Note: I typed this fast, my head is about to shear off, it is not verbatim, and I’m sure it’s muddled. It will undergo edits over the next few days. Please do make comments, give insights, offer other questions, and discuss it to your heart’s content. It might not be a new idea… oh well, it’s still a fun one to bat around.
I was meeting with Spaced Diode last Saturday and what comes out of his mouth?
He says “I have this idea and you can mock me if you like…”
SD knows my tendency to listen to ideas, mock them, and replace them with my own. But in this case I was actually interested because he looked… eager. Engaged, even.
“Now, I realize that someone may have already thought of this, but I haven’t seen it, and it just came to…”
“Spit it out, SD,” I said impatiently.
Note: We could debate history (below) but I neither want to teach history nor debate it.
So here’s the idea:
What happened in Alexandria? Well, you had various asses at different points (Caesar, Aurelian, Theophilus, and the Muslims) over a period of almost 700 years do their damnedest to be spectacular asses. We had dark ages in there and beyond that period as well. So what do dark ages consist of? Utter lack of intellectual advancement which typically leads to people being brutal asses to everyone else because they’ve got nothing better to do.
We can speculate whether there is a direct correlation or causation (one to the other or vice-versa) but the point is we had some dark ages and they were pretty awful. Everyone agrees on that point. They also agree that there’s precious little records and the loss of the Library of Alexandria was a pretty huge waste. Lots of brainpower got burned up.
That’s pretty good incentive to try to find some other solution.
Think about what would happen if someone really tried to wipe out the Library of Congress, or if we had our own dark ages after a world war to end all world wars. It’s not beyond the bounds of the imagination to picture us doing something stupid in the future – a few years from now, hundreds of years, thousands… But what happens then? What if future dark ages lead to using precious documents as toilet paper? What if an EMP blast in multiple locations toasts everything around and not only can you not get to the information but you don’t even know where it is anymore?
Thus, the Lunar Alexandria Project.
The very first question posed to me by Spaced Diode started out simple. “How do you build a ten-thousand year clock?”
We discussed that at some length. I supposed that it really came down to a materials selection.
Then he asked, “How do you make anything last ten thousand years?”
I told him my idea on how to design for “forever” was that there’s damn few viable solutions and we agreed that even hundreds of years in book format was pushing limits. Age, water damage, FIRE… DARK AGES… But really, any format – gold discs, memristors, crystals, hard drives – all of it at the mercy of the stupidity of mankind when we really put a lot of ignorance into our efforts. All are fragile and all may be destroyed just like the Library of Alexandria.
His next question was simply “Why not put that information on the moon where no one could get at it? Why not put it there in a repository?”
I said “Oh yes, that will be of big help – any sufficiently advanced society that crawls out of the muck of a new dark age can have that data if they make it to the moon, well after when they actually needed it. Wow. Great idea, man.”
He looked at me exasperatedly. “No (you lunatic), you put out two signals. One is AM radio, which is the simplest kind of communications. I can make an AM radio out of trash in my garage – it’s trivial.”
I said “Oh sure, trivial, tell that to Marconi…”
He looked at me over his glasses with his classic pitying look again. “No, I am talking about receiving, not broadcasting. What you do is broadcast simple instructions for how to get to the point where you can really use the library and…”
I nodded. “Yes! And then you can handshake communicate!”
He looked at me as if I had finally grown a real live brain. “Exactly,” he said, “then they can surf the internet and download all sorts of data – they could rebuild civilization using all the information we’ve already amassed.”
We discussed this for hours. Questions popped up.
- How do you make something last for ten thousand years? A whole new set of technologies have to be invented.
- It has to be self-repairing
- It should be like a factory in some ways, capable of making it’s own parts, too
- Think “alive”
- It has to have redundancy
- It has to have redundancy
- It has to be distributed
- Location, location, location (the poles)
- How do you rad harden it?
- How do you viably store that data?
- RAID systems, cloud type arrangements
- It has to have redundancy
He said, and I agree with him – THAT is where you should put research dollars. THAT is something almost anyone could get behind. THAT has technological payoffs that are incredible.
