Packing civilization in a box designed for space means choosing our heritage

When the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket made its trial launch in February, the ship did not just take the red Roadster Mask and the mannequin in a spacesuit into space. He carried another small payload, which, at first glance, seemed less impressive: a quartz disk with a diameter of 2.5 cm with a laser-engraved " Foundation " trilogy by Isaac Asimov.

The famous cycle of science fiction is only the beginning of the planned disc content. While traditional hard drives are only included in the area of ​​terabyte capacity, quartz can hold 360 TB per disk. And he boasts a lifetime of 14 billion years. This is more than the current age of the universe.

This disk was symbolic; future devices will contain much more information, and much more useful. But this technology belongs to more serious problems than humanity solves today: turning into an interplanetary civilization, storing information for thousands and millions of years, communication and communication with other minds (alien and terrestrial).

So how do we record knowledge and experience for posterity? How to ensure that this information will be understandable for civilizations that may be very different from ours? And what do we need to say?

People have met with such problems before. Ancient civilizations built monuments like pyramids and left artifacts and records - sometimes deliberately. Later researchers used this material to recreate ancient ideas about the world. However, in the modern world we aim much further: from centuries to millennia, from one planet to interstellar space, from one species to many.

Carved in stone

Ancient civilizations, from the Mayans to the Indians , used stone and ceramics to store records. These materials may not be the most effective carrier, but they are definitely durable. The clay tablets of Mesopotamia have survived from the very dawn of civilization.

Today, people retain most of our records in delicate electronics, which are decaying much easier than past tablets.

“Our civilization is more ephemeral and at greater risk than any of the previous ones,” Nova Spivak told our publication. Spivak was one of the founders of the Arch Mission Foundation, a non-profit foundation (arch from the word archive - archive), which provided quartz disks sent to space on a Falcon Heavy rocket.

Quartz, like glass, is chemically stable and physically durable - Spivak indicated. Think of all the glass instruments used in chemical laboratories around the world. Since quartz is transparent, scientists can use high power lasers to create patterns inside the disks — something like three-dimensional engravings that can be bought at souvenir shops. Physical engraving of data inside a disc creates a much more stable recording than the use of an electronic method of recording data. For example, magnetic memory on a hard disk is influenced by electromagnetic fields and degrades over time.

Writing data inside the material instead of the surface also has its advantages. It protects information from wear of the surface, which kills devices such as CDs, which store data on the surface [ it’s strange that the author doesn’t know how CD works - data, of course, is not stored on the surface, but surface scratches can prevent them from being read / approx. trans. ]. This method also allows you to increase the density of information, if you believe the article describing the technology. Engineers can take advantage of the availability of five variables to encode data - each “notch” has three spatial dimensions and two optical properties — the axis of lowest light velocity and phase shift. This allowed them to achieve an impressive amount of 360 TB.


To encode information using a nanometer-sized engraving, a laser with femtosecond pulses is required — this is the time scale of the movements inside the molecules.

Disks are also a convenient way to send and receive large amounts of data. Spivak imagines how people shoot such large-capacity disks in the direction of remote space outposts for the delivery of, say, an update of the terrestrial Internet to the Martian Internet. The discs will definitely provide more bandwidth than radio transmitters, says Spivak, and the physical sending of information from one place to another is already common practice. Google used this method to transfer 120 TB of data from the Hubble telescope between scientists [ freshly assembled material from the Lord of the Rings trilogy filming was transported on hard drives between the US and New Zealand to Peter Jackson for viewing / approx. trans. ].

Data storage in 5D on quartz disks is still unacceptably expensive. The first set of discs was created and donated to the Arch by the laboratory at the University of Southampton, UK, where this technology was invented. Spivak predicts that the commercialization of this technology will require several million dollars and up to ten years. Projects such as Project Silica from Microsoft demonstrate that work is already underway to improve this technology.

Going to space

Reliability and redundancy are critical to maintaining information for the long term. Such an attitude is cultivated in the field of archiving, says Laura Welcher, who leads the Rosette project, storing world languages ​​in the Long Now Foundation, a partner of Arch. “Information will be safe if you have many copies of it,” she told us.

Therefore, the Spivak Foundation plans to create several Arch libraries. “Look at the Voyager CD or other attempts to preserve culture — time capsules, sending something into space — these items are sent to one place once,” says Spivak. “We always ship many items to several places.”


