Orbital Museum

[MeticulousMitch]

Your task is to create an orbital museum that will preserve modern cultural and scientific artifacts for millions of years.

Primary objectives of the museum would be:

1.) Stability. The museum needs to remain in an indefinitely stable orbit, so as to avoid colliding with the earth or moon or being ejected into interplanetary space. Propose Geosynchronous/Lagrangian, etc.

2.) Preservation. The museum must protect its contents from radiation in the long-term, and possibly incorporate a pressurized section for the preservation of biological samples.

3.) Ease of access. Easily achievable orbits are preferred over orbits which are difficult to reach. Furthermore the design of the station should probably facilitate easy access to the items on board.

4.) Visibility. If possible the museum should be visible in the night sky with the naked eye, so that it is easily rediscovered after civilization-ending catastrophe.

Feel free to speculate on how to achieve the above points, as well as what artifacts such a museum might contain:

Books?

Vehicles?

Websites?

Biological specimens?

Artwork?

Films?

Examples of certain technology?

How large might this station be, and how much would it cost to construct?

Finally, if you have a better idea for preserving our current civilization, propose it. It may be better to have multiple museums, or even a different concept entirely.

If some intriguing ideas come out of this I will create 3D artwork depicting such a station.

[Camacha]

I think leaving something like that in orbit would make it vulnerable. I think building, for instance, on the moon would provide better chances of survival - especially if you dig in. The lack of atmosphere would prevent wear, as long as you take radiation and (micro)meteorites into account, but both of those can be avoided by going underground. The moon itself would provide a huge shield.

[Headhunter09]

Kind of reminds me of Starslip.

I would probably bury it in an asteroid (provides shielding, structural support, heatsink, raw materials, etc.), and put the asteroid in a highly stable orbit, or near a Lagrange point. I would also keep it fairly nondescript, and leave markers on other celestial bodies or on the Earth that would allow a reasonably advanced civilization to pinpoint the asteroid's location.

One big problem with some sort of long-term storage is accounting for the fact that languages and even thought systems will change radically in even a few thousand years. This was addressed partially in the documentary Into Eternity.

I guess the best way to reliably store any data would be clay tablets, since that has been the most effective long-term storage to date.

[Sillychris]

1) The orbit would be strictly circular and altitude would be greater than any atmospheric effects (Maybe 10000 km)

2) The station would have lead shielding. Lots of it and it would be an inch thick.

We're not gonna mess around with pressurization. Vacuum is a pretty good method of preservation.

3) The station would have airlocks and be rated for pressurization, as well as have highly generalized air fittings for adding air. (think the vacuum lines in your chemistry lab. Any rubbery line shoved overtop will form a seal)

The station would also have an east-orbit exactly over the equator, making it easy to dock to.

In terms of docking, the station would have a large flat circular magnetic washer docking port. The inside radius would be large enough for two people in spacesuits and the outside radius would be much, much larger. You'd still have to get inside with a spacesuit.

As far as access to items on board: The items would be restricted to items that can survive a vacuum, and they would be secured in a simple and easy to remove fashion.

4) The station's skin would have a texture of many spheres, and painted white or some other reflective colour. The bumpy texture should reflect light in every direction.

I would store data in a strictly binary fashion. Nothing stands the test of time like data stored in binary and any civilization that could reach the station would have obviously figured out the benefits of binary and would be able to decode it without too much trouble. Perhaps crystal discs? MAgnetic tape would be a poor choice.

Every component of the station (including the lead shielding) should have information etched onto it. Lots of math would be nice, since that's handy to any civilation. Maybe the proof of Fermat's last theorem?

It would be nice to provide them with a dictionary, although that's a moot point as far as application goes.

DNA sequences. Store as many dna sequences as possible. That can't be rederived.

[Headhunter09]

I would store data in a strictly binary fashion. Nothing stands the test of time like data stored in binary and any civilization that could reach the station would have obviously figured out the benefits of binary and would be able to decode it without too much trouble. Perhaps crystal discs? MAgnetic tape would be a poor choice.

