New NASA Images Show Location of the Lunar Library

I wonder how hard it would be to launch small payload to the moon without being noticed.<p>If I were a billionaire and could figure out a way to do it, I would send a hoax backup of Planet Earth, artificially aged 201 million years (Triassic–Jurassic extinction event). It would include small statue of previously unknown dinosaur species holding a tool and Rick Astley song encoded in a way that takes long time to decode.

Things like these and the Voyager probes etc. always make me wonder:<p>What is the likelihood of discovering something <i>that small</i> among the vast empty scales of space?<p>If another species had sent something the size of the Voyager probes into our solar system, or even crashed it into our moon, or Mars, or even into the oceans of this very planet, what are the odds of us stumbling upon it?

&gt; &quot;The analog layers contain a subset of the entire collection, and include: [...] (4) The complete Vital Articles of the Wikipedia (the full English Wikipedia text is in the digital layers).&quot;<p>If we somehow lose Wikipedia and every mirror of the data, we&#x27;re sending Jimmy Wales to the moon to fetch the off-site backup.

What I like is that in all likelihood, some time during the next century some archaeologists or history students will go dig on that site, find the disks, find all its technical details on internet and will use it as an historical resource, yet will not learn anything new because wikipedia&#x27;s history will probably still be preserved in 100 years.

<i>Stephen Wolfram’s, A New Kind of Science (preserved for the future, when people will finally understand why it is so important)</i><p>Heh. Seems at least as likely that those future people will chuckle at this the same way we do now about alchemists trying to transmute lead into gold.

It seems ridiculously arrogant to me to do this and not fully and publicly release exactly what was sent.

I had this idea 25 years ago. Only I wanted it to be in the form of exabyte hard drives that could be continually read and written from Earth via laser, but never erased. Wikipedia on the moon, in case we get hit by an asteroid. But hard drive technology is still not good enough to last more than a few decades.

Well, this is good fun but, as they say, if you haven&#x27;t checked the recovery procedure, you don&#x27;t have a backup.<p>So, apart from a microscope, this would require finding the discs, scraping off the epoxy, and uh, going to the moon in the first place.

Another Brautigan library! &quot;It doesn&#x27;t make any difference where a book is placed because nobody ever checks them out and nobody ever comes here to read them. This is not that kind of library. This is another kind of library.&quot; [1]<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thebrautiganlibrary.org&#x2F;about.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thebrautiganlibrary.org&#x2F;about.html</a>

While with the amount of collaboration and dedication to curating the contents and delivery of the payload are absolutely incredible, it saddens me to read about the ‘debris’ left in the crash.<p>For anyone in the industry: is waste created a significant concern when carrying out a space mission?

What if it gets hit by a meteorite?

I really love the fact that the media is readable with reasonably available tech.