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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.
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.
from what I understand, this is a private project with no relation with the state of Israel
"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."
Idiocracy is here. No one even questions that statement.
So off-planetary backups will be a thing now?
"a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carried an Israeli-made spacecraft named Beresheet beyond the grasp of Earth's gravity...
If the moon were beyond the grasp of earth's gravity, it wouldn't be the moon.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
There's a blank page at the end.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That's going to make a great story plot for the movie made by the alien archeologists who will find the disc.
#DeleteFacebook
And bondage, domination and sadism are the solutions?
Ezekiel 23:20
Um, no. It isn't logically valid. The disk cannot LAST BILLIONS OF YEARS. Idiocracy. No one questions any statement. How would a disk (residing on the Moon) outlast the Moon itself when the Moon is destroyed? People really have gotten dumber.
This might be taking the need to air gap your backup disks a bit too far. On the other hand, I wonder how long it will be before the disks are hacked and 30 million pages of data found lying around on the moon are exposed?
enough backups in enough places around the solar system, on an ongoing basis, that our precious knowledge and biological heritage can never be lost
So if civilisation does crash, the sum total of human knowledge won't be lost. We will know where it is: on the Moon. But until we regain that knowledge we will not be able to get back to the Moon to read it.
And by that time, it will be rather irrelevant as we will have already rediscovered it!
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
"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.
Constitutionally Correct
...we just fly to the moon to learn how to reboot?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
There you go. Makes total sense. The disk is going to outlast the Moon (because the Moon isn't going to even be the Moon). Let me break it down to you: this disk isn't even going to be readable in 50 years.
It resides on the moon now. If it is removed from the moon before the moon is destroyed, it may survive longer than the moon.
correction: If it is successfully delivered to the moon, remains there for a time, and then is removed before the moon is destroyed, it could survive longer than the moon.
Assuming that we're no longer around, it's a fairly safe bet that any civilization capable of recovering the discs will be able to extract the information. It's hard to imagine aliens capable of traveling across the galaxy that are confounded by primitive data. Fully comprehending the information may be another matter, but I imagine they'll be able to puzzle out accessing it. We do live in the same physical universe, so it's not a stretch to imagine that they would have developed and used (or still use) similar technology themselves.
Take your pick:
https://www.independent.co.uk/...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Someone's gotta be there to tell them to turn it off and turn it back on again.
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
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Oh wait, that's the Palestinians who are deliberately targeting civilians. But that's good, because Israel is bad, because anti-Semitism is good when you realize that jews are white and therefore privileged and evil.
I kicked in $20 to the project when I first heard about it. It was competing for the Google Lunar X Prize. The project doesn't have state backing, but several state owned enterprises have made in-kind and other sorts of donations, especially expertise, particularly Israel Aerospace Industries. The original cost of the project ballooned to $100 million, which shows that even a bare-boned project like this is exorbitantly expensive. To my knowledge *none* of the other X-Prize teams made it this far.
I hope they make it. I was reading that the other times have told the SpaceIL team they are rooting for it. If they pull off a successful landing it creates the private lunar transport industry. If it fails, the industry may die in the womb.
thats religion for you, the religious nuts are turning the world in to hell while dreaming of a heaven that does not exist.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
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.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's not ideal, but ironically, it's less likely to be turned into a smoking crater than the place it came from.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
OMG -- it'll last for BILLIONS and BILLIONS of years! That's wonderful! But will the guys supporting RAR / WinZIP / ARC / ?Q? also be around that long? It'd be awful to have an ARC file but on a Mac with no way to decode it. (They could at least handle a LBR file.) Easy Alien Computer Hacking.
Then again, they'd better watch out after decompression -- the RIAA and MPAA will be after them as well, since the copyright duration extensions will still be active.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
One needs to be on Mars, with another sunk deep into the seas of Triton. And if we ever locate Planet Nine, a third copy could go there.
Of course it'd be best if each came with some mechanism to protect the archives...
#DeleteChrome
... for 5.25" floppy disks in December 1985, conveying the slogan: "Professionals avoid all risks. Scotch 3M disks are safe."
In the background of the slogan, the full page was filled with an image of the starting Challenger space shuttle.
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.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Well, when these neighbors keep launching explosive rockets, hoping to kill as many civilians as possible, that changes the picture a bit.
You know what changes the picture a bit? Expansionism. In fact, it changed the borders.
Do you know HOW they got control of those lands? Hint: their neighbors wanted to wipe them out.
Wait, are you talking about the Israelis, or the Palestinians? Because you could equally use that description in any direction.
I think that this sums up the situation better than anything else. But you could equally well have asked TE Lawrence.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Thirty million pages doesn't seem like much, really. The linux kernel source code is now over 25 million lines, which would be roughly 500,000 pages. So 20% of the entire knowledge of humanity is encompassed by the Linux kernel?
I don't think so. Thirty million pages is at best an exemplar of current knowledge, but nowhere near anything worthy of being called a "backup".
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
You seem to lack knowledge of history. Not long after Israel was created, there were armies massing on their borders ready to invade, and wipe them out.
