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Putting Civilization in a Box For Space Means Choosing Our Legacy (space.com)
When SpaceX's record-breaking Falcon Heavy rocket made its first test launch in early February , the craft didn't just hurl Elon Musk's shiny red roadster and spacesuit-clad mannequin to space. It had another, smaller payload, which at first glance seems much less impressive: a 1-inch-wide (2.5 centimeters) quartz disc with Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy encoded in laser-etched gratings . From a report: The famous science fiction series is only the beginning of the discs' planned contents. At a time when traditional hard drives are just breaking into the terabyte range, the quartz medium can hold up to 360 terabytes per disc. It also boasts a life span of 14 billion years. That's longer than the current age of the universe. This disc was symbolic; future devices will contain much more, and more useful, information. But the technology speaks to grander issues that humanity is now pondering: becoming a multiplanetary civilization, storing information for thousands or millions of years, and contacting and communicating with other intelligences (alien and Earthling).
So how should we record our knowledge and experiences for posterity? How should we ensure that this information is understandable to civilizations that may be quite different from our own? And, most importantly, what should we say? Humans have faced challenges like these before. Ancient civilizations built monuments like the pyramids and left artifacts and writing, sometimes deliberately. Later researchers have used this material to try to piece together ancient worldviews. However, in the modern era, we've set our sights much further: from centuries to millennia, from one planet to interstellar space, and from one species to many.
So how should we record our knowledge and experiences for posterity? How should we ensure that this information is understandable to civilizations that may be quite different from our own? And, most importantly, what should we say? Humans have faced challenges like these before. Ancient civilizations built monuments like the pyramids and left artifacts and writing, sometimes deliberately. Later researchers have used this material to try to piece together ancient worldviews. However, in the modern era, we've set our sights much further: from centuries to millennia, from one planet to interstellar space, and from one species to many.
Page 1: How to construct a Quartz Disc Reader
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I figure at best we've got 200-300 years left on this planet before a major collapse of civilization. We used it up before we were able to go elsewhere. We blew it.
Whatever is stored will need a whole lot of uncompressed material as examples of the sorts of things on the medium, and as a stepping stone to reading the on-media documents that explain how to decode any compressed materials, and even those compressed files should have copious amounts of uncompressed metadata.
To show why we are not a thriving interstellar culture.
Lucas stole ideas from Asimov - everything from galactic empire, traders, rebels, to big ass space stations, etc. Whatever, today that stuff sucks donkey balls thanks to Disney.
Sure. And he stole his ideas from Gibbon.
And yes to the donkey balls.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
The tardis translation matrix will handle it.
...after running it through the ST Universal Translator.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
I mean, I love literature, including Asimov, but why spend all that bandwidth on one work? Would aliens realize it's fiction, or even know what fiction is? Wouldn't it be more appropriate to show our achievements in science or math, or maybe our wide range of cultures or languages?
Asimov is highly worthwhile, but c'mon. Shakespeare is in another league. And don't forget a decent English dictionary such as American Heritage.
Nicely done.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Sorry, but which year does this come from: "At a time when traditional hard drives are just breaking into the terabyte range"? Because traditional hard drives have broken the terabyte range 10 years ago. And we're talking mainstream.
Ancient civilizations built monuments like the pyramids and left artifacts and writing, sometimes deliberately.
I doubt that ancient rulers cared much (if at all) about their “legacy”. Ancient artifacts and monuments were produced for many reasons: religious, political, practical, artistic, etc., all of which had relevance in their present. Concerns about the future mostly had to do with the afterworld. What we find today by chance is not because of smart planning by our elders, it is because we still have smart people who find the study of our past valuable and enlightening.
As for those who are trying today to concoct some “legacy”, they are pompous, vain and clueless fools. They have no idea what will survive (or how long), what will be found, what will be judged valuable and significant. They’d sure love to make decisions for the rest of humanity. And, hey! Shooting a CD into space is a lot easier than achieving something actually so useful to humanity that it would be remembered for many ages.
Or, may be they are not really fools and, like a few rulers of the past, the “legacy” stuff they make is merely there to impress their contemporaries. In short, yes, just more bloody advertising.
360 Terabytes should be more than enough storage for anyone.
... the quartz medium can hold up to 360 terabytes per disc.
And as this comes from Earth, 360 terabytes == 1 Terrabyte
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I could post endless quotes from naysayers over the last 200 years about how the automobile will never outcompete the horse, radio is a useless novelty, everything that's possible to know has already been discovered, planes won't be able to travel faster than the speed of sound, 640K of memory... but, you get the idea.
We're terrible at predicting how an emerging technology will impact the future, but exceptionally good at finding novel ways to apply that technology in ways that nobody could have ever guessed.
Besides, your olympic athlete analogy is horribly flawed.
Isaac Asimov's books are unlikely to mean anything to aliens, that will make the message quite hard to understand
We could start with what we know about mathematics, physics and chemistry, as there are good chances a remote intelligent life form worked on that concepts too.
So, how much is that in Libraries of Congress?
There is most probably no one up there to read these messages due to the Civilization Bottleneck theory.
The bottleneck theory postulates that the life evolves via natural selection, i.e. the survival of the fittest. As a result any civilization is based on the same principle. It leads to creation of competing imperialistic groups, and finally to a nuclear war between them. And consequently a quick end to a civilization.
The Great Silence, the total absence of any intelligent radio signals whatsoever from the space, makes this theory quite plausible.
The Content Mafia will want compensation for galactic distribution rights.
The best you can probably do for a future historian is to record as complete a picture as you can without filtering. If you have space, and I don't see why you don't, you could chuck in a copy of the entire web, warts and all. It would, initially, be helpful to have a snapshot of how a few random families actually lived, so that the historians could get some context before wading in. And some digital library might give a general opinion of what we knew and believed. But any filtering process, even if it improves the quality of the record, must also add some bias. The whole picture, or if we can't manage that, then a random snapshot, may be more helpful.
Elon's car and it's data cube aren't leaving the solar system. This message isn't intended for aliens. It's for our somewhat distant offspring. Eventually we will have enough space presence to make recovering Starman an economically viable advertising stunt. SpaceX themselves may even fetch it back for their 100th or 250th anniversary if the orbit is sufficiently close.
Of course, if we lose track of it and they happen on it 20k years or more from now, it will be a valuable surprise.
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
Well, why not that one?
This isn't "Space Exploration by Committee", this is a frontier. Possibly our final one.
If somebody wants to launch a book into space, there's literally nobody that can or should stop them.
Maybe it'll give somebody else incentive to build a bigger rocket and launch the collected works of Chuck Tingle even further into space. Followed by a bigger, better rocket launching Pride & Prejudice. Then somebody launching Terry Goodkind into space.
Not his works. The author himself. He'd probably be up for it, based on his descent from sanity visibly documented during his Sword of Truth series. But that's a topic for another thread....
Long story short, people can do anything they want in space and more power to em. It's either that, or we sit on this rock till we die.
Maybe that's our destiny anyway, in which case there's still no reason to stop people from slinging random books into space.
Record information... not interpretation... Interpretation will be done when the past is understood in its historic and cultural context.