Lunar Library Launched

A couple weeks ago a rocket blasted into space to deliver a satellite into orbit, this sort of thing is now routine. However, this rocket carried a unique payload destined for the lunar surface: a library. The Arch Mission Foundation is piggy backing a special disc on Spaxe IL’s lunar mission. The disc holds all sorts of information that may outlast humanity so future civilizations can get a glimpse into the past. If all goes well it will land on the surface of the Moon on April 11th.

In addition to the English version of the Wikipedia (approximately 7.5M printed pages), the Library contains more than 25,000 books and other resources, including collections from Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive, and the Long Now Foundation Rosetta and PanLex datasets, which provide a linguistic key to 5000 languages with 1.5 billion cross-language translations. The Library also holds a long-duration duplicate of SpaceIL’s Israeli Time Capsule, and several other private archives and special collections.

“Our goal is to provide a backup of human civilization,” said Nova Spivack, co-founder of the Arch Mission Foundation. “Instead of trying to create a generic representation of humanity, our approach is to send crowdsourced resources like the Wikipedia, and many other datasets.”

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