
New NASA Images Show Location of the Lunar Library - abbe98
https://medium.com/@novaspivack/there-is-now-a-30-million-page-backup-of-planet-earth-on-the-moon-d0504458aca1
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nabla9
I wonder how hard it would be to launch small payload to the moon without
being noticed.

If I were a billionaire and could figure out a way to do it, I would send a
hoax backup of Planet Earth, artificially aged 201 million years
(Triassic–Jurassic extinction event). It would include small statue of
previously unknown dinosaur species holding a tool and Rick Astley song
encoded in a way that takes long time to decode.

~~~
shaunpud
> If I were a billionaire

It's a shame how we've moved from being a millionaire to being a billionaire
in such a short amount of time...

~~~
mises
You can thank inflation, the government's biggest hidden tax. And of course,
it hurts the poor the most, those without the financial know-how to invest,
buy CDs, T-Bills, etc. Yet there are still no moves to stop inflation. Why?
Because it's good for business. Cheaper money.

~~~
bobthepanda
Deflation also hurts the poor, because the remaining debt balance they have
stays the same while the price they are paid for the fruits of their labor
decreases, and it also encourages those with money to sit on it instead of
spending or investing.

The populist policy in 19th century America was to ditch gold for a more
inflationary silver standard.

~~~
mises
Not all poor are in debt. You are correct that deflation can hurt top; let's
judt go back to the gold standard.

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Razengan
Things like these and the Voyager probes etc. always make me wonder:

What is the likelihood of discovering something _that small_ among the vast
empty scales of space?

If another species had sent something the size of the Voyager probes into our
solar system, or even crashed it into our moon, or Mars, or even into the
oceans of this very planet, what are the odds of us stumbling upon it?

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aquova
The odds of another space-faring civilization with roughly the same detection
technology of us finding the Voyager probes is infinitesimally small. However,
any civilization that has managed to reach our Solar System (or just beyond
it) most likely has technology we haven't even dreamed of, and could possibly
detect it with Star Trek-esque "sensors".

The bigger issue with the Voyager probe is that even if some other aliens did
manage to find it, the odds that they would be able to replicate a phonograph
in order to play the record is possibly a bigger hurtle. In the end, it's a
neat symbolic touch for humans on the verge of going to space, but the most
likely alien race to recover Voyager is us.

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i_am_proteus
A phonograph isn't necessary to play a record. Various methods of imaging of
the grooves would reveal the data.

For instance, archivists can listen to records with a laser-based device to
avoid damaging fragile recordings.

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m0dest
> "The analog layers contain a subset of the entire collection, and include:
> [...] (4) The complete Vital Articles of the Wikipedia (the full English
> Wikipedia text is in the digital layers)."

If we somehow lose Wikipedia and every mirror of the data, we're sending Jimmy
Wales to the moon to fetch the off-site backup.

~~~
grenoire
It's going to make a lot of editors really angry that their edits and Talk
pages are no longer there...

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Iv
What I like is that in all likelihood, some time during the next century some
archaeologists or history students will go dig on that site, find the disks,
find all its technical details on internet and will use it as an historical
resource, yet will not learn anything new because wikipedia's history will
probably still be preserved in 100 years.

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em-bee
well actually, i hope we'll send updates every few decades and continue this
tradition so that it won't be a surprise to archaeologists when they find it
and they'll just leave it alone because they already know.

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noonespecial
_Stephen Wolfram’s, A New Kind of Science (preserved for the future, when
people will finally understand why it is so important)_

Heh. Seems at least as likely that those future people will chuckle at this
the same way we do now about alchemists trying to transmute lead into gold.

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sneak
It seems ridiculously arrogant to me to do this and not fully and publicly
release exactly what was sent.

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mikeash
It’s privately funded. Feel free to send your own library to the moon if you’d
like to see it be done differently.

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sneak
Lots of privately funded things are run in an arrogant, press release, “look
at us” fashion. That doesn’t make them useful or interesting.

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dreamcompiler
I had this idea 25 years ago. Only I wanted it to be in the form of exabyte
hard drives that could be continually read and written from Earth via laser,
but never erased. Wikipedia on the moon, in case we get hit by an asteroid.
But hard drive technology is still not good enough to last more than a few
decades.

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aasasd
Well, this is good fun but, as they say, if you haven't checked the recovery
procedure, you don't have a backup.

So, apart from a microscope, this would require finding the discs, scraping
off the epoxy, and uh, going to the moon in the first place.

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drtillberg
Another Brautigan library! "It doesn't make any difference where a book is
placed because nobody ever checks them out and nobody ever comes here to read
them. This is not that kind of library. This is another kind of library." [1]

[1]
[http://www.thebrautiganlibrary.org/about.html](http://www.thebrautiganlibrary.org/about.html)

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mlacks
While with the amount of collaboration and dedication to curating the contents
and delivery of the payload are absolutely incredible, it saddens me to read
about the ‘debris’ left in the crash.

For anyone in the industry: is waste created a significant concern when
carrying out a space mission?

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duskwuff
> is waste created a significant concern when carrying out a space mission?

The Beresheet lander had a dry mass (i.e, not including propellant) of roughly
150 kg. The Moon is naturally impacted by roughly 2800 kg of natural meteors
per day -- a few hundred extra kilos of metal debris is not a big deal.

Debris which remains in orbit, or which is likely to reach the Earth's surface
intact, is much more of a concern.

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amelius
What if it gets hit by a meteorite?

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probablybroken
Yes - you'd think it would be longer lived in orbit. Clearly practicality
wasn't the main concern of this mission.

~~~
LUmBULtERA
From the article:

"In the last two years (2018 and 2019) — and funded purely by a few donations
from friends and our own team — we have sent 4 backups to space.

    
    
        One is orbiting the Sun for at least 30 million years, in the glove compartment of Elon Musk’s red Tesla.
        One is orbiting the Earth on a satellite.
        One is now on the Moon for up to 5 billion years.
        And one was sent to space and returned to Earth and will go in a museum."

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social_quotient
I really love the fact that the media is readable with reasonably available
tech.