A question that just occurred to me, and it is one I have wondered about in our present day. Do societies that have all sorts of new breakthrough technologies come all at once break down because they didn’t have the transition from lesser to greater technology over a period of time, where they could assimilate it? Look at any third-world cockroach country. They have this amazing mix of people still living in poverty and ignorance, some have all the benefits of Western Society, and the two are absolutely awful when mixed. Look at any dictatorship, middle eastern country, or North Korea (redundancy there, I know).
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By the by, check out the article that Mitchell posted at Center of the Anomaly. It’s about your rapidly-disappearing-in-the-distance gun rights.
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I’m thinking Anthony Weiner should look to his new career options at this point.
And this morning it hit me – he could be a rap “artist”. His name?
The first thing that crossed my mind while reading this was The Mote in God’s Eye, a Niven / Pournelle book that featured an alien civilization that constantly rose and crashed. They had these museum / knowledge storehouse structures that were designed so that they had “You have to be this advanced to figure out how to enter” security. So this has at least been thought about. I don’t remember if there is much that is useful for a real-world thing though.
I’ll have to think about this…
The thing is, my buddy started thinking of it in terms of “Why the hell aren’t we aiming for this?” for real. It’s like an investment whether you make something that is eventually actually needed for it’s purpose – OR – it’s going to pay off in huge dividends on the tech front.
And maybe both, in which case you just roll the new tech into the Library.
Thanks for the link! It’s important that we get this out there.
Back on topic this discussion reminded me of this: Norweigian Seed Vault. We need to get Bill & Melinda in on this.
I’m glad you found that op-ed. I had heard O’Bugger’s “below the radar” comment and immediately haired out – gave me the willies, it did. And now we know what he’s been banking on all along. Obama gives syphilitic rats a sporting chance at looking respectable.
That seed vault came up in the conversation, too. They’d better put guards around it or someone will finally make a journey to it only to find a bunch of rednecks drinking beer and eating it all like sunflower seeds.
And because this makes TOTAL sense, the gov’t will kill it somehow.
Let me savor this…
I’ve never been accused of making sense before.
Wow. It’s like winning an Emmy/Pulitzer/Academy award, only with respect and honor instead of hot air and mutual masturbation.
OK, lets get technical.
Start with an AM station on the moon.
First need: Power.
Radioisotope generators can last how long?
If not that, solar electric. But static electricity would cause collection of dust on the solar panel, must keep the panel clean and functional at all times. Reference the Mars Rovers and their problems with dust.
Geothermal heat differential? How hot is the Moon below the surface?
Just about anything else would require refueling from an unknown source.
How about getting an asteroid and putting it at L3 or other orbit, assuming it has the necessary raw materials.
Assume that the AM radio has a power source and electronics that are self-replicating, redundant, and easy to manufacture for the “intelligent system”.
You’ve now gotten to the part of “you must be THIS technologically advanced to ride this ride”.
What protocols and technologies would survive 10k years, besides chiseled rocks, baked clay tablets, or non-acid-based ink on parchment?
Or should we drag Mr. Clarke back from the grave and inquire what he thought about “The Sentinel” as well as the Monolith…
The first rock (or bone) has been thrown to the masses…
BTW, “The Mote in God’s Eye” was excellent, the follow-on not so much, IMHO. The biggest difference in the Moties in their universe, and what we’re working on, is that their civilization turned over very rapidly, much less than 10k years, IIRC. Anyone got the book to do some research?
More…
What if we had a computer system that was “self-healing”, with the capability of accurately finding faults within itself, or in a system that it was monitoring.
Hook up a 3-D printer to make its own parts out of raw materials, a la Star Trek replicator?
Two or three of these machines, monitoring each other for faults, like the Space Shuttle computers, and repairing each other with parts that they manufacture on the spot?
OK, so civilization dies, the AM transmitter keeps transmitting, telling how to make the proper Earth-based system to reply to the transmitter. The response to the AM transmission causes a rocket or rockets to launch from the Moon to the site of the reply. You must be advanced enough to transmit a specific reply to get the reward.
Have multiple reward systems as backups to accommodate multiple failures of civilization…
Hey, this is fun!
