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 committed to efforts to spread human knowledge across the breadth of the solar system for future generations to discover.
The Arch Mission Foundation (AMF) has already placed a nickel-based nanofiche disk on the lunar surface, with such archives serving as a backup for the wealth of human knowledge.
They are not, as you might have guessed, made of copper.
Special safes
The magician, once described by Forbes as the most commercially successful magician in history, he also invested in the project, according to him Blocks and fileswhere he donates part of his work to the archive.
These 4G read-only drives have a diameter of 120 mm and are 0.04 mm thick. They are essentially 25 layer DVDs.
They include four analog layers with approximately 60,000 pages of content accessible with an up to 200x optical microscope. The first layer includes a briefing on the meaning of more than a million words and concepts in different languages, as well as vast libraries of knowledge in various fields.
They also contain instructions for retrieving information from the next 21 layers. This content contains technical and scientific specifications so that anyone who comes across the material can learn how to retrieve and interpret the digital data from the nanofiche disk.
These layers contain more than 100 GB of compressed data, which translates to approximately 200 GB of uncompressed information. They include content from Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, and information on nearly 7,000 languages using the PanLex dataset.
Hidden within the data are “special vaults,” according to Blocks and Files, including the secrets of David Copperfield, which explain the art and science of his illusions.
AMF has a history of launching missions dating back to 2018. It completed the first major installation of its Lunar Library in 2019 with a 30 million-page archive now intact on the moon.
It has since been added to the archive with subsequent missions, but it is also planning a mission to Mars starting in 2025, which will see libraries beamed to the red planet’s orbit and surface over the next few decades.
Once planted, future inhabitants of Earth – or aliens – believe they will one day discover these archives. They then built a DVD player based on the instructions and learned all about the sum of human knowledge, including David Copperfield’s secrets to success.