Millions of Wikipedia pages to be sent to moon for ‘Lunar Library’

A non-profit organization is planning to set up a library on moon by putting the entire Wikipedia there in an effort to share knowledge across time and space.

The Arch Mission Foundation plans to create a Lunar Library by putting up Wikipedia on moon. However, the contents will be imprinted by laser on tiny sheets of nickel that are thinner than human hair and smaller than postage stamps, with one nickel sheet containing 16,000 pages of content.

Arch Foundation partnered with a space company Astrobotic and will send its tiny Wikipedia on-board of its moon mission expected to launch in 2020. Astrobotic’s CEO John Thornton said, “It’s humbling to think our mission to the Moon will deliver something that could be read millions of years from now. Arch’s Lunar Library will be a monument not only to human knowledge and culture, but also the first commercial mission to the Moon.”

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Arch Foundation’s aim is to set up archives of humanity’s culture in various places throughout the cosmos in order to inspire people more about space. Co-founder Nova Spivack informed The Verge, “We thought of this project to archive human civilization around the Solar System — to create a permanent off-site backup of all our cultural achievements. So, our knowledge, our art, our languages, our history — all the stuff the human mind has produced.”

The idea is that these archives can survive for billions of years up in space where future humans can read them. Spivack claims that their Lunar Library will contain top most Wikipedia articles in different languages and also the Long Now Foundation’s ‘Rosetta Project’ – digital library of over 1,500 human languages – with more content to be included.

Moreover, all the sheets will be packed inside a CD-sized container that will contain between 25 million to 50 million pages of text as well as images and can be read by a 1,000-magnification optical microscope. The firm also plans to keep the library growing and send more archives to moon with time. It is also developing a Mars Library and later, to various places in the Solar System, wrote Tech Crunch.

The sending of information in space is not new for Arch. Previously, they sent small digital storage devices comprising of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy on-board SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy with the Tesla Roadster.