They have 20 GB? I downloaded the entire English wiki 4 years ago (just the text of articles, not photos) and it was 12 GB.
Now it's ~55 GB uncompressed and as you said that's without images, audio, and more.
Wikipedia to the Moon
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Re: Wikipedia to the Moon
#12Sending an archive of YouTube would be much more useful for any aliens that happen to drop by. YT comes far closer to The Sum of All Human Knowledge than Wikipedia.
I'm not sure that's correct. Wikipedia contains detailed articles on many very obscure subjects. Searching for such topics on YouTube usually gives disappointing results.
Wikipedia is missing some material though. A better choice might be the google book project or libgen, which contains a ton of obscure books and scientific papers. But compressing it all to 20 GB would be difficult or impossible. Much easier than compressing Youtube though.
Re: Wikipedia to the Moon
#13Re: Wikipedia to the Moon
#14How long would it survive there? The surface of the moon is a pretty hostile environment, I would think.
Re: Wikipedia to the Moon
#15The deadline for the Lunar X Prize is next year, and according to wikipedia one of the teams has a launch contract with SpaceX. Does SpaceX have a rocket capable of making it to the moon?
Please note that the ability to "making to to " is all about Delta-V. Which varies wildly with payload size.
Re: Wikipedia to the Moon
#16Re: Wikipedia to the Moon
#17The deadline for the Lunar X Prize is next year, and according to wikipedia one of the teams has a launch contract with SpaceX. Does SpaceX have a rocket capable of making it to the moon?
Please note that the ability to "making to to " is all about Delta-V. Which varies wildly with payload size.
To be precise, it varies according to the equation:
Delta-V = Exhaust velocity x natural log(mass full / mass empty).
As the "mass empty" is very dependent on the payload size, it will indeed change a lot!
Re: Wikipedia to the Moon
#18How long would it survive there? The surface of the moon is a pretty hostile environment, I would think.
It's a ceramic disc. Since there is no wind erosion, if it doesn't get direct hit, it should last quite some time. Footprints from first landing are still there - and are expected to be for at least next 10 million years - so you can expect finely-engraved piece of rock to last much longer.
Re: Wikipedia to the Moon
#19Now I understand why they were begging for donations all the time
Re: Wikipedia to the Moon
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
I meant compressed. Text compresses really well.
It does indeed. However compression may cause problems for future beings discovering or understanding the data.
Perhaps, but surely some compression is reasonable. You could shorten common words to much shorter sequences of bits without losing any information.
Any civilization capable of retrieving the disk should understand enough about information theory to undo compression. Instructions can also be explained in detail with pictures at the beginning, uncompressed.