Earth and the Moon, captured together by the DSCOVR spacecraft. Credit: NASA/NOAA
Through the ages, humans have tried to preserve their knowledge and treasures in various repositories, and some of those storehouses have been massive in scale. The library of Ashurbanipal, assembled 700 years before the life of Jesus of Nazareth, is the oldest known collection of human knowledge. Ashurbanipal located his collection of 30,000 cuneiform tablets in the ancient city of Nineveh, the capitol of the Assyrian Empire, in what is today’s Iraq. Impressive as it was, its extent was dwarfed by another library of antiquity, the great center of learning in Alexandria.
Egypt’s legendary Library of Alexandria preserved much of the world’s ancient knowledge. Scholars and researchers from across the Mediterranean gathered there to avail themselves of its spectacular 500,000 papyrus scrolls. Tradition has it that Julius Caesar accidentally razed the library in an attack of the nearby harbor in 48 B.C.E., though other evidence points to a later demise. Regardless of the date, its loss was a tragedy for human culture.
Threats all around
Dangers threaten the survival of our modern culture and, perhaps, the existence of the entire human race. Just ask the dinosaurs. A six-mile-wide (10 kilometers) space rock brought an end to their 186-million-year reign over the planet, and many more asteroids are out there. (We’re doing a pretty good job of tracking the big ones, but nature is full of surprises.) Toxic waste, ecological catastrophes, climate change and global epidemics all pose existential threats to humankind.
Can an asteroid send us back to the stone age? Can an extreme pandemic rewind humanity’s progress by millennia? It’s the stuff of dark science fiction tropes, but the possibilities do exist.
Now, however, copies of the greatest scientific discoveries, and the finest cultural and artistic masterpieces, could be stored in the safety of a world a quarter of a million miles distant.
First steps
The concept has already seen a proof-of-concept flight aboard the Intuitive Machines robotic Moon lander Odysseus, which touched down on its side in February 2024.
Odysseus was part of the Artemis program to return humans to the Moon. Aboard the craft was a data storage unit designed by Florida data startup Lonestar Data Holdings. Lonestar offers what they call Resiliency as a Service (RaaS) or “off-planet disaster recovery services” with “a series of increasingly sophisticated data centers on and around the Moon.”
The concept was inspired by a real-world event, says CEO Chris Stott: “In 2017, a cyber weapon of mass destruction got loose. It was called Notpetya, a Russian cyber weapon aimed at Ukraine. It wiped out 80 percent of all data on their computers, in their railway stations, from the Ministry of Finance to hospitals to ATMs. But worse, it got out.” Notpetya escaped on to other networks within seconds, Stott says. “It nearly took us back to the 1800s.”
Lonestar intends to protect the world against a similar future attack. Stott has been testing data backup in space since December 2021, when Lonestar and software developer Cannonical uploaded software to the drive on Made In Space’s 3D printer aboard the International Space Station. That operation successfully performed AI, storage, and more.
Proof of concept
In February 2024, as a test of a more robust service, the company transmitted a digital copy of the Declaration of Independence across space to the Odysseus lander while en route to the Moon, and then again from the surface of the Moon itself. The craft then returned digital copies of the Constitution and Bill of Rights to Earth.
Lonestar’s next mission is scheduled in the first quarter of 2025, again aboard Intuitive Machines’ next lander, this time taking a full data center. Says Stott: “This next step for us will be the first physical data center off world, ever.”
But Stott’s team has much bigger plans: Working with terrestrial data center partners, a “living, breathing digital twin of the entire planet” is in the works, he says. The company’s next steps are in lunar orbit with a series of multi-petabyte data storage spacecraft launching from 2027 to 2031.
Eventually, Lonestar and its associates would like to erect more permanent facilities, and they have their eyes on lunar lava tubes. “There are more than 2,700 lava tubes,” Stott reasons. “What we’re looking at is one that is 93 kilometers [58 miles] long, in the Marius Hills of the Ocean of Storms. It’s vast. You could put three or four Manhattans in half of it. And their natural internal temperatures are at minus twenty, perfect for electronics.”
Other efforts
The Arch Project is exploring another version of global backup. With experience gained at the Moon, the organization’s Arch Mission Foundation Initiative plans to create a solar system-wide archive of humankind’s knowledge. Arch asserts that their design is the “largest footprint and longest duration engineering project in human history.” Arch envisions a billion-year archive of libraries established throughout the solar system.
Arch’s first library launched aboard Elon Musk’s SpaceX Tesla. In the glove box of the car, a copy of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy is engraved on a quartz disk. Arch designers project that such digital documents can last for 14 billion years. Before Lonestar’s Intuitive Machines flight, another installment made its way to the Moon aboard the SpaceIL lander. That mission contained a 30-million-page “backup of civilization.”
The Moon also offers a handy site for an offworld seed repository of Earth’s plant life, much like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the island of Spitzbergen. In 2017, flooding threatened the Svalbard facility when nearby permafrost began to thaw. A lunar storeroom would be immune to such terrestrial disasters.
Additionally, the Moon’s great library could serve as a DNA storehouse for endangered creatures, preserving the genetic record of Earth’s rarest species. Biologists say that the stable, cold temperatures in several of the Moon’s south polar traps could preserve seeds as well as fibroblast cells from animals. Fibroblasts can be transformed into stem cells for cloning endangered species. Researchers are now studying ways to protect specimens from the radiation environment of the Moon’s south pole, and hope to fly their canisters on upcoming missions.
The Artemis program, which aims to return humans to the Moon within several years, affords opportunities for such a project. A biological or digital treasure trove on the Moon could help future generations to restore Earth’s biome and benefit from the best technology and wisdom of today.
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