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Data Storage Earth Space

Putting Civilization in a Box For Space Means Choosing Our Legacy (space.com) 92

Posted by msmash from the tough-choices dept.
When SpaceX's record-breaking Falcon Heavy rocket made its first test launch in early February , the craft didn't just hurl Elon Musk's shiny red roadster and spacesuit-clad mannequin to space. It had another, smaller payload, which at first glance seems much less impressive: a 1-inch-wide (2.5 centimeters) quartz disc with Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy encoded in laser-etched gratings . From a report: The famous science fiction series is only the beginning of the discs' planned contents. At a time when traditional hard drives are just breaking into the terabyte range, the quartz medium can hold up to 360 terabytes per disc. It also boasts a life span of 14 billion years. That's longer than the current age of the universe. This disc was symbolic; future devices will contain much more, and more useful, information. But the technology speaks to grander issues that humanity is now pondering: becoming a multiplanetary civilization, storing information for thousands or millions of years, and contacting and communicating with other intelligences (alien and Earthling).

So how should we record our knowledge and experiences for posterity? How should we ensure that this information is understandable to civilizations that may be quite different from our own? And, most importantly, what should we say? Humans have faced challenges like these before. Ancient civilizations built monuments like the pyramids and left artifacts and writing, sometimes deliberately. Later researchers have used this material to try to piece together ancient worldviews. However, in the modern era, we've set our sights much further: from centuries to millennia, from one planet to interstellar space, and from one species to many.
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Putting Civilization in a Box For Space Means Choosing Our Legacy More

Putting Civilization in a Box For Space Means Choosing Our Legacy

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  • First thing to store on everlasting Quartz Disc (Score:5, Funny)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Sunday February 25, 2018 @04:05PM (#56184957)

    Page 1: How to construct a Quartz Disc Reader

    • Page 0: How to obtain a PDF reader.

    • Page 2: How to find a 1" quartz disc in the vastness of space

      • Look in the glove compartment of any passing car.

        (Which, containing considerable amounts of metals, is likely to remain relatively conspicuous, at least compared to a 1inch quartz disc. )

  • I figure at best we've got 200-300 years left on this planet before a major collapse of civilization. We used it up before we were able to go elsewhere. We blew it.

    • Re: I'm sorry, but I just don't see it happening. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by c6gunner ( 950153 ) on Sunday February 25, 2018 @04:48PM (#56185159) Homepage

      300 years ago we were still 100 years away from developing the steam locomotive ... but you think that we won't "go elsewhere" in the next 300 years?

      That's adorable.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I'm struck by the age of the athletes in the Winter Olympics. Most of them are in their mid to late 20's and early 30's with a few in their late 30's and a few in their teens. They aren't expecting that when they are twice their current age that they will be twice as fast/good at what they are now doing. The concept you fail to understand is "limits". We have them. Claiming that the progress we have experienced in the past 100 (or 300) years will scale for the next 100 is speculation. It has no logical trut

        • We're terrible at predicting the future (Score:4, Interesting)

          by dfm3 ( 830843 ) on Sunday February 25, 2018 @07:03PM (#56185557) Journal
          I could post endless quotes from naysayers over the last 200 years about how the automobile will never outcompete the horse, radio is a useless novelty, everything that's possible to know has already been discovered, planes won't be able to travel faster than the speed of sound, 640K of memory... but, you get the idea.

          We're terrible at predicting how an emerging technology will impact the future, but exceptionally good at finding novel ways to apply that technology in ways that nobody could have ever guessed.

          Besides, your olympic athlete analogy is horribly flawed.

          • And, on the other hand, we don't have personal jetpacks, flying cars, or humanoid robots, and we're just developing relatively cheap flights to low earth orbit. Things didn't just go faster and farther than expected, they went in unexpected ways.

        • The concept you fail to understand is "limits". We have them. Claiming that the progress we have experienced in the past 100 (or 300) years will scale for the next 100 is speculation.

          It is speculation based on past progression and likely projection, whereas your suggestion - that we are going to hit a limit in 300 years or less - is speculation based on nothing other than your own pessimism/cynicism.

          Economic and technological development are both increasing rather than decreasing; exponentially increasing in the case of technology. If you have a good reason for positing that the trend of the last 1,000 years will suddenly reverse I am certainly willing to listen, but you don't get to j

    • I figure at best we've got 200-300 years left on this planet before a major collapse of civilization. We used it up before we were able to go elsewhere. We blew it.

      And you know this how? To put it another way, since this statement could have been made with equal predictive power at the collapse of Rome, at the time of the Black Death, or at the time of peak child mine labor in the nineteenth century, what is special about this time that makes your prediction more certain right now?

