Maybe personal electric Roadster Elon musk and seized all the tapes of news headlines, thanks to historic space launch company SpaceX, but it turns out that super-heavy carrier rocket Falcon Heavy has sent into space a second, secret cargo, which almost nobody knew. Inside of a red convertible Tesla hid a small object, which is intended for millions (and possibly billions) of years, even in extreme conditions such as outer space or the surface of some distant planetary bodies.
The device is called Arch (pronounced “ark”) and is a tiny storage media that is designed for long term data storage. It contains whole libraries of information encoded inside of a small disc of quartz crystal, no bigger than a normal coin.
Similar arches “can preserve and disseminate knowledge of humanity through space and time, passing them on to future generations”, noted in the California non-profit organization Arch Mission Foundation behind the creation of this technology.
The arc looks like a significantly reduced size DVD or Blu-ray drive, but its potential is incomparably superior to both of these media, as well as any other optical media, which may be in your home. The technology was developed by the Peter Kazansky from Southampton University, and thanks to her for this tiny drive can store up to 360 terabytes of information, roughly equivalent to 7000 Blu-ray discs.
But what’s even more impressive is the sustainability of such media. As pointed Arch Mission Foundation, rims Arch Arch 1.1 and 1.2 have the long-term life cycle among all ever created media. Thanks to “five-dimensional storage”, implemented due to laser nanographite inside the quartz glass, they are theoretically able to remain functional up to 14 billion years.
Drive 1.2 Arch, called the “Solar Library” (“Solar library”), currently travelling through space inside the Roadster Elon musk at a speed of about 12 908 kilometers per hour. The media contains a cycle “Basis”, consisting of seven science fiction novels of Isaac Asimov, where the main idea is centered around the concept of preserving human knowledge and culture within a large and unforgiving Universe. The mission of Elon perfectly fits the goals of the developers of Arch, so the drive was decided to launch with the Falcon Heavy, despite the high risk of an unsuccessful launch.
“The sun is circling around the Sun for billions of years,” says the co — founder of the organization the Arch Foundation Mission Nova Spivak.
“Think of it as the ring of knowledge around the Sun. This is only the first step of the epic project of mankind for the development, coding and dissemination of information throughout the Solar system and beyond”.
Two runs of the same disc with “lunar” and “Martian” libraries scheduled for 2020 and 2030, respectively. Their task will be to save backup copies of human knowledge about Mars and the moon, with the prospect that future colonists of the red planet will ever catch and use for “seeding” the first local Martian Internet. If this sounds ambitious, the key objective of the project will seem even more fantastic.
“Sooner or later, all of the library space Ark will be merged into the decentralized data network, which will apply to the entire Solar system. Because of this people will be able to share and receive new information within our system, and in the future development and expansion – and beyond,” added Spivak.
Of course, now this may sound crazy insane dream. But if you doubt that this project will ever be implemented, then ask yourself one simple question: could you believe that in 2018, the space launch vehicle? To speculate on this topic, you can not only review, but also in our Telegram chat.
In addition to the electric vehicle, the Falcon Heavy rocket sent into space a secret cargo
Nikolai Khizhnyak