We started the Arch Mission Foundation because we saw the environment is in crisis.
We're losing up to millions of species in the next hundred years.
We see ecological collapse in almost every
ecosystem. These are serious risks and that's why
we at the Arch Mission Foundation are backing up the planet so that it will
last for billions of years.
My moonshot is backing up planet Earth for billions of years. We started the Arch
Mission Foundation because we wanted to make sure that human history, knowledge,
culture, art, and civilization will never be lost. Our vision is not only to back
up science because we think, in fact, science will continuously be
rediscovered. But what is more unique and in a way more precious is culture, art,
literature, history, language. These are things which aren't repeated. They only
happen once. And at any place in the universe the artists, the thinkers, the
cultural leaders, the civil rights leaders, the humanitarians, the voices
that emerged, they are real treasures for the whole universe. So what we decided
was rather than make editorial decisions, we would collect large sets of data
created by others. So we've been collecting the best large data sets that
humanity has across cultures, across languages, across genres, and delivering
them to space and other locations where they can last forever.
Well, if you're doing a moon shot, you obviously have to do it on the moon. But
more importantly, the moon is something that people throughout history have
looked towards for inspiration and it's something that everybody has equal
access to. Everybody can see it no matter where they are on earth. When I was about
eight years old, I had an amazing dream that I still remember very clearly today.
In that dream, humanity needed to back up all of our important knowledge so that
we could save it and make sure that no matter what happened on earth it would
never be lost. Fast forward to my actual adult life where after building many
different companies that dealt with storing knowledge and doing artificial
intelligence, I came back and asked the question: is it possible to put the
Wikipedia on the moon? We're really still at the
beginning of this process. We have sent three backups to space so far. One in
Elon Musk's Tesla. Another is orbiting the Earth on a satellite that contains
the Wikipedia now. And most recently, we crash-landed the Lunar Library,
a 30-million-page library, on the moon in Israel's Beresheet Lander.
So what we're doing is backing up human knowledge and history on special nickel
discs that last forever. When we started this project five years ago, we couldn't
find any storage technology that could handle the amount of data we want to
save and that was durable enough to last for up to millions or billions of years.
So we had to find new technologies. We started using quartz crystal. We then
added the ability to write into these nickel disks and we're etching pages and
images onto them using nanotechnology. These can be recovered with a microscope.
You don't need a computer. And the archives that we're making have no
electronic parts. They're completely passive objects and we're putting them
around the planet, as well as across the solar system. We don't have to replace
the technologies and archives that we've already sent. As new technologies emerge,
we adopt those and we start to use them for the next archives that we distribute.
Our plan is to send many copies to many places and to keep sending updates on a
regular basis. So this billion-year archive, as we call it, will always have
layers of new technologies, and that is also part of what we can teach and share
with people in the future who find it.
On million-year timescales, it's almost guaranteed that there will be
extinction-level events on Earth and on every planet in our solar system. And, in
fact, we're overdue for one. What we're doing with the Arch Mission and the
billion-year archive is not only a planetary insurance policy, but it's a
way to raise awareness about the fragility and risks that we face here on
Earth today. The very fact that we have to do this is a wake-up call that tells
everyone we've got to do something now. We've got to solve this while we still
have time. We're building a backup in case we don't,
but just building that back up doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything. In fact, we
should do everything we can so that the backup is never needed. We succeed if
nobody ever has to use what we make. So the Arch Mission is backing up the planet.
But we're doing it to save the future. We're trying to engineer a better future
for humanity. We don't think of this as a one-time project. This is an ongoing
mission because there's always more to send. And so this has to be an ongoing
process. Something that humanity does forever. So think about this the next
time you look up at the moon. Humanity is there. Our history is there. 5,000
languages and 30,000 books are there. So when you look at the moon, realize that
the moon is forever changed. And we, and maybe you, are part of what we sent.