desert island in space

Posted on April 21, 2007 by pm286

There’s a splendid long-running program on the BBC – Desert Island Discs – which invites well known people (I hate the word celebrity and hope the concept disintegrates) to say what 8 records (discs) they would take to a desert island. They also can take one book (they get the Bible and Shakespeare anyway – it’s Britain) and one luxury.
Here’s a similar idea. Assume we know the world will be hit by an asteroid in a week’s time.  And human civilisation – and probably the race – will go. All digital preservation on the planet will slowly decay – it needs electricity. Physical artifacts buried in the earth may survive, but they might get destroyed by dinosaurs or whatever comes next.
So we transcribe our digits (statically) onto some medium which we blast into geostationary orbit. Let’s say a million silicon wafers with a 10 megabytes on each – a terabyte (I am sure this has all been thought of many times and there is a better solution). We assume that this medium remains in orbit for millenia and that cosmic rays don’t degrade it.
The human race has to decide what single digital object they would put into space. It can’t be the complete web, and it has to be bounded (i.e. only have internal hyperlinks, not external). We have to be able to go along with a 10-terabyte disc to someone or some organisation and say – please copy iFoo … (and I would not be keen on current compression formats as the aliens might not understand them).
 What should Foo be?

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3 Responses to desert island in space

  1. David Bradley says:
    April 23, 2007 at 2:21 pm

    The obvious would be the human genome, the works of Shakespeare, or “On the Origin of Species”…but perhaps, a simple digitised photograph would suffice. That icon image of earth as viewed from space for the first time. (Maybe add an alt tag to say “H sapiens, R.I.P.”)
    db

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  2. ojd20 says:
    April 23, 2007 at 2:22 pm

    I’d put a transcript of the argument on what should be kept. That would give a pretty clear indication of the state of humanity I think.

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  3. David Bradley says:
    April 24, 2007 at 2:34 pm

    PMR’s use of the word “records” and its synonym “discs”, should remind us of just how quickly technologies, particular recording media, can become obsolete and forgotten. The initial switch from vinyl record to compact discs does not seem like too distant a memory (yet), but most undergrads were not even born when it began and have grown up through minidiscs, the mp3 revolution and the emergence of solid state flash hard “discs”, which is still ongoing. Give it another decade and you will have kids searching through their parents attics and laughing remorselessly at a dusty stack of CDs, just as my generation to great amusement at those chunky 78s to which Roy Plumley referred in his original Desert Island ethic.
    The advantage of such an analogue technology at 78s and its offspring the vinyl record, of course, is that you could easily “read” their contents with nothing more than a pin and a paper cone. It would be impossible to “read” an mp3 from a flash card with such a setup.

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