With the launch of SpaceX’s biggest rocket Falcon Heavy, went a Tesla Roadster into the space to go into Mars’ orbit and give epic views. However, one thing that didn’t make headlines was the second secret payload that went along with the sports car in order to tell ‘aliens’ about humans.
The tiny mysterious object is a small storage device, the size of a coin. Called ‘Arch’, the device is built to long-term achieve and store huge libraries of data encoded on a small disc of quartz crystal and is expected to survive million and billions of years in space. Three of these Archs were sent into space.
A California-based nonprofit called ‘Arch Mission Foundation’ made these discs saying that the Archs could ‘preserve and disseminate humanity’s knowledge across time and space, for the benefit of future generations’.
Tesla Roadster floating through space will give ‘epic views’
As Science Alert reports, the disc can store up to 360 terabytes of data, equivalent to the data stored in 7,000 Blu-Ray discs, and are the longest-lasting storage objects ever created by humans – supposedly stable for up to 14 billion years.
The disc launch was named ‘Solar Library’ since it contains all the three books from Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi classic ‘Foundation’ trilogy. Co-founder Nova Spivack claimed, “The Solar Library will orbit the Sun for billions of years. Think of it as a ring of knowledge around the Sun. This is only the first step of an epic human project to curate, encode, and distribute our data across the Solar System, and beyond.”
Spivack explained that the goal is to eventually build the largest, most durable and most complete off-site backup of all human knowledge ever created and spread across space is different mediums and formats, reported Tech Crunch.
There are also launches planned for 2020 and 2030 with ‘Lunar’ and ‘Mars’ Arch libraries, aiming to send curated backups of human knowledge to the Moon and Mars. The Mars Arch library is believed to also serve to seed localized internet on Mars for immigrants.