Third Time’s a Charm — Lunar Library Successfully Lands on the Moon — Backup of Human Civilization Will Last for Up To Billions of Years.

We are thrilled to announce that on February 22, 2024, our third attempt to land the Arch Mission Foundation’s Lunar Library on the Moon has succeeded!

This historic moment secures humanity’s cultural heritage and knowledge in an indestructible archive built to last for up to billions of years. For the first time, we can guarantee that civilization on Earth will never be lost.

Etched onto thin sheets of nickel, called NanoFiche, the Lunar Library is practically indestructible and can withstand the harsh conditions of space. This landing is thanks to the efforts of over a thousand people who contributed, and the support of our sponsors at Galactic Legacy Labs and the Lunaprise Mission. The Lunar Library landed as part of the Lunaprise payload in the Intuitive Machines IM-1 mission, on the Nova-C lander Odysseus, launched on a SpaceX rocket.

The Lunar Library contains a backup of human knowledge that will now endure untouched on the Moon for eternity. For the first time ever, we can now guarantee that humanity’s achievements, history, literature, languages, sciences, arts, music, film, philosophies and religions, and more, will persist, no matter what happens on Earth.

The entire Lunar Library is comprised of more than 30 million pages and exists in stacks that are distrubuted across two locations on the Moon.

The first stack is located somewhere near the site of the Beresheet crash, where it is thought to still be intact, but likely very hard to find.

The second installment was landed successfully on the Intuitive Machines Oddyseus lander and is confirmed to be intact.

Some of the notable content in the Lunar Library includes:

• The Wikipedia. The entire English Wikipedia containing over 6 million articles on every subject and branch of knowledge.
• Project Gutenberg. Selections from Project Gutenberg’s library of over 70,000 free eBooks containing some of our most treasured literature.
• The Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Project archive of over 7,000 human languages and The Panlex datasets.
• Selections from the Internet Archive’s collections of books and important documents and data sets.
• The SETI Institute’s Earthling Project, featuring a musical compilation of 10,000 vocal submissions representing humanity united
• The Arch Lunar Art Archive containing a curated collection of works from global contemporary and digital artists in 2022 — a subset of a larger collection of artworks on the mission.
• David Copperfield’s Magic Secrets — the secrets to all his greatest illusions — including how he will make the Moon disappear in the near future.
• The Arch Mission Primer — which teaches a million concepts with images and words in 5 languages.
• The Arch Mission Private Library — A vast collection of millions of pages of books, documents and articles on every subject, including a broad range of fiction and non-fiction, textbooks, periodicals, audio recordings, videos, historical documents, software sourcecode, data sets, and more.
• The Arch Mission Vaults — private collections, including collections from our advisors and partners, and a collection of important texts and images from all the world’s religions including the great religions and indigenous religions from around the world, collections of books, photos, and a collection of music by leading recording artists, and much more content that may be revealed in the future.

In summary — whether by virtue of being part of the Wikipedia, or by inclusion in one of our other content collections, if there is an important or notable person, place or thing on Earth — it’s probably now on the Moon — along with content about billions of other people, places and things.

When unified by a dream, humankind can achieve the extraordinary. Together, we worked to safeguard our culture beyond Earth and etched libraries that will survive as long as the Moon. When teamwork lights the fire of imagination, even the most ambitious dreams take flight.

While we have a never ending stream of missions ahead of us, we embark with renewed strength and purpose to spread our archives around the surface of Planet Earth, across our solar system, and eventually amongst the stars as well.

One day, these spaceborne knowledge repositories will not only preserve our past, but will also enrich, inspire and accompany future generations who venture forth and make their homes amongst other worlds. They will carry the flame of our civilization, our heritage and our homeworld with them.

We want to extend a special thank you to Intuitive Machines for their pivotal role in enabling this milestone. We also want to recognize our esteemed advisors, and our many content partners and collections including the Long Now Foundation, The SETI Institute Earthling Project, the Arch Lunar Art Archive project, Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and the many donors who helped make the Lunar Library possible through their generous contributions. This accomplishment would not have happened without the collaborative support of so many.

While there were many challenges along the way, including a shipwreck on the Moon with Israel’s Beresheet, and a mission with our friends at Astrobotic that sadly splashed down into the South Pacific, today we celebrate this monumental accomplishment as we look up at the Moon in gratitude and wonder. This milestone demonstrates that even in the face of impermanence, and multiple failed attempts, human ingenuity can endure, as long as we don’t give up.

We have safeguarded our cultural heritage far beyond Earth, ensuring that no matter what the future holds, our history, knowledge, and accomplishments will persist untarnished on the Moon for eons to come. But we have much work ahead of us.

We will continue to send backups of our important knowledge and cultural heritage — placing them on the surface of the Earth, in caves and deep underground bunkers and mines, and around the solar system as well. This is a mission that continues as long as humanity endures, and perhaps even long after we are gone, as a gift for whoever comes next.