How can you be sure people in the future would know to scan any high-density format (nanoscopic etchings, crystal lattices, etc)? In the past, people have burned scrolls as kindling at archaeological digs because they didn't recognize that they contained information.

[Sillychris]

How can you be sure people in the future would know to scan any high-density format (nanoscopic etchings, crystal lattices, etc)? In the past, people have burned scrolls as kindling at archaeological digs because they didn't recognize that they contained information.

It doesn't need to be high density, if just needs to be binary.

If I scribble down a bunch of ones and zeroes on a piece of paper, it's still stored as binary.

Also, I feel I can safely conclude that any civilization that can attain spaceflight will at some point figure out how to extract data from whatever medium we store it in... especially if we leave instructions in the form of pictures.

[AngelLestat]

Nice ideas, but the only one who mention what to put inside was Sillychris.

But when I thought in a space museum I imagine more icon stuffs. Like Voyager.

I would keep the voyager traveling untouch like its now, so I would put a string some meters around with a "No Trespassing" sign (museum style), matching voyager speed.

I sort of satisfy all requirements. Is in orbit (around galaxy), there is not much radiation problems there, kinda visible and in the future you can go with your ship and your kids, stop at side and gaze at our first instruments which open our eyes and knowledge, still in duty with its mission.

[Transits]

What I would do is attach the museum to the end of a space elevator in, say... Northern Brazil, then It would allow easy access to and fro. Also, you could have large fields of solar panels connected to the museum to provide power and you could use an oxygen generator to provide oxygen (take gases from the atmosphere up the elevator and use them to provide plants with photosynthesis along with the energy from the solar panels), and gravity could be generated by a rotating torus.

[MeticulousMitch]

It's difficult to imagine a space elevator lasting millions of years without maintenance, especially considering factors like continental drift. We also don't know how to build one yet.

[Accelerando]

Haul an asteroid back to HEO and bore the museum into it. Assuming a density around 3.2g/cm^3 for stony meteorites, and a 600,000,000g or 600 ton asteroid pushed by ion engines, we get a volume of roughly 188 m^3. Could presume, from there, that we have a roughly spheroid shape: solving for radius of a perfect spherical body gives us a radius of ~3.5 meters, a diameter of ~7 meters. This sounds like it is within the boundaries of NASA's proposed asteroid capture mission, except for the large detail that we are hauling to HEO rather than Lunar orbit.

Assuming that's possible, this would give us enough room for maybe a really small module for use as a museum, using the rock as a radiation and dust shield. It would probably cost on the order of however much the asteroid recovery does, est. around $3 billion, plus however much it will cost to send the module up there along with drilling equipment and maybe astronauts to install it all and give everything the once-over. Cost of launching an SLS is est. around $500 million so I'll assume in the neighborhood of $2 billion for actual museum installation because of the new equipment. This puts us at $5 billion to do it all.

Will it be visible with the naked eye? Maybe if the asteroid were painted with some highly reflective material, or sheathed in a large structure made of Mylar, for instance.

Alternatively, we could skip the hauling asteroid part and install the museum at an asteroid that's already close to home, 2010TK7 at solar L4. 300m diameter gives us more room to work with at distance-based cost of visibility and accessibility.

The museum itself:

The museum will contain digital and analogue data stored in several types for redundancy. We will have records, sturdy plates, shelves of books, some genetic information, and a few exemplary pieces of technology.

We should have at least one record that demonstrates how humans speak. We could record speakers saying letters aloud, or phonemes, or Chinese characters, something to that effect. At the same time, we should include with this record a written list of all things spoken, so our future listeners can figure out what they're hearing. Other records, like the one included on the Voyagers, would be nice.

Sturdy physical plates of some sort should be used for recording important text, maybe in conjunction with the records. We could engrave important works of art onto them, maybe encoding color data in the depth of the engraving at each pixel.

Our paper library most critically will have picture books. Clear, to-the-point illustrations should show what the basic words of our written languages mean, at least sufficiently that the reader will be able to use the dictionary. After this we will have mix of language learning books, historically important fiction, philosophy, science and mathematical texts, history books. Among these books we may have some containing punchcards.

