How the Lunar Library Was Built

The Lunar Library was built for the Arch Mission Foundation, using an advanced new technology for etching tiny analog images into nickel, invented by the scientist and engineer, Bruce Ha (See: www.nanoarchival.com).

For an in-depth description of how Lunar Library was built, and what it contains, read our comprehensive publication, Overview of the Lunar Library, which contains a detailed “making of” section, as well as a catalog, and much more commentary.

Here is a zoomed out picture of a tiny part of one little area in the Arch Mission Primer section.

A low-quality microscope image of a set of analog etchings on one part of the Primer layer of the Lunar Library

Each analog layer was etched at 300,000 dpi and is a 140 billion pixel surface that contains 20,000 analog images, where each image is 300 dpi.

Here is a rendering of photos of members of the SpaceIL community. Each photo is a 300 dpi image.

The front cover (top) layer has fewer images at a lower magnification (larger size) in order for the images to be easier to see with a lower power microscope and even the naked eye.

An image of 1 area on the front cover of the top analog layer of the Lunar Library.

On the deeper analog layers, each letter of each word is the size of a bacillus bacterium. Features of each letter are sculpted in the sub-micron range (they are etched at nanometer scale).

A series of images depicting Bruce Ha, the inventor of the nano diffractive etching technology that the Lunar Library is built with, etched by electro deposit into a 1 mm area of nickel (for more info see: www.nanoarchival.com)

Portion of the Hebrew Bible, as surface relief nickel etchings made by electro-deposit.

Scan showing sub-micron feature precision of Tibetan letters.

The Arch Mission Foundation

Our nonprofit charitable organization, the Arch Mission Foundation, is backing up planet Earth, so that our heritage (our knowledge, culture, art, science, DNA, etc.) will never be lost.

We call this The Billion Year Archive initiative — it’s a backup strategy that is designed to guarantee the preservation of the heritage of our world for at least a billion years.

We make our backups using new technologies that can preserve data for ultra-long-timescales. But durability alone is not enough. We are also distributing these backups to many locations around the solar system, as well as to locations all around the Earth itself. This concept of “many copies, many places” is a common best-practice in any good backup strategy.

By sending many offsite backups (and a stream of updates) to many locations, we can eventually make a 100% guarantee that at least some of them will last for up to billions of years.

In human history, until now, this guarantee has never before been possible to make. We will achieve this within 10 years, and then we will continue it.

We started the Arch Mission in 2015 as a grassroots effort, and got our full nonprofit organization status in 2016.

In the last two years (2018 and 2019) — and funded purely by a few donations from friends and our own team — we have sent 4 backups to space.

But this is just the beginning.

We plan to send thousands of these backups to points around the solar system, locations on Earth, and even beyond our solar system, over time.

By placing many copies in many places, and sending a regular stream of updates, we can ensure that the heritage of our civilization and our planet will be protected and can never be lost.

This growing distributed backup of Earth can be used to recover our records, and even reconstruct our civilization and even life on Earth… if ever necessary.

Hopefully a backup of Earth isn’t needed anytime soon, but it will be eventually.

On geological timescales it is certain that life on Earth will be wiped out many times — it happens with regularity on million-year timescales — and so this distributed backup will be the only remaining trace of our civilization.

Why is a Backup of Planet Earth Needed?

The global situation here on Earth is trending in the wrong direction. We are headed towards multiple potential extinction-level events, including an environmental crisis of our own making.

Humanity and the leaders of the world are not rising the challenge fast enough. By the time the environmental crisis we face becomes an urgent issue for every person on the planet, it will be too late to stop the collapse that is coming. If people act now — on a massive and intense global level — the best we can achieve is to reduce the severity of what’s coming.

We are already in the opening act of the sixth great extinction on Earth. This is a fact, not “fake news.”

The gifts of nature, that we have taken for granted all our lives, will be mostly gone after 100 years. That’s not a long time.

Our children and grandchildren will have to endure — and try to survive in — the broken planet we are leaving them. Everyone knows something is wrong — even the climate change deniers know the weather is starting to become more violent.

The ripple effects of the accelerating loss of species and ecosystems, the undeniable fact of rising global temperature, the pollution and over-depletion of natural resources and the environment, and over-population and unchecked industrialization of the world, are a perfect storm.

We do not believe that governments will get organized enough to solve this before it is too late, although we hope a worldwide movement of concerned individuals will rise to the challenge in time.

But what if that doesn’t happen? What if neither governments nor concerned citizens of the world are able or willing to act decisively to save the environment, and prevent all the other existential risks we face?

In case we don’t solve all these problems — Then we at least have to prepare for various 50 year, 100 year, and 1000 year worst-case scenarios. That’s the intelligent, wise, and responsible thing to do.

Making sure that no matter what happens, Earth’s heritage will survive and be recoverable is what we are doing at the Arch Mission Foundation.

While much of our work is focused on preservation of the past for the benefit of those in future, there are also many near-term benefits of our work, even if the world doesn’t end anytime soon.

The main near-term benefit has been in bringing people together across cultures, disciplines and and organizations, to think about how to solve these emerging global problems, and how to prepare for the possibility that they aren’t solved.

The conversations we have facilitated have already yielded many new collaborations, new technologies, and even new startup ventures.

In addition, we have helped to raise awareness globally in the media, and we have worked behind the scenes to give a number of space missions a higher purpose and benefit for humanity.

If that’s all we accomplish, that’s enough. But we also have delivered several ultra-long-term backups of Earth into secure locations, and that’s certainly a plus.

