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Thirty-Million-Page Backup of Humanity Headed To Moon Aboard Israeli Lander (cnet.com)

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.

5 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. strange name? by ChristTrekker · · Score: 3, Informative

    "B’resheet" means "In the beginning". It is the Hebrew name for what many know as the book of Genesis, being the first few words from it.

    1. Re:strange name? by techno-vampire · · Score: 4, Informative

      Actually, in Hebrew, it's the very first word. In Hebrew, books, prayers and weekly Torah portions are almost always named by their first word. Torah portions are named after the first word that's not been used yet because otherwise there'd be an awful lot of portions who's name would translate into "And the Lord said unto Moses." Also, of course, one of the central prayers of the service is called the Amidah, meaning "The Standing Prayer," because the congregation stands while reading it.

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  2. Re:Beyond what? by aitikin · · Score: 3, Informative

    The Moon wouldn't be the Moon because it wouldn't be a moon,.

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  3. Re:B.D.S. by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, 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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  4. Re:B.D.S. by harrkev · · Score: 2, Informative

    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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