A Human-Culture Orbital Backup System
Ensuring the preservation of Human Culture using Satellites & Orbital Decay.
This article presents a concept for a system that would maximize the possibilities of safeguarding and preserving Human Knowledge & Culture in many scenarios of global catastrophes in short, medium and long-term timescales.
Why ?
Most people will agree, independently of their present evaluation of either the sanity, validity and prospects of the present trajectory of human systems and events… that the achievements of the human enterprise in terms of Culture, Knowledge, Science and Arts are absolutely worth preserving.
For many, the current levels of human understanding of the nature of reality and the Cosmos in the form of the Standard Model of Particle Physics and the Lambda/CDM model, and the extraordinary potential of our Mathematical, Technological, Logical and Computational tools puts the human race, not only as the only inhabitants of the lonely category of ‘Intelligent Specie’… but also prints, at the bottom of the relative short page that tells our ~280000 years-brief history, an asterisk followed by a short statement written in small print that says:
* With a surprising chance to realize the potential of travelling, discovering and colonizing vast amounts of Space and, like a bunch of grandmas with a neglected garden, make an apparently excessively rocky sterile Cosmos... flourish and blossom with all kinds of self-sustaining life.
Yet, many dangers loom around the human story and the fragility of our planet. From asteroidal impacts to nuclear wars, like Einstein said: It would be very easy to go back to Sticks & Stones.
How ?
The concept is very simple, and equals to a space-based time-capsules:
Satellites containing valuable information for the sustainment and development of the human specie, and the means to read it (computers + solar panels) would be placed on orbits with natural periods of decay, the shorter term satellite backups would deorbit relatively quick unless refueled.
The Short-term Orbital Backup System could be designed to maintain its orbit until refueling stops (we assume then that humanity lost space capabilities due to a catastrophic technological reversal) and the deorbiting would result in that information becoming available again for any survivors.
The Long-term Orbital Backup System would consist of a group of satellites with longer deorbiting periods that would ensure the return of the information back to earth on longer time frames.
It is important to say that this system allows the constant update of the information it contains, a live backup for future generations in case we run out of planetary luck, or sadly, which is more likely… trigger some nuclear fuck up.
Saludos y Gracias.
