The European Space Agency’s Doomsday Ark is a vault, to be put on the Moon, that will broadcast the blueprints for recovering civilization after an earthly apocalypse. Learn more from Josh and Chuck from Stuff You Should Know by clicking the below image.
That’s great!
But what happens if the information isn’t retrievable? If it’s an earth apocalypse, how long would it take the survivors to build something that would be able to listen to the information being broadcast and actually be able to do something with that information?
One more thing, the moon rotates around the earth, the information that is being broadcast will have a short transmission window. Imagine someone taking notes on something important then the reception window passes and when it comes back the broadcast has moved on to something else.
Burst transmission might work to push lots of data within a short time frame but then it falls back to the survivors to have a means of being able to decipher that data stream and break apart the data blocks.
While this appears to be a good idea initially, it also appears to have a few issues with execution. Why not just have a satellite with data stored in it? That satellite could be getting feed from a ground station and when TSHTF, it could monitor the situation until such time that it was programmed to de-orbit. Then it could reenter and land near a settlement. Yeah, I know, sounds a bit much and maybe more risky but it could work better than a data depository on the moon.