A pair of recordings on Voyager spaceships contained music, sounds of the Earth, analog images recorded and greetings in many languages. On the aluminum case, the recording has symbolic instructions for playing it with the included cartridge and needle.

Redundancy as a means of savings can be applied to humanity as a whole. If we become a multi-planet species, it will be “insurance for life we ​​know,” as Musk said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine.

If you wait long enough, large cataclysms will surely occur. It is wise not to put all your eggs in one basket.

“Now both the level of opportunity and the level of risk is increased,” said Spivak. The ability for one person or a small group of people to destroy an entire civilization, deliberately or accidentally, is greater than ever. “I think for us it will be a sign of transition to the next level of development if we survive as a civilization,” he said, “and it’s very likely that a large part of civilization will not survive.”

SpaceX stated that its goal was to contribute to the development of a civilization exploring space. “Their part of the work described by this phrase is space exploration,” said Spivak. “And our part is civilization.”

Spivak said that placing Arch libraries in all parts of the solar system that are of interest to humans on storage media that can be stored for millions to billions of years can help preserve civilization. And space is definitely the place to go to connect with other forms of life.

In addition to working on innovative technologies, the people who develop these artifacts encounter many philosophical problems. For example, they need to ensure that people, or other forms of life, who discover our messages, will be able to recognize and decipher them.

It is impossible to calculate for each type of mind that our records may meet in the distant future. Perhaps there is some form of life that feeds on silicon, Spivak said. "They can decide that it is tasty," he said. Therefore, the storage device should be interesting enough to spur curiosity, and look so that it is clear that the message is enclosed in this object.

Spivak asked renowned computer scientist Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica computing software and Wolfram Alpha online problem solving system, to help the Arch team work through these difficulties. The role of Wolfram is “to ask difficult questions and maintain our intellectual frankness,” Spivak said.

The two men had a different approach to solving these problems. “Nova told me about his project, and I responded in the style of“ Your project is doomed from a philosophical point of view, ”laughs Wolfram. He said that cultural and probably biological differences between us and the recipients of our messages may prove to be insurmountable. Nonetheless, he said, this mission seems interesting enough to work on it as an adviser.

»The main problem - how to make something clear in the absence of any common cultural context? Said Wolfram. “I think that, no matter what, we had a problem on our hands that was insoluble from a philosophical point of view."


Wolfram stumbled upon this Persian inscription while researching for his book, A New Kind of Science [A New Kind of Science]. In the absence of a cultural context, he could not understand whether it was a mathematical picture, a cellular automaton, or something else. As a result, he learned that this is a stylized list of 62 distinctive features of Allah.

The problem of messaging becomes more complicated the further the communicating parties are separated from each other - on a cultural, temporal or biological scale, explained Wolfram. And our concepts of thinking and communication are extremely human-centered and based on the ideas of the 21st century, he added.

Think of the difference between man and artificial intelligence. Google recently trained a program to recognize the risks associated with heart disease, based on an analysis of the blood vessels of the fundus. The algorithm works on the basis of medical data of almost 300 00 patients. Most likely, the differences that are important for AI do not matter to us.

Similarly, when studying ancient artifacts, it is difficult to understand which aspect of the ancient geometric structure was important for the creators, and which became accidental.

As these examples show, the real problem with preparing communication with the alien life form is that we can test our assumptions only on a single kind of creature. And this kind itself also carries out these tests.

Wolfram's skepticism should not be confused with cynicism: the barrier of communication can be insurmountable from a philosophical point of view, says Wolfram, "but this does not mean that we should not try to do it."

Spivak agrees that communication will be difficult. But he points out that people successfully passed messages through the epochs, mentioning the Dead Sea Scrolls and Egyptian hieroglyphs among the examples.

If a creature finds our archives in the near future, it will probably be human. Given this, Spivak limited the range of use of Arch Mission by humans and humanoid organisms. Limiting the target audience reduces the number of philosophical problems and provides the basis for the development of devices. For example, people are guided by sight and use symbolic writing, so a good start would be to create a visually intriguing artifact.

Unfortunately, many animals and natural phenomena look quite interesting, but do not convey any messages. As an example, a male prickly Arotron , creating ornaments in the sand to attract partners, can be cited. While scientists do not know exactly to what extent these ornaments contain a message and which one. However, Spivak said that it is reasonable to assume that our descendants recognize the visual signals used in the library, given the history of the use of symbols and written languages ​​by humanity.

