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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.

3 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. thats great by FudRucker · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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

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    Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
  2. Re:B.D.S. by harrkev · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Which crimes are those?

    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.

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    "-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
  3. Re:B.D.S. by ClickOnThis · · Score: 4, 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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    If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.