Genetic material could be stored in a heavily shielded container in the center of the museum. Refrigerating it can allow it to stay readable for more than a million years if the asteroid remains cold enough.

We store petabytes digitally if we can perfect formats such as laser-baked glass and iron-in-CNT memory that promise incredible information density and more than a million years of life. If that doesn't turn out, we engrave the data in metal or ceramic, or maybe punchcards as before. Even if they can't hold much, we could keep them to serve as examples of stored data formats.

Technology-wise, we may want to include a few actual computers. Not sure what else.

Final note. Digital records, like human language, will need to come with a way to decode them. On a sturdy physical medium, like metal sheets, we should draw clear diagrams, something like a picture book that shows how we read and write and process digital information. Computer architectures, maybe? Lists of characters and their corresponding numerical values in various text encoding formats like Unicode, ASCII, etc.

What do you all think?

Edited March 2, 2014 by Accelerando
changed "orion vehicle" to SLS

[Jordanpumah]

Deleted because I am really tired and the thing that was here was kinda stupid.

Edited March 2, 2014 by Jordanpumah

[Transits]

A space elevator could have robots doing maintenance on the center of mass (where most tensile force will be happening), these (I given moderate AI) could make it last a hugely long time.

[Red Iron Crown]

Orbit is a particularly bad place to put such a museum. Somewhere on or below Earth's surface is far, far safer from the many hazards of space. If you want redundancy from Earth-destroying events, the surface of some other body is safer than an orbiting station.

One of the main reasons for making such a museum, in my opinion, is to help bootstrap civilization if we ever have a cataclysmic fall. It's not much help for that if you need basic space travel to access it.

[Nibb31]

Exactly. If as the OP posted, your objective is stability, preservation, ease of access and visibility, then a high Earth orbit is probably one of the poorest places to put it.

[Idobox]

Put in on the Moon, and draw a massive target with titanium oxide powder. That way, anybody on Earth could see the gigantic sign pointing to where the museum is.

Clay tablets are easy to build for a neolithic or bronze age civilization. In our day and age, etching on silicon, diamond or alumina isn't very difficult and would result in a much sturdier support. Also, a big chunk of alumina is pretty useless, and alumina is common and cheap, so you don't risk tomb raiders to melt it or sell it for scrap. They might steal it and sell it as an archeological artifact though, but it stands a better chance of staying intact.

I would make tablets of with different 'font' size, with the biggest one at the entrance and containing the most basic information, like instructions, alphabets, etc. That way, the explorers would first discover the instruction manual, and seeing tablets with smaller and smaller characters would know they need to look for microscopic engraving on the ones that look smooth.

Binary coding seems the most logical way to store data for the far future. I would write in an uninterrupted line, like a snake or a spiral, to avoid confusing on how to read a big matrix. The trick they used in SETI, using a number of bits that is the product of two primes so that aliens would spontaneously arrange them in a rectangle and see the picture is a very good idea, and I would include it, at least for some of the first tablets.

In the fine print, but still readable with the naked eye data, I would include a hard-copy of wikipedia and a few dictionaries, including pictures. With such a document, you could learn the language and discover pretty much the complete civilization. Obviously, you would need to select the most useful articles and make them stand out, so that future translators don't waste too much time reading transformer movie or assassin's creed article before they can understand the language and basic cultural aspects.

[Sillychris]

Orbit is a particularly bad place to put such a museum. Somewhere on or below Earth's surface is far, far safer from the many hazards of space. If you want redundancy from Earth-destroying events, the surface of some other body is safer than an orbiting station.

One of the main reasons for making such a museum, in my opinion, is to help bootstrap civilization if we ever have a cataclysmic fall. It's not much help for that if you need basic space travel to access it.

Ever heard of plate tectonics? No museums getting subducted in space! (Note: This forum thinks subducted isn't a word)

Also, I think restricting access until a civilization got space faring capabilities would seriously improve the odds of them not wrecking everything.

[SargeRho]

In space, the museum would need to constantly adjust its orbit. Unlike KSP, Orbits aren't stable indeffinitely. In Earth orbit you have to worry about the gravity of the Earth, Moon, Sun, Jupiter, and if you plan to keep something there for very, very long, the gravity of all inner and most outter planets too.