Transmitting a message to a distance

Many factors will divide the minds of future people and the information we leave to them: language, culture, technical agreements, perhaps even biology. For successful communication it is necessary to minimize these obstacles.

When developing an archive, it is important to weigh the strengths of the different ways of encoding information. “Each layer of encryption adds complexity to decryption,” said Welcher from the Rosette project. If we wanted to encode the fairy tale " Jack and the Beanstalk " in DNA, then, according to Welcher, she must have five layers of abstraction:

1. Human experience.
2. Colloquial.
3. Written language.
4. Digital information.
5. DNA nucleotides.

Arch drives have a similar encoding level, but Welcher says that sacrificing simplicity was worth it, given the incredible durability of the carrier.

For the Rosette disk, the physical component of the Rosette project, they chose a strategy with less coding: they encode information in the form of real pages of text, something like microfiche . Existing technologies allow such a small text to be recorded that an electron microscope is required to read it, says Welcher, but “we didn’t want to erect such a high barrier to access, so we left pages so large that they can be read with optical zoom.”


The Rosetta CD contains over 13,000 pages of information in over 1,500 languages. Each page is microscopically engraved on a nickel disc.

Ideally, archivists would need to store devices to extract information from an artifact with it. This is the concept of civilization in the box from Spivak. In this project he hopes to build small containers with carriers of different life expectancy and capacity. This will include devices that can be read directly, similar to the Rosette disk, as well as those that require more complex decoding, such as high-capacity quartz disks.

The box will also have tools for decrypting messages. For example, the kit will include lenses and microscope diagrams for reading analog discs with real images. The foundation also developed small computers based on the Raspberry Pi and DVD players, capable of reading DVDs with a lifetime of thousands of years, made from special materials. These computers will be stored in boxes with spare parts. The foundation will write instructions for reading more complex records, such as quartz disks, to other media, as Spivak says.

This sensitive electronics can last for quite a while if it is shielded from debris and radiation, especially in an oxygen-free atmosphere, Spivak said. But even after degradation, components can serve as a scheme that message recipients can use to recreate technologies and extract information from disks.

Archivists can take advantage of historical ideas, Spivak said. “We were able to understand the history when we had a lot of data distributed in many places,” he said. “In some cases, there have been translations or links to other known data sets.”

In light of this, Spivak plans to include textbooks - brief introduction materials - in all devices. However, according to him, he wants to reach the “extremes” in this matter: to include a huge amount of visual and coded instructions for accessing, translating and understanding information on each device.

What will they want to know?

If we assume that we will be able to transmit a message to our posterity or to extraterrestrial guests, and let us assume that they will be able to decrypt the message, the question remains of what to tell them. Many scientists and futurists suggested using math in messages. Mathematics is universal and fundamental, and it can be derived from basic principles. With a little work, you can even encode information about what we learned about how the universe works - namely, scientific discoveries.

But this is exactly what can make mathematics the most boring thing out of all that we can send to aliens or save for descendants, said Spivak and Wolfram.

“When I started this project, I was completely in favor of conveying information about science,” said Spivak. “But the more I thought about it, the more I understood that science and mathematics are in a sense something like consumer goods: everyone in the Universe, reaching a certain level of development, reaches them.”

Thinking over the fact that our descendants or other intelligent life forms will want to learn about us, you should think about what we ourselves are trying to understand by studying cultures, individuals and animals. We usually try to understand what their lives are like and why they make such decisions. And this suggests that people are interesting and meaningful are a set of values ​​and experiences that make us unique.

Wolfram echoes this opinion: “If we want to convey something about ourselves, we need to send something special to us,” he wrote in an extensive blog entry on this topic. Humanity should concentrate on preserving and transmitting its experience and world view, for curious aliens or archaeologists after 10,000 years.

Include art objects there: images of paintings, sculptures, ornaments, from Paleolithic to modern times. Encode music, languages ​​and prayers. Tell stories, from sacred texts to high literature and folklore. Record history, traditions and customs. Share a variety of life on Earth through images, recordings and DNA. In general, give them everything that makes us what we are, something that cannot be reproduced or replaced.

In the end, no matter what we choose to include in the archives, it’s more likely to relate to what we consider important today than what future recipients of the message want to know about us, said Wolfram. And in this sense, he believes that projects like Arch Mission will prove useful, as they make society think about what legacy it will leave.