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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.

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  1. Re:Boycott, Divest, Sanction the criminal Israeli by GLMDesigns · · Score: 0, Troll

    Of course Divesting and Boycotting in protest IS A RIGHT.

    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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