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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
300 years ago we were still 100 years away from developing the steam locomotive ... but you think that we won't "go elsewhere" in the next 300 years?
That's adorable.
Well, we'll see what happens, Trump is the only politician in my life to actually stick to his campaign promises so I have more faith in him at this point.
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.
... 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.
Maybe instead of looking to politicians to lead us to the stars, we should look elsewhere. Unlike Obama and Trump, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are getting stuff done.
An anonymous coward remarked:
Après nous, le déluge. C'est la vie.
Prompting sysrammer to respond:
Nice. I looked it up because I wasn't sure about "nous". Wiki added this tidbit: "adopted as the motto of the Royal Air Force 617 Squadron which carried out the "Dambuster" raids". Appropriate.
And, of course the 617 Squadron's motto was a cheeky (and purposeful) misquote of Louis XIV's famous dismissal of warnings about unrest among the commoners over his extravagant spending on Versailles, "Après moi, le déluge."
That aside, though, there are certainly going to be plenty of opportunities for humanity to go extinct in the near- and medium-term future. Designer plagues, for instance. (If you're old enough, you may remember when science-geek kids regularly got chemistry sets for Xmas and birthday presents that included some fairly hazardous substances, as well as the ingredients to make everything from awesome stinks to small quantities of actual explosives, poison gases, and other noxious and/or dangerous compounds. Now consider the potential consequences of making gene-splicing technology in similar kit form available to antisocial 14-year-olds.) Or runaway nanotechnology. (Blue, green, and gray goo, anyone?) The continuing proliferation of nuclear weapons eventually making its way down the responsibility food chain to members of the tinpot dictator crowd, perhaps?
The thing is, though, "using up" the planet is pretty fucking far down the list. Gobbling up all the low-hanging fruit? Absolutely - and we're just the kind of short-sighted species to depend on for that. But those resources don't, for the most part, get "used up" in the process of using them. Instead, they get transformed into trash - trash that future generations will find ways to recycle into new stuff, because the scarcity of the resources will by then justify the expense of recovering them from landfills and so forth.
Likewise, catastrophic climate change will not "kill the planet," either. It will change the planet and its ecosystem in fairly drastic ways - but life will continue, and adapt, because that's what life does. The Permian-Triassic extinction killed off 95% of all species in existence on this planet. 180 million years later, just before the Chixiculub event ended the reign of the dinosaurs, the planet was teeming with life - and it had been overrun with species proliferating to occupy every available ecological niche since about 10 megayears after the P-T extinction ran its course.
We humans are a pretty damned hardy bunch. If there's a way to survive, we'll find it. Not all of us, perhaps, but enough to allow the species to continue to exist.
Sure, it's possible that, as the icecaps melt and the oceans rise, billions of human beings will die in conflicts over possession of the remaining, sharply reduced quantity of arable land and potable water. By the same token, it's also quite possible that they will not - that, instead, we'll find solutions like urban farming and inexpensive desalinization and filtration of toxic compounds from aquifers that will allow those billions to avoid armed conflict, despite wrenching changes in geography and resource distribution. It's simply impossible to know with any degree of certainty.
As Neils Bohr famously observed: "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future ..."
Check out my novel.
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.
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