Last year, Elon
Musk's personal Tesla might have gotten all the headlines during SpaceX's
historic rocket launch back back in February, but the Falcon Heavy also
carried a second, secret payload almost nobody knew about. Stashed inside the
midnight-cherry Roadster was a mysterious, small object designed to last for
millions (perhaps billions) of years – even in extreme environments like space,
or on the distant surfaces of far-flung planetary bodies.
Called an Arch (pronounced 'Ark'), this tiny
storage device is built for long-term data archiving, holding libraries of
information encoded on a small disc of quartz crystal, not much larger than a
coin.
According to Arch
Mission Foundation, the California-based nonprofit behind the technology,
these Archs could “preserve and disseminate humanity's knowledge across time
and space, for the benefit of future generations”. The Arch looks like a
shrunk-down DVD or Blu-ray, but its potential for data storage goes way beyond
any optical discs you have in your home.
The technology,
developed by physicist Peter Kazansky from the University of Southampton in the
UK, can theoretically hold up to 360
terabytes of data, about the same amount as 7,000 Blu-Ray discs. But even
more impressive than the data capacity is the physical longevity of the medium
– the first two discs, called Arch 1.1 and Arch 1.2, are said to be two of the
longest-lasting storage objects ever created by humans, theoretically stable
for up to 14 billion years, thanks to '5D data storage' inscribed by laser nanostructuring in
quartz silica glass.
The Arch 1.2 disc
currently making its way through space on Musk's Tesla Roadster at a cruising
speed of some 12,908
km/h (8,021 mph) has been loaded up with Issac Asimov's Foundation trilogy –
a seminal sci-fi classic, similarly concerned with the concept of preserving
human knowledge and culture in a vast, unforgiving Universe. It's a mission
perfectly aligned with the goals of the Arch's developers, who have named this
maiden disc launch the 'Solar Library'.
“The Solar Library will orbit the Sun for billions of years,” explains co-founder Nova Spivack. “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.”
Subsequent
launches are planned for 2020 and 2030, with the 'Lunar' and 'Mars' Arch
libraries intended to send curated backups of human knowledge to the Moon and
Mars – with the latter disc hoped to serve as a useful aid for colonists on the
Red Planet, helping them to 'seed' a localised internet on Mars. If that all
sounds pretty ambitious, the ultimate goal is even more fantastic.
“By eventually connecting the Arch Libraries, and the Arch storage devices they contain, through a decentralised read-write data sharing network that spans the Solar System, we can begin to grow and share a collective decentralised library of everything humanity learns, on every planet in our Solar System, and even beyond, as we spread,” Spivack says.
Wow. Okay, so it's
one heck of a moonage
daydream, but if you don't believe it, ask yourself this: did you ever
expect a Tesla Roadster would be orbiting the Sun in 2019?
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