On February 6, 2018, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket was launched from the launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida. (?SpaceX)
There is a second payload on board the SpaceX Falcon Heavy that launched on Tuesday (February 6), and (unlike the Tesla Roadster) it took 14 billion years to make Year.
SpaceX confirmed in a live broadcast before launch that the device, known as the Arch, is hidden in a red Tesla Roadster and is now floating in space. It's a simple-looking object: a clear, thick disk of quartz crystal, about an inch across, with letters etched into its surface. It could almost be a small business award—best car dealer, perhaps, or top pizza restaurant—except with data microscopically etched into the body of the car using a powerful, high-frequency laser.
, and these numbers, or at least the future they suggest, are the reason why Arch has made it to the roadster. [Interstellar Space Travel: 7 Futuristic Spaceships to Explore the Universe]
Pronounced "ark" as in "archive," this is part of a Silicon Valley plan - as technology investor, self-proclaimed futurist and Arch Mission Fund To create "a self-replicating, meta-level process to immortalize human civilization," the foundation's co-founder Nova Spivack explained to Live Science
The foundation selected quartz discs for the task because they could To store a lot of information very compactly without losing much information over long time spans, each laser-scribed dot on the disc is only 200 nanometers wide (slightly larger than a single HIV virus), but that's it, Spivak said. Six bits of information can be encoded, and as long as the quartz isn't shattered or exploded by intense waves of radiation, those dots should be clearly visible to anyone with the skills to do so - even millions (perhaps billions) of years into the future.
In a phone interview, Spivak explained that etching quartz is part of a grand plan to seed the solar system with super durability. The data storage device contains a vast cultural archive of human civilization.
There will be visible symbols on the outside of the disk that say, "Look, this is interesting.
Future disks will then have tiny images etched onto them "like microfilm," he said, large enough to be seen with a good microscope. The foundation hopes that a discovery Future observers of the symbols will take the time to decode the tiny dots, which will contain a vast archive of information. A photo reveals all five of the arched discs built to date, including those currently on the Tesla Roadster. The one flying by (Courtesy of the Arch Foundation)
Why it’s done Spivak said: “If you look at the history of civilization, human civilization has done a very good job of annihilating itself. As this happens, many modern cultural records stored on biodegradable disks, drives and tapes will be gone within a century.
The stated goal of this architectural project is to serve as a kind of insurance against civilizational disasters. By creating a lasting, redundant record and leaving it somewhere where future human (or extraterrestrial) civilizations may discover it, our culture's collective knowledge will never die.
It's a startling idea that's simultaneously utopian, space-age, and utterly fatalistic—enough to capture the imagination, according to Spivak, of Elon Musk's After learning about the first arch during a chance Twitter exchange, they agreed to send it into space.
Spivak insists that he did not seek to be the author or curator of this monument that is spread across modern society.
"The idea here is to not just send one or two or 10 one-off arches," he said, "but to send millions, maybe billions, of them all across the solar system to Various places," KdSPE "KDSPs" Foundation hopes to build lunar vault libraries in many other countries, as well as Mars libraries, and expand to other types of long-term data recording companies. luding-DNA.
In this context, Spivak reluctantly acknowledges that the foundation must act as a gatekeeper, as Arch technology remains prohibitively expensive, at least for now.
"KDSPE" "KDSPs" "The Wikimedia Foundation, ***, Project Gutenberg (e-books), the human genome and other large open data sets are priorities," he said, "KDSPE" "KDSPs" After that, he Would like to provide a small subset of records to "donors". For a fee of $20 to $100, he estimates, in return they get the right to put some piece of data deep inside for future generations. The funds will go into an endowment, he said, hoping to fund the foundation long-term. Eventually, he said, if the donation is large enough, the foundation will provide archival rights for free. "KDSPE" "KDSPs," rather than picking and choosing which ideas were retained at that time, he said. The foundation hopes to distribute a protective force broad enough over the long term to create a truly representative portrait of human society that will reach deep into life. We'll include everything, including the bad stuff, because the bad stuff is important too.
So what is the point of all this effort? Why go to all the trouble of writing something for an audience in the distant future that may never come, Spivak suggests? Or maybe a silica-eating alien eats the domed disks as food? [Hello everyone, Earthlings! 8 Ways Aliens Are Contacting Us:
Well, it turns out that building arches can be very profitable.
"Some of the things being developed definitely have commercial potential," Spivak said.
Right now, the best way to send large amounts of information between Earth and space is through radio signals. But there are some hard bands that limit radio broadcasts due to the speed of light and other issues. Even the Internet connection aboard the multibillion-dollar International Space Station in low Earth orbit is only the speed of a typical home router. This is fine for the data needs of a small team, but imagine trying to squeeze all the data needs of a Mars city through this connection, with the additional latency due to distance and the speed of light.
If/when humans go into space, Spivack believes that dense, lightweight data storage devices may become more valuable as a means of transporting Internet content between Earth and Mars. He said technologies like quartz disks, which could one day store hundreds of terabytes of information, would be well-suited to the task, and there were plans to spin off the patents of the research groups involved in the Arch project to Side Corporation - Intellectual Property Companies that will provide funding for the foundation. For now, Spivack said, he is working on getting as much data as possible from "the humanities." (The Foundation, he said, assumes that any civilization capable of parsing microscopic data points on disks has understood our science.) "KDSPE" "KDSPs" as long as the Foundation is exerting its grudging (at least according to Spivack) curation Human characters, they behave like what you'd expect from a bunch of Silicon Valley techno-futurists: The first arched discs produced to date, including the one on the Tesla Roadster, contain Isaac A. Simov's basic trilogy.
Originally published in Live Science.