If Canada had amassed thousands of tanks, and tens of thousands of armed troops right at the Canada/US border, getting ready to invade, wouldn't that make you a little nervous? If a war started, would be be wrong to grab a little of Canada as a "buffer zone" to help prevent a future invasion?
Yes, you are partially right. I agree that Israel should not really expand into those lands. But as to the rest of it, if Palestinians routinely try to kill Jews, should the Jews just let them?
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
No one else read Isaac Asimov? I'm ashamed of y'all. First foundation!
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
You seem to lack knowledge of history. Not long after Israel was created, there were armies massing on their borders ready to invade, and wipe them out.
If you want to talk history, let's go back a bit further. The Jews got kicked out of that area, and then were reinstalled by force. How do you expect the neighbors to have felt about that?
Yes, you are partially right. I agree that Israel should not really expand into those lands. But as to the rest of it, if Palestinians routinely try to kill Jews, should the Jews just let them?
Would they try so much without the 1967 expansion?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Canada actually *did* amass an army at the US border once. In response, the US pre-emptively declared war and invaded. This resulted in the War of 1812. It's mostly forgotten now because the peace agreement which ended it included both sides ceding all captured territory, so very little was actually changed.
If we loose all that, we are likely to perish all together. So probably that's a record for another species to discover.
4wdloop
I wonder if any of those pages will contain information about the crimes the state of Israel has perpetrated against Palestinians.
No, hopefully it's only full of real history.
A black rectangular monolith with sides having dimensions with the ratios 1:4:9.
Gees, dude, last time I looked at the moon it was covered in these round objects, I think they are called craters, supposedly created by impacts of all sorts and sizes. Well, I guess those pages are playing atmosphere free impact roulette, how long will they last, a hour, a day, a week, a year, who knows but definitely a whole lot less longer than the moon itself, it can take millions of impacts of varying sizes, from microscopic to sizeable boulders, routinely and it only takes one to blow away collective delusions.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
At least it will be easier to retrieve than the backups on my ZIP drive.
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
Pop some EMP's, kill off most of the population that will freak out if the grid goes down, their phones/computers stop working, they can't drive to Starbucks. Then once things die down, someone goes and gets the backup and we hit the reboot button LOL.
“Last week, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carried an Israeli-made spacecraft named Beresheet beyond the grasp of Earth's gravity”
That's a novel way of describing orbital mechanics. Neither the spacecraft or the moon is “beyond the grasp of earth's gravity”, what they are is in orbit.
Let me break it down to you: this disk isn't even going to be readable in 50 years.
Apollo retroreflectors are still in operation (well, good enough to bounce a laser off them anyway) and they're 50 years old and exposed to the vacuum on the lunar surface.
If the disks aren't directly exposed then micrometeorite erosion could take a few tens of thousands of years to get to them.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Most Arab states don't even recognize the sovereignty of the state of Israel. They all pretty much refer to them as Jews.
We should also give North America back to the native peoples.
We should also give North America back to the native peoples.
I have pointed out many times that the way we treated the natives was abominable. Whether it was literally genocide or not, when you boil it down, that's what's left in the bottom of the kettle. But sure, do that! I'm a quarter Mexican, which means I am one, partially anyway. Don't let the door hit you. Or did you mean full-blood natives? Because this land would look funny with just a few hundred people on it.
More seriously, Jews already lost that land, and then were reinstalled by force by the USA. Great Britain conceived of the notion but was then talked out of it, more or less by TE Lawrence. Sounded like a good idea to US, though. Israel is literally an example of giving the land "back" ... to people who were never more than a minority in the region.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This is a horrible idea and risks our species as well as each nation's national security.
Around the turn of the century, I found myself on a neo-Nazi mailing list for some unknown reason. It felt weird when it and I were saying the same thing about current events. It didn't happen often, but it happened on a few occasions.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Sounds like I hit a nerve with a Nazi sympathizer. Fuck off, Adolf.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I wonder if any of those pages will contain information about the crimes the state of Israel has perpetrated against Palestinians.
This would be a valid question if those pages contained information about the crimes the Palestinians had committed against Israel.
Since this is a knowledge project and not a political project, I would expect the answer to both questions is: No.
(No, I am not interested in arguing about who started it, both sides are fucking pathetic. I could get behind glassing the entire area with nuclear bombs and forgetting about the stupidities and atrocities happening there on a daily basis.)
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
About 8 years ago lunar orbiters captured pictures of the former lunar landing sites. You know what you can see in those pictures? Footprints. Even footprints have survived 40 years on the moon.
During the moon landings themselves the astronauts were able to locate a lunar surveyor that had been there for two years. It was fully intact except for one leg.
Of course that doesn't mean something could survive a billion years or more but it does mean that every square inch of the moon is not getting constantly pelted by meteors on a regular basis. You see all the craters because just like the footprints there is no erosion that would remove them over time like we have on earth. You're looking at billions of years worth of craters.
The thing we're talking about is pretty small, - the size of a DVD. The odds of it taking a direct hit from a meteor large enough to damage it, even over a long period of time isn't very high. There's probably a pretty good chance that it will end up being covered from powder or pebbles from a nearby strike, but if it's enclosed in something at all tough, it would probably survive.
Of course it's possible it could get taken out within a week, just not likely.