Humanity’s knowledge is now guaranteed to be safeguarded for billions of years, in the event that a catastrophe destroys our civilization or our planet. Everything is safe in a library that is not even on Earth…
Nuclear war, natural cataclysms, chain volcanic eruptions, devastating epidemics… Impossible to know what tomorrow would bring! A catastrophe could very well harm humanity, in a scenario worthy of The Last of Us or Last day on Earth. Imagine! Everything we have built over thousands of years, all the accumulated knowledge that crumbles to dust in days or a few hours! Also, to prevent such loss, the Arch Mission Foundation strives to preserve the cultural heritage and knowledge of humanity in indestructible archives built to last for billions of years. It places these almost everywhere on Earth, in caves, underground bunkers or even mines for example.
But what if the Earth were to be destroyed? A scenario which is unfortunately not impossible, and which has pushed the foundation to seek, by all possible means, to secure these archives outside of our planet. Also, it has developed a library containing no less than 30 million pages of archives on human history and civilization. It covers a wide range of topics, from all cultures, nations, languages, genres and time periods. Thus, all the achievements of humanity, its history, its literature, its languages, its sciences, its arts, its music, its films, its philosophies and its religions, and many other things, will endure, whatever he arrives on Earth. And we have just experienced a historic moment since, for the first time, we have managed to store all of this… on the Moon! And it’s not a metaphor!
This lunar library, named Galactic Legacy Archive, was first successfully landed on the Moon on February 22, 2024 by the Odysseuus spacecraft, launched by SpaceX, with the help of Galactic Legacy Labs’ Lunaprise mission. It contains, among other things, the entire English Wikipedia – more than 6 million articles –, parts of the Project Gutenberg digital library (more than 70,000 electronic books) and the Internet Archive, the linguistic archives of the Rosetta Project – more than 7,000 human languages – and the Arch Mission Private Library – which includes millions of books, documents, sound recordings and program codes – as well as the magician David Copperfield’s major tricks – the secrets of his greatest illusions, including how he will make the Moon disappear in the near future. However, DNA archives and tardigrades are not included.
Obviously, all this knowledge is not found in books or on CDs or hard drives. Archive data is stored in the form of nanofiches made up of several layers of engravings and digital data. These are small plates made of nickel and gold alloy, in which the contents are engraved. On one square centimeter, it is possible to store up to 2,000 pages of text with a resolution of 150 dpi, for eternity. In fact, the material resists extreme temperatures as well as electromagnetic radiation, and does not rot. The Lunar Library today has 41 layers of analog and digital content spread across two locations on the Moon.
This undertaking has not been an easy undertaking! It took no less than three attempts to succeed! Already in 2019, the Israeli lunar lander Beresheet was to transport this famous library. However, the mission failed because the device crashed on the Moon. In January, the Peregrine mission of the American space company Astrobotic was also due to take the archives. However, a fuel leak occurred on the lander after launch, causing it to crash over the Pacific. This time was good! Hoping that the Moon doesn’t disappear too!