Although the threats that humanity faces from nature, and its own stupidity and short-sightedness, are increasingly dire, we are still optimistic that humanity and life on Earth will get through the turmoil ahead. It won’t be an easy ride.

The next few centuries will be hard. But, as Harry Seldon realized, in Isaac Asimov’s inspirational Foundation Series, making a backup of civilization can have subtle yet profoundly beneficial effects on the future trajectory and resilience of civilization. Even if the backup is never needed, the act of making it, and making it a priority, changes civilization’s direction for the better. Ironically, by helping to prepare for the decline of civilization as we know it, we may help to prevent it, make it less severe, or at least help it recover faster.

Change is part of life, and part of nature. Change is often painful, and learning requires making mistakes. But the sign of higher intelligence is the ability to relate to change proactively, rather than just reactively. We are doing this and therefore we have hope.

It All Started With a Dream I Had When I Was Eight Years Old

Ok, well if you have read this far, you know quite a lot about what we are doing and why. But there is more. A lot more.

There is a secret backstory, including an incredible series of unlikely events that led to all of this. That story will be told at another time. It’s long, detailed, and full of surprises and high strangeness, including photographic evidence of some really amazing things that have happened along the way.

Believe it or not, this all began with a very detailed dream that I had one night as an eight-year-old child in 1977.

I have been meaning to write about this dream, and I will. It’s almost a novel, it was so detailed and long.

But suffice to say, in that dream I saw my adult life in which all of this was happening, in great detail, as well as what is coming next and for a long time into the future. I don’t know if all of it will come true — and I hope it doesn’t have to. But because of that dream, I developed a long interest in preserving our civilization and helping humanity in any way I can.

That’s why I’m doing this now.

And I’ve been really fortunate to meet many like-minded people along the way. I didn’t do this alone.

Without the close collaboration of Nick Slavin, Bruce Ha, Matt Hoerl, Robert Jacobson, Michael Paul, Tzili Charney, Genius 100, Peter Kazansky, Stephen Wolfram, Small Jones, Brewster Kahle, Laura Welcher, Adam Cheyer, Josh Jones-Dilworth, Doug Freeman, Yonatan Weintraub, Yariv Bash, Ido Aharoni, Rami Kleinmann, David Copperfield, and our many other team members, advisors, and partners — this would not have materialized.

What’s Next?

Our work has only just begun. We have had some accomplishments and we have proved we can execute.

But to fulfill our mission we have to keep going — we have to send many more backups to many places, on an ongoing basis.

We have many new missions to deliver backups of Earth planned — to the Moon, as well as around the solar system, and even around the surface of planet Earth. These are part of many initiatives that use new technologies we are working with. There is much more to do! It’s exciting, challenging, and meaningful work.

It’s also often extremely hard and even lonely work at times — and we struggle to do this alone and without the support we need. Yet through thick and thin — we make it happen.

I am proud of what our small team has accomplished. We have placed the longest lasting archives of civilization ever made into the longest-duration locations in the solar system.

We have backed up planet Earth to some extent — and we have a plan to do it much more thoroughly — a plan that we are executing.

That’s not bad for our first few years of bootstrapping this effort.

And no matter how hard it is at times, it’s also super fun, satisfying and meaningful. Plus we get to meet and work with some of the smartest and most visionary people on the planet.

And we have no choice. We are driven to do this. We have to do it. We love doing it. We will do it. And we invite you to do it with us.

Visit our site, follow us, and join our mailing list to keep up with our progress.

And please consider making a donation — large or small — to support our work.

We Need Your Help

For what we have accomplished, you would be amazed at how small and underfunded we are.

The Arch Mission is not a bunch of billionaires working on a vanity project. It’s actually a core team of less than 10 volunteers, with about 50 volunteer advisors, and the goodwill and help of several dozen leading organizational partners.

Backing up Earth in even one offsite location should have cost more than several tens of millions of dollars, but we have been able to deliver four locations for only a few million dollars of combined cash donations and in-kind pro-bono services.

We succeeded by sheer force of will, passion, ingenuity, and by carefully applying all the lean-startup skills we’ve all learned over our decades of collective tech startup and production experiences.

But we have gone about as far as humanly possible on a volunteer-basis and without a real budget or staff. Now we need your help!

We believe the work we are doing is important for humanity and life on Earth today, as well as in the future. It must continue and our civilization has limited time to get this backup fully in place before it’s too late to do it well.

To scale this effort across the solar system, and the planet, we need serious help, including large committed ongoing financial support from people and organizations who share our concern and are able to help us execute.

If you believe in our vision, and if you can help support us with donations, please contact us.

The Moon has Changed

When you look up at the Moon from now on, think about what is now there. The Moon has changed.

The Moon is now a library of the most sacred, important, and wonderful accomplishments and memories of the human race. It also contains some fun, even humorous oddities and ephemera — plus many secret Vaults to be revealed in the future.

Because of what we have landed there, the Moon is quite literally now a place where all of us are represented and where all of our cultures and traditions are honored, respected, and enshrined, for billions of years. All of humanity’s wishes, accomplishments, memories, and prayers are there — forever.

The Moon has always been a symbol of peace and serenity. It is a safe space for humanity — a place where we are all friends. We are all equally close to it. We can all see it. And most importantly, when you look back the Earth from the Moon, there are no national boundaries seen on Earth. The Earth, and every living being on it, are simply one.

So think about this when you look at the Moon from now on: The Moon is now home to humanity’s most important and treasured beliefs and heritage — and everyone in the Wikipedia, and the many other data sets we included, are there. Humanity is there, forever.

The Earth is our face and the Moon is its mirror — A mirror that reflects not only the light of the Sun, but now also the light of humanity.