Israel's Beresheet, the first privately-funded spacecraft launched on Thursday, Feb. 21, aboard SpaceX's Falcon 9, is carrying an important cargo
A 30-million-page archive that contains the history of the entire human civilization is currently on its way to the moon. Called "The Lunar Library," the archive encoded on a specially designed disc is meant to serve as a backup for humanity in case an apocalyptic event wipes out the entire human race.
The Entire History Of Humans
The archive was developed by the Arch Mission Foundation or AMF. According to the nonprofit organization, the archive contains information on the entire human history and civilization, including all cultures across all nations, languages, and time periods.
The Lunar Library is the third installment in The Arch Mission that hopes to send backups of humanity to many other locations around Earth and across the Solar System.
"By delivering many copies to many places, and updating them with new installments on an ongoing basis, we intend to gradually pepper the solar system with the records of our civilization," the organization explained in a statement.
"The more Arch Libraries we deliver into the Billion Year Archive, and more places we store them, the more likely it is that at least some of them will survive for billions of years into the future, when they may eventually be found by those who come after us."
The first special library from the AMF was launched in Feb. 2018 onboard Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster with its inanimate driver Starman as a payload for the first demonstration mission of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy. A disc made out of quartz silica glass contains a copy of Isaac Asimov's The Foundation.
After Humans
The backups are designed to last for billions of years after the human race and Earth will have perished from a number of possible apocalyptic scenarios, including climate change or a nuclear war.
"While I am optimistic that humanity will rise to the challenge and develop a multinational planetary defense initiative to mitigate these planetary risks, it is also prudent to have a plan B," stated Nova Spivack, the organization's co-founder, in an e-mail to CNet.
AMF will continue to update the archives no matter where they are in the Solar System. An addition to The Lunar Library is set to be launched onboard the Astrobotic lunar lander in the near future.
The nonprofit is also planning to send similar archives to Mars.
