At the very top of the Wikipedia article “List of artificial objects on the Moon” is a short disclaimer: Though the list includes more than a hundred objects, it is far from complete. Not included are the “lesser” items littering the lunar surface—the pins, statues, golf balls, plaques, hammers, and memorials that moonwalkers have left behind. Among them is an object called the Lunar Library.
It is a kind of ark, designed to preserve an everlasting cultural memory of human civilization. Etched onto a sheet of nickel, in a nano-font so minuscule it can be read only through a microscope, are the complete texts of thousands of great written works from across the ages. Near the top of this final testament of our species is an English-language edition of Wikipedia, the encyclopedia anybody can edit.
Unlike the paper Bible left behind by NASA moonwalker David R. Scott in 1971, the Lunar Library’s form is impervious to gamma radiation and expected to last billions of years. For Wikipedia, being engraved into eternity represented a triumph long delayed.
In 2007, it had become the largest encyclopedia ever to exist, ending the reign of the imperial Chinese Yongle encyclopedia after six hundred years. Some called it the first digital wonder of the world, yet it had reached this milestone to meager fanfare. Tributes were muted, and the lone statue monumentalizing its achievement little known, as it stood, for some reason, in the Polish border town of Słubice (pop. 16,000).
So when in 2018 a private moon lander named Beresheet ferried the Lunar Library into orbit, it was an elevated honor in an unusually literal sense. The craft’s languid two-month flight path ended above the moon on April 11, 2019, where it took only a few seconds for seven years of planning to come undone. Beresheet lost contact with its faraway pilots and then dropped through the thin atmosphere, crashing with such force that a glittering nickel disk was flung far across the face of the Sea of Tranquility.
The Lunar Library had, in the words of its creator, been turned into a “30 million page Frisbee.” It has never been seen since. Wikipedia is sui generis, one of the strangest and most outlandish successes of its time, quite unlike what came before it or anything set to succeed it. At first this bungled tribute seemed another letdown for Wikipedia.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
