Skip to main content

The world's most famous magician invests in data storage startup that wants to send 100GB disks to the Moon for future humanoids

Legendary magician David Copperfield is throwing his weight behind efforts to scatter human knowledge across the breadth of the solar system for future generations to discover.

The Arch Mission Foundation (AMF) has already planted a nickel-based nanofiche disk on the Moon’s surface, with such archives serving as a backup for the wealth of human knowledge. 

They aren’t, as you may have guessed, built from copper.

Special vaults

The magician, described once by Forbes as the most commercially successful magician in history, has also invested in the project, according to Blocks and Files, donating some of his work to the archive.

These 4g read-only disks have a 120mm diameter and are 0.04mm thick. They’re essentially DVDs with 25 layers.

They include four analog layers with roughly 60,000 pages of content which can be accessed using an up to 200-times optical microscope. The first layer includes a briefing on the meaning of more than a million words and concepts in several languages, as well as vast libraries of knowledge about different subject areas. 

They also include instructions to retrieve information from the next 21 layers. This content includes technical and scientific specifications so anybody who stumbles on the material can learn how to retrieve and interpret the nanofiche disk’s digital data.

These layers contain more than 100GB of compressed data, which translates to roughly 200GB of uncompressed information. They include content from Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, and information on nearly 7,000 languages with the PanLex dataset, among other sources.

Hidden within the data are ‘special vaults’, said Blocks and Files, among which are David Copperfield’s Secrets, which explain the art and science of his illusions.

AMF has a history of launching missions, stretching back to 2018. It completed the first major installation of its Lunar Library in 2019 with a 30 million-page archive that is now intact on the Moon. 

It’s since added to the archive with subsequent missions, but it’s also planning a mission to Mars beginning in 2025, with libraries beamed over to the orbit and surface of the red planet over the coming decades.

Once planted, the thinking is future inhabitants of Earth – or extraterrestrials – would discover these archives one day. They’d then build a DVD player based on the instructions and learn all about the sum of human knowledge, including David Copperfield’s secrets to success.

More from TechRadar Pro



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TechRadar's Year in Review: AI revolution, smartphone evolution, and visions of the future

If I had to sum up 2023 in one word it would be AI. Okay, technically that’s two initials, but let’s not quibble – because there’s no doubt that it provided the year in tech with its main story arc. Artificial intelligence was everywhere this year, as every company in the world gawped at the massive impact of ChatGPT, and decided they wanted to jump aboard that bandwagon. You could barely move for new chatbots, new image generators, and new AI-enhanced features in every device released in 2023. And there’s no sign of that changing in 2024; in fact, we expect it to be an even bigger deal. Elsewhere, phones and laptops did much the same as they had the previous year – well, except where they had new AI-enhanced features – so it was in the virtual reality space where bigger changes were afoot. If the Meta Quest 3 was impressive then the Apple Vision Pro looks to be genuinely game-changing, and we can’t wait to see what impact it has in the next 12 months. Of course we also saw plenty ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Microsoft and Sony enter "binding agreement" to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation

Microsoft has announced that it has reached a "binding agreement" with Sony, pledging to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard.  With Microsoft having won its anti-trust case with the US Federal Trade Commission , its planned acquisition of Call of Duty developers Activision Blizzard has taken a big step closer to becoming a reality. In order to alleviate the concerns of monopoly-building that got Microsoft in legal hot water to begin with, the head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, announced yesterday via Tweet that it has entered into an "agreement to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation."  This agreement will no doubt come as a relief to fans concerned that Microsoft's acquisition plans might result in Call of Duty becoming an Xbox exclusive, following in the footsteps of future Bethesda releases. Since Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda caused the studio to break its tradition of offering titles cross-platform for upcomi...
Post a Comment
Read more

This Stardew Valley-like farming sim plays at the bottom of your screen so you work and play at the same time

Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing are among some of the best choices out there if you're looking for a game to get swept up in for hours at a time. But, if you're a fan of management sims and a multitasker as well, this upcoming farming sim will likely pique your interest.  Developed by Mister Morris Games, Rusty's Retirement is an idle-farming simulation game that runs at the bottom of your gaming monitor, allowing you to focus on other tasks like working while you tend to your crops. Set to release in Q1 2024 on Steam , the idle sim puts you in the shoes of a wholesome robot as you grow crops and use them to produce clean and energy-efficient biofuel. Having gathered this "vital robot power source," you'll then need to sell your harvest to the other machine inhabitants of your settlement. This, in turn, will let you reinvest the money into expanding your farm. If you're a terrible procrastinator (like me) this might not sound like your cup of tea...
Post a Comment
Read more