Svalbard’s a ‘seed vault’ only, there must be something for extinct animal species. Another question I thought of: if stored on the moon, who among the finders will know enough to even know that they’re looking at? let alone to make purposeful use of it?
Wouldn’t that be ‘ping’ ?
" We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe." — von Goethe
Yeah! Did that once, many years back. took a couple weeks. Used a ripper program that went out on the net and got all the metadata, saved to a HD (now on the third one). Put the CDs in Logic cases (no-wear), recycled the jewelboxes.
Over time, started to drop album folders into VLC, save the playlists, at ur fingertips.
Sure, why not? It’s not like we have any other pressing issues to address. Let’s keep pouring 100s of billions into the right pockets and press on.
FLAC is good, but not necessary for background listening. At 192k the average song is ~ 5Mb. 100k x 5 = 0.5 TB.
With a long, varied list of select internet radio stations, you can choose what genre (or special weekly show) you want to listen to at the moment. Picked by people, not algorithms. Keep a playlist of the stations you like best, startup your player (like VLC) with the list, and pick the one you’re in the mood for.
Or you could just collect mp3s locally for choosier days, dump a bunch of them into VLC, listen to them in album or random order. In either case, at no cost.
You already knew the answer to ‘What would happen if you moved at the speed of light’ was was “To actually reach the speed of light you’d be massless.” No shit. The question was already massless.
If you’re zooming past the Earth at the speed of light headed straight at the Moon, you’ve got about 1 second to enjoy that before you make a very, VERY large crater.
If you change course and head straight at a frozen tardigrade, it will make a VERY large crater in you.
‘Speed of light’ compared to what? is what you need to worry about. Most things in the universe won’t be moving at the speed of light compared to you (or whatever you’re inside of), and when you run into them, you won’t last for long.
If you’ve not dipped into William Gibson (Neuromancer) and several trilogies since), I’ve enjoyed all that I’ve gotten to so far. (Wanna ‘re-read’ the ‘Bridge Series’ in audiobook.)
(I’m also a fan of Stephenson, Dan Simmons, Charles Stross, and that ilk.)
One of the rare examples of sci-fi mixed with a skillfully unfolded mystery. Even when you know ‘the answer’, there are plenty of ‘how did they do that’ film-making mysteries.
I forgot to mention his entirely ‘I, Robot’, VG 2004 film … maybe because robots don’t don’t seem so science-fictionish these days…
Hard to define ‘hard’, a few more I liked: (no ranking)
The Time Machine (both the Pal and the Wells films; quite different)
Dark City (1998, Pryas)
Forbidden Planet (1956, Wilcox)
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951, Wise)
Fifth Element (hilarious, Besson, 1997)
Alien (Scott, 1979)
13th Floor (Rusnak, 1999)
Stargate (1994, Emerich)
Steamboy (2004, Otomo)
Movies made from famed series I’d REALLY LIKE to see:
Ringworld (Niven, a crime noone’s DARED to try).
Some setting of Riverworld. (Farmer)
ANY of Neal Stephenson’s SF books, esp. Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Diamond Age, Anathem.
(Not even the BBC? I mean, who expected Doctor Who to get THIS far?!)
I haven’t seen the evidence of ‘water oceans’ out there that are about more than a few water ‘geysers’ spewing from below the frozen surfaces like our breaths on winter mornings.
Whenever I hear the words ‘water’ or ‘life’ in a message from NASA I think, ‘Hmmm… who stands to gain from this PR?’ (At least telescopes return great pix and -other, visible- evidence.)
Aw shucks, for ‘disc’ I read ‘planet’. And ‘Large Magellanic Cloud’ is a close neighbor. But hey, it’s a start.
You can’t do that because it will physically fall apart.
Don’t know where you ever got that idea. It raises and lowers itself all of the time these days to avoid debris.
It could easily be raised to 2-5000 miles by adding energy from a similar small engine (with a decent-sized fuel tank) over a few months/years.
‘Wear and tear’ from what? Micrometeorites? The orbits of any ‘small fragments’ (of what?) would decay very slowly and instantly burn-up many centuries later.
Arthur C. Clarke’s stuff is like that… So are a lot of the old anthologies from 50s-60s (e.g. the Groff Conklin ones … Omnibus for one - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groff_Conklin).
The ‘Riverworld’ series by Farmer and ‘Ring’ series by Niven are also.
Pay a billion to burn it up?
It’d cost a lot less to put it in a higher orbit for a thousand years where it could be a museum for space travellers.
SPOILERS in the both the following:
This interesting 28m video goes into the book in some detail (great images as well)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2XXkauk0eU
A description at Wired
For very long-time, high-probability safety, the surface of the Earth is constantly being re-shaped. Whole mountains can disappear in a few million years. Floods, earthquakes, ice, weather alone.