A lunar backup record of humanity

Abstract

The risk of a catastrophic or existential disaster for our civilization is increasing this century. A significant motivation for near-term space settlement is the opportunity to safeguard civilization in the event of a planetary-scale disaster. While a catastrophic event could destroy significant cultural, scientific, and technological progress on earth, early space settlements can maintain a backup data storage system of human activity, including the events leading to the disaster. The system would improve the ability of early space settlers to recover our civilization after collapse. We show that advances in laser communications and data storage enable the development of a data storage system on the lunar surface with a sufficient uplink data rate and storage capacity to preserve valuable information about the achievements of our civilization and the chronology of the disaster.