I've been muttering about lunar colonisation having a potential "lifeboat" function for Earth if ever it faces global catastrophe (all out nuclear war, asteroid, stray black hole?) for years. Much more sensible than worrying about colonising Mars.
Now, I see via Sabine Hossenfelder, that some scientists are proposing it - although specifically as a biorepository:
Update: I am curious about the scenario as to whether or not Wikipedia contains enough information for the rapid re-creation of technological civilisation if you had to start from scratch.
I mean, you can download the entire thing (including photos) for around 100 GB, apparently. (Different articles give different figures, though. On Wikipedia itself, it says that text only, compressed, would take up 22 GB. In any case, even if it's 150GB, I have enough spare memory on my current phone for that.)
But here's the thing - to print it out would take 61 million pages, apparently. So being able to access it from electronic memory is going to be important. If a huge burst of radiation from the Sun or an exploding star can fry most electronics on Earth, that might be a problem.
I assume there is going to be an adequately shielded copy of it somewhere on Earth - but how many, I don't know. I like the idea of some survivalist who stores his Wikipedia loaded phone in a radiation proof box (and who can recharge it via a camping solar panel) being the key knowledge holder in some ram shackle post apocalyptic village.
Finally, Wikipedia itself points me to a book from 2014 called The Knowledge: How to Rebuild the World From Scratch. It got good reviews too, it seems. Maybe I should get a certain "free" library to see if it's there. (It is!) Maybe I should download it...
2 comments:
We are facing a potential catastrophe in the next 30 years of that magnitude. But you would need to be pretty deep in the moon to avoid it. And you would likely die also since all your electrical kit would burn out.
The disaster is a micro-nova, leading to Greenland and Antarctica moving to the equator. That gives you 2 massive waves which kills most people. I think last time even people in Alice Springs would have been wiped out. Although this time they might probably be okay.
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