Statements on The Billion Year Archive Project
Dr. med. Cordula Sachse-Seeboth (Twitter, 31 May 2020): »What is your plan if you encounter similar activities in the past of human civilization? If the process of evolution is a higher-level program, a linear course is rather unlikely.«
Nova Spivack, American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author. He is the founder and CEO of the early stage science and technology incubator Magical and co-founder of The Arch Mission Foundation, (Twitter, 31 May 2020): »If we encounter any such activities it increases the probability that our activity is worthwhile, whether linear or not. If this type of activity occurs with regularity then does it correlate to civilizations that survive or that fail?«
Dr. med. Cordula Sachse-Seeboth (Twitter, 01 June 2020): »Thank you very much for your counter-questions. It depends on the context. Please find my detailed answers on my website.«
My detailed statement, 01 June 2020:
»No civilization wants to be forgotten and wants at least the kind of immortality that is expressed through testimonies of its culture.
You will come across some »archaeological« artifacts in space. As for the terrestrial artefacts – already catalogued and not yet discovered – they should be systematically subjected to a thorough physical analysis.
Not all extraterrestrial civilisations can be considered automatically peaceful. Neither is mankind (unfortunately) at this point in time. To answer your question, it is by no means necessarily advantageous for a faster restart of a civilization if data carriers or technologies are destroyed in advance by competitors, withheld from them or used to destroy them.
The main goal of your mission is the preservation of the human species. Critical information can accelerate evolution, but also the demise of a species if technologies fall into the »wrong hands« – as they do now. Therefore, we have to think about the basic requirements a civilization must have in order to solve the »puzzle« of the data medium.
There is no doubt that data security is all the better guaranteed when Noah’s Ark projects are installed not only globally, but also in the home solar system and beyond. What we are willing to communicate, to what extent and whether we make differences on the respective levels should be clarified internationally in advance.
The further away the artifacts are from Earth, the more complex the design is. For »earthlings«, however, who are not yet able to leave Earth, the technology must be neither too simple nor too complicated to prevent accidental or deliberate destruction.
For example, Crown Jewels are stolen but usually not destroyed. Since you plan to use crystals for data storage, I would design them as synthetic »gems« if necessary. If evolution on earth has been non-linear, you might want to pay more attention to certain gems.
The location coordinates for the storage of these valuable data carriers should not be left to chance, plate tectonics, irregularities in the earthly magnetic field and other factors should also be taken into account. The decision is certainly not a trivial one. Redundancy is not a question, but a necessity.
Furthermore, the oceans and sea level should not be neglected. The latter were significantly lower during the Ice Age, and civilizations are often founded directly on waters.
For most of us, cave paintings are archaeological evidence of the earliest humanity. These, too, should be subjected to a more detailed analysis. Perhaps we will find data carriers that do not belong there, or we ourselves will place the data carriers to be developed there in the future.
Life is fundamentally endangered. At any time, a previously unrecognized celestial body could enter the solar system and trigger floods, for example, or a neighbouring star could explode, or its own sun could go out of sync, or a plague of natural or artificial origin could devastate mankind, or misprogrammed robots could cause damage, or human tyrants could trigger a world war of devastating proportions, or super-volcanoes could erupt, or meteorites could crash, and, and, and, and … It would be an illusion to think there were safe times. The Earth has already suffered at least five mass mortalities.
Suppose tomorrow is the deadline, and in perhaps 100 million years the next species on Earth is ready to leave: You may find footprints on the moon and remains of Apollo lunar module, with a lot of luck a Tesla orbiting the sun, Starlink mini-satellites, and maybe not yet crashed space debris. On Earth they find testimonies like: pyramids built by the »grandparent generation« (?) and those data storage devices you plan to build.
For the current situation on earth you should be even more imaginative than you already are.
Let us hope that it will not become necessary and that the current species will manage to make the leap into space and achieve independence from its own solar system to ensure the long-term survival of the species.
Basically it is good to know that we have a backup, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we were not the only ones. As soon as our telescopes reach much better resolutions, we will be in for some surprises.
I am open to further questions …«
source for discussion: https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/The-Billion-Year-Archive-project-A-post-apocalyptic-disaster-recovery-plan?amp=1&__twitter_impression=true