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New NASA Images Show Location of the Lunar Library
- amelius 7y agoWhat if it gets hit by a meteorite?
- darkhorn 7y agoI think cosmic radiation over several years is enough to degradate the material.
- probablybroken 7y agoYes - you'd think it would be longer lived in orbit. Clearly practicality wasn't the main concern of this mission.
- jobigoud 7y agoWhat is the expectancy of a meteorite hitting this exact spot vs orbital decay?
- walrus01 7y agoTelecom satellites in geostationary orbit will remain there on a geological time scale. Human civilization could knock itself down to a bronze age level of technology and rediscover spaceflight long before the orbits of any of them decay. Some weigh as much as 6500 kg. Including a 100 gram library for PR purposes by a private satellite owner wouldn't be too hard. It's a lot less exotic than saying "the surface of the moon", however.
- LUmBULtERA 7y agoFrom the article: "In the last two years (2018 and 2019) — and funded purely by a few donations from friends and our own team — we have sent 4 backups to space. One is orbiting the Sun for at least 30 million years, in the glove compartment of Elon Musk’s red Tesla. One is orbiting the Earth on a satellite. One is now on the Moon for up to 5 billion years. And one was sent to space and returned to Earth and will go in a museum."
- duskwuff 7y agoThe Moon has a uneven gravitational field which can cause surprising orbital perturbations. There are some relatively stable orbits known, but it's a little unclear how stable they would be over a scale of many years. Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_orbit#Perturbation_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_orbit#Perturbation_effec...
- mlacks 7y agoWhile with the amount of collaboration and dedication to curating the contents and delivery of the payload are absolutely incredible, it saddens me to read about the ‘debris’ left in the crash. For anyone in the industry: is waste created a significant concern when carrying out a space mission?
- acollins1331 7y agoOnly to humans
- duskwuff 7y ago> is waste created a significant concern when carrying out a space mission? The Beresheet lander had a dry mass (i.e, not including propellant) of roughly 150 kg. The Moon is naturally impacted by roughly 2800 kg of natural meteors per day -- a few hundred extra kilos of metal debris is not a big deal. Debris which remains in orbit, or which is likely to reach the Earth's surface intact, is much more of a concern.
- m0dest 7y ago> "The analog layers contain a subset of the entire collection, and include: [...] (4) The complete Vital Articles of the Wikipedia (the full English Wikipedia text is in the digital layers)." If we somehow lose Wikipedia and every mirror of the data, we're sending Jimmy Wales to the moon to fetch the off-site backup.
- grenoire 7y agoIt's going to make a lot of editors really angry that their edits and Talk pages are no longer there...
- nabla9 7y agoI wonder how hard it would be to launch small payload to the moon without being noticed. If I were a billionaire and could figure out a way to do it, I would send a hoax backup of Planet Earth, artificially aged 201 million years (Triassic–Jurassic extinction event). It would include small statue of previously unknown dinosaur species holding a tool and Rick Astley song encoded in a way that takes long time to decode.
- floatingatoll 7y agoThis is why we don’t deserve to meet alien life.
- Razengan 7y agoI hate to be Reddit here, and I hope this train will be duly downvoted, but: Maybe the real alien life was the friends we made along the way?
- throw0101a 7y ago> I wonder how hard it would be to launch small payload to the moon without being noticed. Hard. The US (and probably other militaries) has a whole bunch of satellites monitoring the planet for ballistic missile launches, and so would detect any rocket launches. After that, the US also a bunch of stuff monitoring space junk, and so any payload would be picked up on radar. It would not take many observations to calculate your payload's orbit, and if that orbit suddenly changed it would probably be noticed. Now, if you suddenly change your payload's orbit to start a trajectory to the moon there would be nothing anyone could do about it, but it would at least be detected.
