigger trading partner with Israel than Europe. Not too long after that the rest of Asia (especially India, Sourth Korea and Japan) will also be a larger than the European market.
Whatever you think of Israel the Palestinians keep shooting themselves in the foot. And BDS isn't going to help them.
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I really don't care about the Israeli-v-Palestinian conflict. It's a grand battle of Dicks v Assholes to me. I have noticed, though, that supporters of Israel - and sometimes even people representing the Israeli government - are very quick to shout "Antisemite! Nazi!" the moment anyone dares to criticize their beloved country, or even shows insufficient enthusiasm in supporting it.
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I don't think Israel's list of crimes surpasses these other countries. And Israel has the same right to exist as all the rest of the countries in the world.
Going back to talking strict
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So was the Cave of the Patriarchs Massacre.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Take your pick:
https://www.independent.co.uk/... [independent.co.uk]
Shooting Rockets at Civillians (Score:1)
Oh wait, that's the Palestinians who are deliberately targeting civilians. But that's good, because Israel is bad, because anti-Semitism is good when you realize that jews are white and therefore privileged and evil.
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The crime of being the only real democracy in that part of the world. The crime of treating women and homosexuals as equals. The crime of allowing Christians, Jews, and Muslims to happily coexist without persecutions of one or more of them. Those are all horrible things, according to some.
Re:B.D.S. (Score:5, Informative)
The crime of allowing Christians, Jews, and Muslims to happily coexist without persecutions of one or more of them.
...unless they were born next door. In which case, take their property, build a wall to keep them out, bulldoze their greenhouses, and build settlements on their land which are internationally understood to be illegal.
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Well, when these neighbors keep launching explosive rockets, hoping to kill as many civilians as possible, that changes the picture a bit. Do you know HOW they got control of those lands? Hint: their neighbors wanted to wipe them out.
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Well, when these neighbors keep launching explosive rockets, hoping to kill as many civilians as possible, that changes the picture a bit.
You know what changes the picture a bit? Expansionism. In fact, it changed the borders.
Do you know HOW they got control of those lands? Hint: their neighbors wanted to wipe them out.
Wait, are you talking about the Israelis, or the Palestinians? Because you could equally use that description in any direction.
I think that this [youtube.com] sums up the situation better than anything else. But you could equally well have asked TE Lawrence.
Re:B.D.S. (Score:5, Interesting)
You seem to lack knowledge of history. Not long after Israel was created, there were armies massing on their borders ready to invade, and wipe them out.
If Canada had amassed thousands of tanks, and tens of thousands of armed troops right at the Canada/US border, getting ready to invade, wouldn't that make you a little nervous? If a war started, would be be wrong to grab a little of Canada as a "buffer zone" to help prevent a future invasion?
Yes, you are partially right. I agree that Israel should not really expand into those lands. But as to the rest of it, if Palestinians routinely try to kill Jews, should the Jews just let them?
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You seem to lack knowledge of history. Not long after Israel was created, there were armies massing on their borders ready to invade, and wipe them out.
If you want to talk history, let's go back a bit further. The Jews got kicked out of that area, and then were reinstalled by force. How do you expect the neighbors to have felt about that?
Yes, you are partially right. I agree that Israel should not really expand into those lands. But as to the rest of it, if Palestinians routinely try to kill Jews, should the Jews just let them?
Would they try so much without the 1967 expansion?
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We should also give North America back to the native peoples.
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We should also give North America back to the native peoples.
I have pointed out many times that the way we treated the natives was abominable. Whether it was literally genocide or not, when you boil it down, that's what's left in the bottom of the kettle. But sure, do that! I'm a quarter Mexican, which means I am one, partially anyway. Don't let the door hit you. Or did you mean full-blood natives? Because this land would look funny with just a few hundred people on it.
More seriously, Jews already lost that land, and then were reinstalled by force by the USA. Great B
Re:B.D.S. (Score:4, Interesting)
Canada actually *did* amass an army at the US border once. In response, the US pre-emptively declared war and invaded. This resulted in the War of 1812. It's mostly forgotten now because the peace agreement which ended it included both sides ceding all captured territory, so very little was actually changed.
Yes they do (Score:3)
There's a blank page at the end.
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I wonder if any of those pages will contain information about the crimes the state of Israel has perpetrated against Palestinians.
No, hopefully it's only full of real history.
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I wonder if any of those pages will contain information about the crimes the state of Israel has perpetrated against Palestinians.
This would be a valid question if those pages contained information about the crimes the Palestinians had committed against Israel.
Since this is a knowledge project and not a political project, I would expect the answer to both questions is: No.
(No, I am not interested in arguing about who started it, both sides are fucking pathetic. I could get behind glassing the entire area with nuclear bombs and forgetting about the stupidities and atrocities happening there on a daily basis.)
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