I envision literally hundreds of machines for redundancy. Self-servicing would have to be an option with certain parts of the system made literally to diagnose and repair subsystems.
My sneaking suspicion? That to make something last that long you would have to effectively simulate life in every way that matters. Instructions, assigned tasks, gathering of raw materials, fabrication/replication, assembly/repair/diagnostics, etc. Perhaps even an element of evolution.
It might be just my perception but it seems that rocketry is so much less reliable than electronics – how would you keep your fuel from degrading over time?
Okay, but the moon’s not far enough to keep it safe when the empire collapses.
Better put it on the other end of the galaxy.
Yeah, but that could take so long to set up and so long to get back we might go through several dark ages by then. What if we shoot for the moon and then put a backup system on Mars straightaway?
What about caves?
I grew up in the Catskills, there are many places where there are huge cave complexes below the mtns.
Iron Mountain has a huge storage complex, it’s mostly for companies’ records, but the gov’t also has huge fallout shelters for the politically connected. These could be used for that project.
Or the cave complex out in New Mexico or Luray Caverns (VA) or Howe Caverns (NY).
The Liberry of Congress is one of these things. We have to hope it’s not burned down in the riots.
Denmark or some scandihoovian country has a seed banks, a knowledge bank would be cool. I wonder if the US gov’t did it during the Cold War.
veeshir, I weep at the thought of all the things you are holding back – the ideas that you could share if you were not a boycotter at LKF.
Many of the thoughts you put forth are important “keep in mind” items, and one of them I am dying to respond to but will have to do that later.
Dude. all the thoughts I put forth are important.
And your failure to recognize that is why I boycott this place.
Being in the hospital is not a good enough reason?
You’re blogging from a hospital?
Don’t you know how dangerous that is? You could give me a virus!!!!
No, I’m not.
I was asking if it *was* a good enough reason and the if you said it was I could use that as an excuse. So if it is not, I’ll have to come up with some better fiction suitable for a boycotter. There are several types of boycotters – garden variety ones that “I’m in the hospital” would fool most of the time. Then there are the real determined ones that would not only chew a leg off to get out of the trap at some blog, but then they’d hang around to ambush the trapper… errr… blogger, when he got back.
No, I’m not in the hospital. The only virus I currently have was passed on to me by the wife and it appears to be the “I’m going to turn your insides inside out” kind. She had it all day yesterday. At least it has a timer on it. And while I don’t think that type of virus is detected by Norton or AVG I also don’t think it is transmissible via the web. You’re safe.
how would you build this lunar library without people on site to put the parts togeather? i do not believe anything this complex could be made as a unit small enough to launch.
power could be supplied by massive thermopiles.
a big problem would be language. pictures work better than words for many things, how can you format a picture into a radio signal that is easy to recognize and decipher?
Clearly this will require another blog posting to address. Very good question on the linguistics side of the matter.
Thermopiles, from what I have read (not exhaustively by any means) have a shelf-life and the power output drops over time. Might be you try to utilize that – do all your really power-intensive things up front to get infrastructure in place and as available power declines switch to broadcast/maintenance mode. Very interesting.
Definitely would take some thought on linguistics.
One thing the whole thought-experiment makes very clear – making anything that we humans create to last – on thousands-of-years timescales – is going to be one hell of an endeavor.
Do you mean radioactive thermopiles? I was thinking about setting up near one of the poles near a deep crater. The temperature difference from sun to shade is nearly 500 f on the moon. I do not believe a thermocouple would degrade with no oxygen to corrode the material.
hilljohnny, that is an excellent point.
Let’s see now… great heat sink (radiate into 3-4K of the universe ultimately)… vacuum, radiation, and the possibility, depending on siting, of thermal cycling which really is an awful problem… hmmm.
Actually there’s been a lot of excellent points in the comments section. I need to absorb them all and throw the recycled idea back into the arena.
Yes, I was thinking of thermopiles. I did a bit of digging around and was surprised to see how small they could actually be made – I had wondered if you could use one to power a brushless DC motor to run an RC helicopter (no, you can’t) because I thought “Hey, no more recharge times and it’d be ‘GREEN’!”
I was obviously being a smartass but the long recharge times do chafe…