First Israeli Spacecraft To Moon Had Secret Mission: Take 30-Million-Page Library Into Space To Preserve Civilization

Callum Paton in Newsweek:

The first Israeli mission to the moon carried a secret cargo, a small metal disk that contains the building blocks of human civilization in 30 million pages of information.

The extensive archive has been dubbed the ‘lunar library’ and is meant to act as a kind of civilization backup for future generations. The DVD-size metal disk containing the information blasted off to the moon onboard the Beresheet spacecraft, a privately funded Israeli mission to the moon, facilitated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX aerospace company.

Nova Spivack, the co-founder of Arch Mission Foundation, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that backed the mission, told NBC the archive was a measure to preserve humanity. “One of the primary evolutionary challenges that we face is amnesia about our past mistakes, and the lack of active countermeasures to repeating them,” Spivack said

“For the survival of our species, we need to find ways to raise our awareness of what worked and didn’t work, and we need to ensure it is shared with the people of the future,” he added.

More here.