© Mark Ollig
Our sun is about 4.6 billion years old and burns through 600 million tons of hydrogen every second.
Astrophysicists forecast in 3.5 billion years, the sun will become 40 percent brighter, causing the melting of Earth’s ice caps, boiling the planet’s oceans, and the evaporation of all moisture remaining in the atmosphere.
The sun will use up the last of its hydrogen reserves in roughly 5 billion years, expand into a red giant, essentially a dying star, and absorb Mercury, Venus, and in all probability, the Earth.
Earth’s average distance from the sun is 93 million miles.
As we know, nothing lasts forever; however, is there a way to preserve Earth’s data, so it survives our planet’s inevitable ending?
When that eventual demise occurs, all information stored using bits, bytes, quantum qubits, and all other logical structures about our lives here on Earth will be wiped clean.
Of course, regardless of how it is stored, all information will be lost since the planet storing the data will no longer exist.
We need to figure out how to organize and store our planet’s collective information for Earth’s future posterity.
Before Earth’s ending, a future human civilization may have the technology to escape our planet’s unavoidable fate and travel, along with all of our collective data history, to a habitable Earth-like planet outside our solar system.
So, does anybody have any ideas on how to future-proof archive our planet’s data?
In 2011, I wrote a column about optical storage discs manufactured with semiconductor substrate materials by Millenniata Inc.
Millenniata’s M-DISC is genuinely remarkable, reliably archiving data recorded on them for 1,000 years.
However, we need a longer-lasting storage medium.
What about storing data using glass?
Some of my readers may recall a past column about glass-storage technology developed by Hitachi electronics using a laser beam to generate coded digital data onto a thin quartz glass.
Hitachi states 40 megabytes of data on one square inch of quartz glass would last 100 million years.
While 100 million years is better than 1,000, we are still faced with the impending doom of our precious data in 3 to 5 billion years.
How can we save from an impending interplanetary galactic disaster billions of years in the future, all information generated by this planet’s civilization?
Maybe I am thinking too far into the future and need to look into the past.
Forty-five years ago, we did not have the technology to send humans to another solar system; however, we could send two spacecraft into interstellar space.
In 1977, two NASA Voyager spacecraft atop Titan-Centaur rockets lifted off at Cape Canaveral, FL.
Each spacecraft contains a message, or note-in-a-bottle if you will, with information about Earth and the lives of its people.
Voyager 2 launched on Aug. 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 on Sept. 5.
Voyager 2 needed to launch first because of its required space travel path trajectories calculated by NASA.
Today, Voyager 1 and 2 are operational and continue traveling further away from Earth and our solar system.
Each Voyager spacecraft is 66 feet long, 12 feet wide, 7.5 feet tall, and weighs 1,700 pounds.
Voyagers 1 and 2 have the best chance of escaping unharmed, our solar system’s eventual celestial cataclysm.
Information about Earth and its people is attached to each Voyager spacecraft on a protected 12-inch round gold-plated copper phonographic disk called the “Golden Record.”
Each Golden Record contains recorded sounds, diagrams, images, and text from our world.
They also show our planet’s location within the Milky Way galaxy and images of Earth’s numerous landscapes, cities, farms, buildings, people, airplanes, spacecraft, and vehicular traffic.
Human greetings spoken in multiple languages, music, birds singing, and other unique sounds and images of how people lived on Earth are also recorded.
A drawing instructs any extraterrestrial intelligence that finds the Voyager on how to retrieve the information from the Golden Record.
A stylus, cartridge, and instructions needed to play the Golden Record are fastened to the spacecraft.
Voyager 1 is currently 14.5 billion miles from Earth and travels through interstellar space at 38,100 miles per hour.
In 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will be within 1.6 light-years (9.3 trillion miles) of a star known as “AC+79 3888” in the constellation of Camelopardalis.
In 1977, astronomers and scientists believed this star might have planets nearby possessing an intelligent civilization.
NASA is still receiving Voyager 1 and 2’s telemetry data and can send commands to both via the Deep Space Network and will until 2036.
Today, both Golden Records containing information about our existence continue their journey through interstellar space, away from Earth and its solar system.
“Both Golden Records are highly likely to survive at least partially intact for a span of over 5 billion years,” said Nick Oberg of the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute in the Netherlands.
NASA’s Voyager Mission Operations Status Report on both spacecraft can be seen at https://go.nasa.gov/3C5MBOu.
“Voyager the Interstellar Mission” web page is http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov.
Contents of the Golden Record can be seen at https://go.nasa.gov/3tF0RKr.
It is hoped, someday, a logical, reasoning intellect will discover one of the Voyagers, decipher and understand the information on the Golden Records, and know “we were here.”
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| Each Voyager spacecraft carries a copy of the Golden Record. The record's protective cover, with instructions for playing its contents, is shown at left. |
