Supervisor Elham AbolFateh
Editor in Chief Mohamed Wadie

30-Million-Page of Everything Human Know to Be Saved in Space!


Wed 06 Mar 2019 | 09:54 AM
Yassmine Elsayed

By: Yassmine ElSayed

CAIRO, Mar. 6 (SEE) - Media reports revealed that a 30-million-page archive of human history and civilization launched aboard a spacecraft headed for the moon.

According to the nonprofit behind the idea, the Arch Mission Foundation, the so-called "Lunar Library" is a small nanotech device that resembles a DVD, and it's intended as a "backup plan" so that everything we've ever learned as humans doesn't get lost in time.

‘Live Science’ reported that the device was installed on Israel's Beresheet lander, which launched and is expected to touch down on the moon in April. Consisting of 25 nickel disks, each 40 microns thick, the archive is built to withstand space conditions. It holds a multitude of types of data explaining, well, humans.

The disks contain thousands of images of book pages, photos, illustrations, documents, the English Wikipedia, entire books, scientific handbooks, and a key that explains languages and translations between them. This library also contains songs, text and children's drawings.

It's the third in a series of archives that make up the Billion Year Archive initiative. The project aims to put copies of this data in several places on Earth and in space so that the information is likelier to survive billions of years into the future.

The device contains both larger text that can easily be read with a simple magnifying glass and smaller text and photos that can be accessed only using more-powerful microscopes and technology.