      But let's assume you're right. 200-300 years is not only plenty of time to get civilization started elsewhere, but in several different elsewheres.

      • Where is the elsewhere you expect us to go? We landed on the moon almost 50 years ago and haven't made it back since. By what technology could we get there in less than 300 years? By what political will and economic power will we get there? We're so hung up on our petty squabbles about which color of skin is the best, which form of government is best, whether science is any better than any other means of achieving advancement in our knowledge, and etc., that we can't form policies that look beyond 3-6 m

        • We made it to the Moon on ten years' notice, and with the technology of fifty years ago. Furthermore, in those days space programs moved at the speed of governments. Now that the private sector is leading the way, the real race is on.

    • More like 20-30 years, at our current rate.

  • Whatever is stored will need a whole lot of uncompressed material as examples of the sorts of things on the medium, and as a stepping stone to reading the on-media documents that explain how to decode any compressed materials, and even those compressed files should have copious amounts of uncompressed metadata.

  • every one of Trumps speeches (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    To show why we are not a thriving interstellar culture.

    • Nice try, but the Bushes, Clintons, and Obama are the ones who killed space ventures - Trump is working on a Moon base.
      • Um, Trump says we're going back to the Moon, just like Obama said we were going to an asteroid and then to Mars, and Bush 43 said we were going to the Moon and then to Mars...nice words from all of them, but not much commitment of money or legislative priority. (Well, let's be fair -- Obama actually had a rover prototype in his inauguration parade.) "No bucks, no Buck Rogers."
  • There are far better literary works out there, sci-fi or otherwise, even by Asimov himself. Quite frankly, it's clearly something that he would concoct month by month, with too many disconnects down the line. I guess it must be somebody with clout's night-table book of choice.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Wulf2k ( 4703573 )

      Well, why not that one?

      This isn't "Space Exploration by Committee", this is a frontier. Possibly our final one.

      If somebody wants to launch a book into space, there's literally nobody that can or should stop them.

      Maybe it'll give somebody else incentive to build a bigger rocket and launch the collected works of Chuck Tingle even further into space. Followed by a bigger, better rocket launching Pride & Prejudice. Then somebody launching Terry Goodkind into space.

      Not his works. The author himself. He'

  • I mean, I love literature, including Asimov, but why spend all that bandwidth on one work? Would aliens realize it's fiction, or even know what fiction is? Wouldn't it be more appropriate to show our achievements in science or math, or maybe our wide range of cultures or languages?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Wulf2k ( 4703573 )

      This is purely symbolic. Nobody will ever find this in the vastness of space, unless it punches through their hull at a significant fraction of the speed of light. As a result, who cares what's "actually" on it?

      It does bring up the question of what "should" be on ones that may actually be found in the future though.

  • One terabyte? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by pmsr ( 560617 ) on Sunday February 25, 2018 @05:36PM (#56185287)

    Sorry, but which year does this come from: "At a time when traditional hard drives are just breaking into the terabyte range"? Because traditional hard drives have broken the terabyte range 10 years ago. And we're talking mainstream.

  • What tripe! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Picodon ( 4937267 ) on Sunday February 25, 2018 @05:57PM (#56185367)

    Ancient civilizations built monuments like the pyramids and left artifacts and writing, sometimes deliberately.

    I doubt that ancient rulers cared much (if at all) about their “legacy”. Ancient artifacts and monuments were produced for many reasons: religious, political, practical, artistic, etc., all of which had relevance in their present. Concerns about the future mostly had to do with the afterworld. What we find today by chance is not because of smart planning by our elders, it is because we still have smart people who find the study of our past valuable and enlightening.

    As for those who are trying today to concoct some “legacy”, they are pompous, vain and clueless fools. They have no idea what will survive (or how long), what will be found, what will be judged valuable and significant. They’d sure love to make decisions for the rest of humanity. And, hey! Shooting a CD into space is a lot easier than achieving something actually so useful to humanity that it would be remembered for many ages.

    Or, may be they are not really fools and, like a few rulers of the past, the “legacy” stuff they make is merely there to impress their contemporaries. In short, yes, just more bloody advertising.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by waveclaw ( 43274 )

      Or, may be they are not really fools and, like a few rulers of the past, the “legacy” stuff they make is merely there to impress their contemporaries. In short, yes, just more bloody advertising.

      You could always sell copies to doomsday prepers and people dreaming of becoming backyarders.

      On the other hand it might take a few cycles of civilization collapsing and being rebuilt before we get a good test of how to build and what to include.

      But then on the third hand I'm hoping that humanity isn'

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nagora ( 177841 )

      I doubt that ancient rulers cared much (if at all) about their “legacy”.

