The moon might be a good place for a massive storehouse of digital information, sort of a Lunar Library of Alexandria (that hopefully won’t burn down). That’s the idea proposed by NASA scientist David McKay, who ten years ago led the team that announced that a Mars meteorite contained evidence of life. According to the New Scientist blog, McKay says the lunar library could be stored on computers buried in the ground, placed inside craters, or located in hollow lava tubes. The New Scientist blog post refers to a white paper that McKay wrote on the subject, but I can’t seem to find it online. From the post:
The benefits of lunar storage are that there is no oxygen to erode the material, constant sub-freezing temperature and the Moon is currently free of all of the havoc wreaked by humankind…
Families could even pay a fee to preserve photographs in the lunar library for future civilizations. McKay calls it the “ultimate time capsule.”
UPDATE: BB pal Glenn Fleishman of Wi-Fi Net News says:
Your post reminded me of the superb novel by Jack Williamson, “Terraforming Earth,” which I believe was overlooked at the time it came out. In his story, Earth is at a nuclear dead-end, and one scientist manages to take several people, vast stores of knowledge, and flora/fauna archives to a previously established moon base. Computers clone and teach “descendents” from time to time over millions or perhaps hundred of millions of years. Sometimes they find that earth belongs to alien species. Sometimes, Earth is back to high technology. Once, they save future humanity from total extinction. Link
UPDATE: Richard Morgan writes:
Your post reminded me of an article I wrote over the summer for the science section of the New York Times, about the alliance to rescue civilization and its efforts to store — not just a compendium of human knowledge — on the moon, but also an ark of all genetic material as well.
UPDATE: Jamais Cascio writes:
For whatever it’s worth, the idea of putting an information repository on the Moon is something I’ve been writing about for awhile, too. I first discussed it in a column in 1999 (an archive copy of the article is here) and brought it up again on WorldChanging more recently (link) in connection to the massive seed vault being built in Norway to protect plant DNA in case of global catastrophe. The ARC folks first wrote about their version of the idea in 1999, as well. While we all came up with the concept independently, I would not be surprised to find even earlier non-fiction iterations of the proposal.
It all boils down to making backups. As anyone who has done tech work (even for themselves) knows, backups are not substitutes for maintenance. Dealing with disasters after the fact is always far more costly, time-consuming and frustrating — and, on the scale we’re talking about, life-threatening — than performing regular maintenance. Maintenance projects (fighting global warming, eliminating global poverty, eradication of pandemic diseases) reduce our need to use backups; backup projects are our last hope when maintenance fails.
The reoccurrence of this idea is an acknowledgment that sometimes maintenance fails, and that if human civilization is worth keeping around, we need to think big.