[ExI] Earth repositories (on the Moon)

[Bryan Bishop]

On Tuesday 11 March 2008, scerir wrote:
> Plans are being made for the installation
> of an information storage bank on the moon,

For the installation, not for the design of it, this is interesting. The 
design should be simple, I suppose: you need the hard drives, an 
electrical power supply, a few microprocessors for running your 
programs, and then a way to maintain the physical archive and sort 
through the inventory, unless it's all digital (which I doubt). What 
sort of physical capabilities should a first version 'ark' have? 
Obviously we do not have self-replication down, so things are going to 
start off fuzzy.

> experts said at a science meeting Strasbourg, France.
> The so-called "Doomsday ark" would provide the tools
> for the reconstruction of the human race in case
> civilization is ever destroyed, The Sunday London Times
> reported.

Compressing civilization down into a bootstrap form also has been 
discussed by Kevin Kelly, Dave Gingery, and various others who have a 
clue as to what's going on. But compressing all of this information 
down presents an interesting challenge, and I am not sure if Wikipedia 
is sufficient to help diffuse information on the design of 
civilization.

> The ark's basic version, which would be buried close
> to the moon's surface, would include hard discs
> containing DNA information and instructions for
> growing crops and metal making, the report said.

Upload Wikipedia please. The other day I was figuring that if I do 
figure out a way to get into orbit for cheap, and if I can manufacture 
transistors in orbit and paramagnetic materials, then I would very much 
like to start offering as much storage space as possible to anybody who 
wants it: fabrication costs will only be the cost of figuring out how 
to make it work with the materials in the sky. (more on this later?)

> The underground vault reportedly would transmit data
> to strongly guarded receivers on Earth.

I don't like that: why not transmit for all to hear a message of hope?

> "Eventually, it will be necessary to have a kind of
> Noah's ark there, a diversity of species from the biosphere,"

Noah's ark? How's that for ego? :)

-Bryan
________________________________________
Bryan Bishop
http://heybryan.org/