For the last four months, Nova Spivack has been busting with a cosmic secret he couldn’t tell the world. And even if he did, he knew it would sound implausibly Star Wars-esque.
He had put tiny eight-legged creatures in suspended animation in epoxy, “like the way Jabba the Hutt had Han Solo,” Spivack says. And just like Han Solo, Spivack had literally smuggled the creatures to another celestial object — in his case, Earth’s own moon — while avoiding any bureaucratic entanglements.
Spivack is an early internet entrepreneur (he worked on Siri before it was sold to Apple) and co-founder of the Arch Mission Foundation. That nonprofit constructed a library of books and encyclopedias containing 30 million pages laser-etched onto microscopic nickel plates, complete with a primer on how to read them. The idea is that the library can be sent into space so there’s a permanent record of Earth culture even if we destroy ourselves. With hundreds of human DNA samples also on board, the library could theoretically be used to restart the human race. Read more…
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