      As for those who are trying today to concoct some “legacy”, they are pompous, vain and clueless fools.

      Hmmmm.

  • 360 Terabytes should be more than enough storage for anyone.

  • Nomenclature (Score:5, Funny)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Sunday February 25, 2018 @06:22PM (#56185457)

    ... the quartz medium can hold up to 360 terabytes per disc.

    And as this comes from Earth, 360 terabytes == 1 Terrabyte

  • Isaac Asimov's books are unlikely to mean anything to aliens, that will make the message quite hard to understand

    We could start with what we know about mathematics, physics and chemistry, as there are good chances a remote intelligent life form worked on that concepts too.

  • So, how much is that in Libraries of Congress?

  • Great Silence (Score:3)

    by Max_W ( 812974 ) on Monday February 26, 2018 @02:11AM (#56186215)
    There is most probably no one up there to read these messages due to the Civilization Bottleneck theory.

    The bottleneck theory postulates that the life evolves via natural selection, i.e. the survival of the fittest. As a result any civilization is based on the same principle. It leads to creation of competing imperialistic groups, and finally to a nuclear war between them. And consequently a quick end to a civilization.

    The Great Silence, the total absence of any intelligent radio signals whatsoever from the space, makes this theory quite plausible.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mentil ( 1748130 )

      It's plausible, but it assumes that all aliens have genetic material which undergoes random mutations at a standard rate. If speciation periodically occurred due to the genetic code 'locking', refusing to mutate, and reproduction were asexual, then there may be species of genetically-identical beings. If one of those species was sentient, then social darwinism may lead to learning to control personality traits that would eventually lead to nuclear war.
      Or they master biotech before physics, and genetically e

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Max_W ( 812974 )

        ... Or the planet's population is kept small or localized (due to hospitable surface area or resource location) such that factionalization is impossible, it effectively remains one tribe. ...

        There was a sociological research when a large group of monkeys, several hundreds, were placed on an isolated island. There were always factions, politics, and war. One after another. I saw a documentary about it.

        But human history also shows the same pattern. One war after another, more and more destructive. Even after the war to end all wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        Anyway, there are billions of planets, which exist for billions of years, and practically no intelligent life, no intelligent

    • The space debris will most probably just float off and crash into something, or drift into the empty void of black space where none shall ever encounter it. How do these people not understand that space is big?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Wulf2k ( 4703573 )

        If they expected it to actually be found, do you think that's the payload they'd choose?

        • Honestly I consider space launches squandered capacity. Put something up there we can use: GPS, moon infrastructure, something that will enrich the nation and the world. A lot of labor went into this thing, and a lot of nothing came out. Generally, I thus assume these people have no sense.

          On the other hand, this thing cost $90 million to put up there, whereas the shuttle program cost $196 billion and the last mission cost $450 million, while a single Apollo mission cost $18 billion--1.67% of GDP in

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Wulf2k ( 4703573 )

            I appreciate your point, but now I'm curious if anybody's working on zero-g ketchup bottles.

          • This was the first Falcon Heavy launch. Nobody knew how it was going to go. Musk said he'd like it if the rocket got far enough up so that it wouldn't damage the pad when it exploded.

            In fact, it went off very well, with the two side boosters landing back on land, and the center failing recovery due to a shortage of lighting fluid. Nobody knew that at the time. None of us watching the launch live knew what we'd see.

            And nobody had something they wanted to put on a rocket that had an excellent chance

            • Fair enough. The added payload often significantly increases the fuel cost, although at this point I don't know how that impacts the launch cost. At least this time it didn't detonate with teachers on board.

  • Won't fly (Score:3)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Monday February 26, 2018 @02:51AM (#56186311)

    The Content Mafia will want compensation for galactic distribution rights.

  • The best you can probably do for a future historian is to record as complete a picture as you can without filtering. If you have space, and I don't see why you don't, you could chuck in a copy of the entire web, warts and all. It would, initially, be helpful to have a snapshot of how a few random families actually lived, so that the historians could get some context before wading in. And some digital library might give a general opinion of what we knew and believed. But any filtering process, even if it imp

  • Missing the point (Score:3)

    by spaceman375 ( 780812 ) on Monday February 26, 2018 @10:25AM (#56187863)

    Elon's car and it's data cube aren't leaving the solar system. This message isn't intended for aliens. It's for our somewhat distant offspring. Eventually we will have enough space presence to make recovering Starman an economically viable advertising stunt. SpaceX themselves may even fetch it back for their 100th or 250th anniversary if the orbit is sufficiently close.

    Of course, if we lose track of it and they happen on it 20k years or more from now, it will be a valuable surprise.

  • Record information... not interpretation... Interpretation will be done when the past is understood in its historic and cultural context.

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