American millionaire sends Amazonian knowledge to the Moon – 03/06/2024 – Rodrigo Tavares

In 1904, Machado de Assis wrote, in “Esaú e Jacó”, that “the Moon is a star that has accompanied us since our origins. She is a witness to our history”. It couldn’t be more correct. In February 2024, a US spacecraft landed on the Moon for the first time since 1972, an initiative by the private company Intuitive Machines. Inside was “Esau and Jacob.”

And much more. The Arch Mission Foundation, led by 54-year-old American entrepreneur Nova Spivack, recorded 100 gigabytes, compressed into 30 million pages, on a pure nickel hard drive created to last millions of years. The disk was left about 300 kilometers from the lunar south pole.

In the column, Spivack states that the objective is to preserve human knowledge. The disc includes the history, literature, languages, sciences, arts, music, cinema, philosophies and religions of humanity. Contains a complete copy of Wikipedia in English, with 6 million articles, 70,000 books brought together by Project Gutenberg, a repository of 7,000 languages ​​and a musical collection of 10,000 vocal performances from the Earthling Project, from the Seti Institute.

The disc also houses a selection of content from the Internet Archive, a non-profit library with millions of free books, films, software, music and websites. In addition, the foundation has added its own archives on art (The Arch Lunar Art Archive), on definitions and concepts (The Arch Mission Primer), on literature (The Arch Mission Private Library), and on religions and spirituality (The Arch Mission Vaults ).

In addition to 14 books by Machado de Assis, the disc contains writings by José de Alencar, José de Anchieta and Lima Barreto, among almost 400 other Portuguese-speaking authors, as I wrote in the Portuguese newspaper Expresso. And “information about the indigenous peoples of Brazil”, says Spivack via email.

The Arch Mission Foundation also has the mission of preserving Amazonian knowledge, highlights Spivack. “Oral traditions and narratives, traditional medicine, knowledge about aquatic ecosystems, knowledge about linguistic diversity, forest management, among others” are being collected, recorded and archived”, says Lucas Lima, library science student at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in the column. North that helps the foundation. The project, started in 2019, was named Amazon Arch (Amazonian Ark).

The sources are the databases of the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (Ipam), the Ministry of the Environment and the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio). Documents such as books, articles and images in PDF format are collected and saved on unbreakable disks.

The next step is to store the Amazon Ark in a set of underground galleries located in the Swiss city of Hagerbach. It is there that the Arch Mission Foundation launched The Global Knowledge Vault project this year, which brings together backups of humanity’s knowledge. Subsequently, the Amazon Ark will be sent to the Moon, in 2024 or 2025.

For Lucas, the “Moon and other celestial bodies become attractive environments for preserving data if the objective is to recover it in the distant future”, since “only a few climatic phenomena, such as lunar radiation,” can be a factor deterioration of information support.

Nova Spivack’s goal is to ensure that civilizational advances are never lost, assuming that life on Earth could one day collapse.

Therefore, shouldn’t we focus our efforts on preventing such a catastrophe instead of investing resources in archiving humanity’s knowledge for posterity?

Nova defends himself: “There are many other people working to prevent collapse, but no one is working on archiving our civilization – so we feel we should at least do that part.”

Idealization is one of the defining characteristics of “O Guarani”, by José de Alencar, another of the works that Nova Spivack sent to the Moon.

Are there really many other people working to prevent the collapse?

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