[Red Iron Crown]

Ever heard of plate tectonics? No museums getting subducted in space! (Note: This forum thinks subducted isn't a word)

Also, I think restricting access until a civilization got space faring capabilities would seriously improve the odds of them not wrecking everything.

We know enough about the location of fault lines to put it someplace safe. Or make multiple facilities, likely still cheaper than a single orbiting facility.

And restricting access to spacefarers only woud like mean that if civilization falls, it will stay fallen.

[Sillychris]

We know enough about the location of fault lines to put it someplace safe. Or make multiple facilities, likely still cheaper than a single orbiting facility.

We know enough to predict near future geologically stable zones, yes. However, introduce any kind of geologic time scale and it becomes impossible to predict. The entire surface of the Earth has been recycled at some point in its history with the oldest rocks being very rare. It would take one hell of a lucky guess to stick a museum in a spot that escapes all tectonics for all time (If that's even possible on a planet as geologically active as Earth).

Also: Erosion. Water and wind will wear down anything we can ever make.

Besides, the OP asked for ideas of an orbital museum, and he didn't list price as a judgement criteria. This museum may very well be for the benefit of ET life stumbling upon our planet. Worried about bolide impacts with your orbital museum? Give it an automated defense system. You can't shoot down getting subducted into the freaking mantle.

And restricting access to spacefarers only woud like mean that if civilization falls, it will stay fallen.

But at least records of our civilization are preserved instead of being turned into shanty huts and cheap memorabilia by struggling survivors in the short term aftermath.

[CalculusWarrior]

I support the Moon Museum ideas. The Moon is (relatively) easy to get to, very visible, and will stick around for a while. Of course, it is a bit of a target for any passing meteor which decides to hit the surface. As such, one structure on the surface is rather vulnerable to future meteor strikes. So perhaps we could build one main museum with the bulk of our culture, but then place several copies (or at least references to the main museum's things) in other regions, as well as maps to the main museum and the other satellites, in case their locations were lost due to meteor strikes. All these facilities would be located underground, but have structures on the surface showing where they are. I also like the idea of painting the Moon, perhaps put a fundamental mathematical law in symbolic form on it, so that future civilizations understand that it was not a natural process which created the markings on the Moon, and that they ought to develop space travel so that they could see what we left for them.

I now have an idea for a science fiction book/movie/video game in which a future civilization discovers these markings and sets out to discover our museums on the Moon.

[Sillychris]

LMFAO "professional lithobraker!"

[Nibb31]

Besides, the OP asked for ideas of an orbital museum, and he didn't list price as a judgement criteria.

Which is typical space-cadet behavior of coming up with a cool idea that involves spaceships and rockets, and then looking for a reason to do it. Usually, when you then isolate the problem that you are trying to solve, you find out that either it has lots of far easier and cheaper solutions than putting stuff on big rockets, or that there was no real problem to begin with.

[Whirligig Girl]

Somewhere on or below Earth's surface

Great, then we'd have the movie National Treasure happen in real life.

[Whirligig Girl]

Ever heard of plate tectonics? No museums getting subducted in space! (Note: This forum thinks subducted isn't a word)

Also, I think restricting access until a civilization got space faring capabilities would seriously improve the odds of them not wrecking everything.

No, your browser doesn't think it's a word. If the forum had a word database, "Kerbal" would work automatically.

[Headhunter09]

Which is typical space-cadet behavior of coming up with a cool idea that involves spaceships and rockets, and then looking for a reason to do it. Usually, when you then isolate the problem that you are trying to solve, you find out that either it has lots of far easier and cheaper solutions than putting stuff on big rockets, or that there was no real problem to begin with.

You're right of course. Thought experiments are fairly pointless, since you would never see them occur in any variety of reality.

Thought experiments ask you to place a series of artificial constraints on your thinking for the purpose of entertainment, encouraging thought, discussion, etc.

Pointing out the fact that it is a thought experiment is both useless and obnoxious.