Arch Mission Foundation’s Nova Spivack: “Humanity's billion-year backup”

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 12 April 2019

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Nova Spivack, founder of the Arch Mission Foundation, to talk about the lunar library (3:10), how is started in 2015 (6:40), doing a test mission with Elon Musk (7:55), packing 30m pages of data into a CD (9:25), safekeeping the keys to civilisation (13:10), storing special data in “vaults” (15:30), why he’s doing it (17:45), looking for billionaire benefactors (20:10), settling the moon (23:25), getting funding from the Charney family (25:20), what happens if the landing is successful (26:30), the fears driving the project (28:20), private enterprise in space (30:00), keeping the project private (31:05), and creating a permanent record for an impermanent time (36:30).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Yo, technology.
0:03.0	What is it all about?
0:07.0	Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch from deep inside the Silicon Valley Future Machine.
0:14.2	This week, I want to take you back to a clear night in February when a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasted into orbit
0:24.3	from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
0:27.5	Stage one, pressing for flight.
0:29.9	Five, four, three, two, one, zero.
0:35.0	The rocket had three payloads.
0:39.3	An internet satellite from Indonesia, another one from the U.S. Air Force.
0:46.3	And the third was a lunar lander called Beresheet that was developed by an Israeli non-profit.
0:57.3	And Beresheet is the one that we're interested in.
1:01.7	The Falcon 9 released it about 40,000 miles above Earth,
1:05.9	putting it into an orbit that for the past 50 days or so has been elongating until this week
1:08.8	when it was set to become the first ever privately funded spacecraft
1:13.1	to land on the moon. And on board, it had some very special cargo. It was a handful of discs
1:22.3	that contained more than 30 million pages of information. Think of it as a blueprint of humanity so far.
1:30.8	It's our scientific advances, our fights, our fables, a bit of our music, a lot of our books.
1:37.6	It's a lunar library, and according to the man behind it, it is the first billion-year backup
1:43.8	of humanity. Just in case we nuke ourselves
1:47.9	into oblivion or render Earth uninhabitable through climate change or, you know, the species of
1:55.0	superior AI-powered robots decide we're just a nuisance. So obviously obviously I had lots of questions about this project.
2:03.2	So I thought in this momentous of weeks that I would bring on Nova Spivak, who came up with
	...

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