- T-A 7y agoAnnounce that you are launching a dummy payload at escape velocity+ to test your new heavy lift vehicle. Something silly, like a Tesla roadster. Once it's beyond radar range (a few tens of millions of km should do), discard the silly shell and fire up the ion engine. Let it run for six months, then wait a couple of years for the final rendezvous maneuver with the moon. With nobody looking for it, the small, stealthy, silent probe which you hid inside the Tesla shell is very unlikely to be detected.
- drtillberg 7y agoAnother Brautigan library! "It doesn't make any difference where a book is placed because nobody ever checks them out and nobody ever comes here to read them. This is not that kind of library. This is another kind of library." [1] [1] http://www.thebrautiganlibrary.org/about.html http://www.thebrautiganlibrary.org/about.html
- Razengan 7y agoThings like these and the Voyager probes etc. always make me wonder: What is the likelihood of discovering something that small among the vast empty scales of space? If another species had sent something the size of the Voyager probes into our solar system, or even crashed it into our moon, or Mars, or even into the oceans of this very planet, what are the odds of us stumbling upon it?
- nabla9 7y agoThe plate they put on Voyager probes are just symbolic gestures. The change of somebody finding the probe is very close to zero. It's not they are not aimed at any stars so they just travel interstellar space. Within 40,000 years both probes will pass stars from 1.5 light years distance.
- Razengan 7y agoBut if an alien equivalent of a Voyager probe does drift into our system, what are our chances of picking it up?
- avian 7y agoZero. An object of Voyager's size is much too small to be detected by existing surveys - we can't even track most of passive objects in deep space we ourselves put there (see for example various hardware left in heliocentric orbits from Apollo missions, or more recently, Musk's Tesla). Even in the unlikely case that it was detected, events would turn out similar to the recent Oumuamua discovery. Some papers would be written on theories of its, most likely natural, origin. A last-second mission to intercept it (much less a sample return) would be considered too costly. There would have to be extraordinary and overwhelming evidence that it's artificial in origin for things to go differently. For a dead probe drifting through space, that evidence just wouldn't be there.
- JorgeGT 7y agoNote that alien civilizations could have vastly superior methods of detecting artificial objects than we have.
- sneak 7y agoIt seems ridiculously arrogant to me to do this and not fully and publicly release exactly what was sent.
- lovemenot 7y agoPresumably, that was the point. It's not about the information per se, which is probably humdrum to us. Rather it's about multi-generational reputation having increasingly tantalising possibilities. See Ark of the Covenant and other human-created mysteries.
- mikeash 7y agoIt’s privately funded. Feel free to send your own library to the moon if you’d like to see it be done differently.
- sneak 7y agoLots of privately funded things are run in an arrogant, press release, “look at us” fashion. That doesn’t make them useful or interesting.
- Iv 7y agoWhat I like is that in all likelihood, some time during the next century some archaeologists or history students will go dig on that site, find the disks, find all its technical details on internet and will use it as an historical resource, yet will not learn anything new because wikipedia's history will probably still be preserved in 100 years.
- em-bee 7y agowell actually, i hope we'll send updates every few decades and continue this tradition so that it won't be a surprise to archaeologists when they find it and they'll just leave it alone because they already know.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- aasasd 7y agoWell, this is good fun but, as they say, if you haven't checked the recovery procedure, you don't have a backup. So, apart from a microscope, this would require finding the discs, scraping off the epoxy, and uh, going to the moon in the first place.
- dreamcompiler 7y agoI had this idea 25 years ago. Only I wanted it to be in the form of exabyte hard drives that could be continually read and written from Earth via laser, but never erased. Wikipedia on the moon, in case we get hit by an asteroid. But hard drive technology is still not good enough to last more than a few decades.
- noonespecial 7y agoStephen Wolfram’s, A New Kind of Science (preserved for the future, when people will finally understand why it is so important) Heh. Seems at least as likely that those future people will chuckle at this the same way we do now about alchemists trying to transmute lead into gold.
- social_quotient 7y agoI really love the fact that the media is readable with reasonably available tech.