The Last Word On Nothing

This post (published in May 2018) seemed worth resurfacing after the astonishing recent news that the Arch Mission Foundation’s Lunar Library had flown to our celestial neighbor with Earth life aboard. For the record, I love the Lunar Library concept (cf., below). But I think the tardigrades were a bad idea.

After several thousand years spent looking up and contemplating the nature of the cosmos, as well as what’s for dinner, we humans have amassed a lot of knowledge. We know the precise age of the Earth and the universe. We know how life sends copies of itself into the future. We know, with amazing accuracy, how strange mistakes in those copies lead to endless forms of life. We know who won the 1998 World Series and how to calculate area and the best way to make a beef bourginon. This is a lot of information to have in one brain, so humans also invented a way to offload some of that information and store it someplace else, through writing.

The loss of collective knowledge, either through deliberate acts of destruction or via accidents, remains one of the most potent sources of psychic pain — at least on a humanistic level. So there was something so touching about the press release I got from Astrobotic Technologies this week.

Sometime in 2020, Astrobotic will launch its small lander off the Earth, send it to the moon, and set it down, marking a leap forward for commercial space travel. Along with cargo for some private companies, some governments, a few universities, and some rich institutions and individual people, it will be carrying a library.

They are calling it the Lunar Library, but for now it’ll just be a digital copy of Wikipedia (which edit date, I don’t know) and a beautiful object called the Rosetta Project. The latter is a project of the wondrous Long Now Foundation, and it is a CD-sized solid nickel disc inscribed with data on 1,500 human languages. You can only read its pages using a microscope.

The Lunar Library consists of tens of millions of pages of text and images, which are stored in a decidedly retro fashion, essentially a 21^st-century style … nanofiche, if you will. Each page is laser-etched onto thin sheets of nickel at 300,000 dots per inch, using a patented nano-lithograph, according to the small concern that is building it, the Arch Foundation (pronounced Ark). All a library patron would need to read it is a 1000x optical microscope.

Astrobotic was at one point a leading contender for the Google Lunar X Prize, which would have awarded up to $30 million in prize money for a private robotic jaunt to our satellite. That didn’t happen, but Astrobotic is still planning its mission, because why not, and because there’s money to be made.

The Arch Foundation apparently flew a mission called Solar Library earlier this year, which used a new memory architecture called a 5D memory, so the foundation wants to add one of these for the moon, too. The company also wants to use DNA storage, encoding information in the four-letter code that serves as the backbone for all of life as we know it. But for now, the Library is just the nickel pages.

Nickel is impervious to cosmic radiation and can withstand wild temperature fluctuations from the lunar day to night, so an etched physical disc will last far longer than any computer or current memory chip. They will last longer than the Pyramids. In fact, it may last much longer than our planet, according to the foundation.

This is all cool and good, but the press release still didn’t tell me why.

The Peregrine — that’s the lander’s name — won’t need to reference this lunar library. It will have all the information it needs stored within its brain, because this is a thing we can do with robots. No human settlers (I don’t want to say colonists) will need it, either, at least for a long time, and maybe forever. By the time we send humans back to the moon on the regular, Apple Watches will have more memory than today’s supercomputers, and we will just bring our knowledge with us.

It could last for billions of years, according to the Arch Foundation: “the ultimate in cold storage for human civilization,” said Nova Spivack, co­founder and chairman. The foundation’s mission is “to preserve and disseminate humanity’s most important knowledge across time and space.” So this library will exist on the moon just because it can.

I think it’s important to note that this knowledge is our most important knowledge as of now, in 2018. This is not a reflection of all we have known and understood, nor what we will come to know and understand in the future. But there is something eternal about this library, all the same. It is a reflection of our most fundamental desire, the deepest ache in all our hearts that ties us to everyone who has ever lived. It is a way for us to send versions of ourselves into the future. It’s a path to immortality. Taking a collectively edited compendium of knowledge and sending it off the planet forever is probably the most human thing there is.

Image credit: E Schokraie, PLoS One, via Wikimedia Commons; bottom, Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Desolation, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)