08 FEB

SpaceX sent a nerdy Easter egg into space, but can anyone read it?

With any luck, alien civilizations will one day be able to read the works of Isaac Asimov and tap into his imagined Encyclopedia Galactica. That’s the hope, anyway.

Tesla wasn’t shy about advertising its launch of a Tesla Roadster on board a Falcon Heavy rocket, on Tuesday. But it was less vocal about that Roadster’s secret cargo: a tiny optical disc, known as an Arch (pronounced “ark”). Theoretically, this format of disc can hold 360TB per disc, and the one on board the launched car contains Asimov’s Foundation book trilogy.

Unlike traditional optical discs, according to the Arch Mission’s press release, this Arch disc is “written by a femtosecond laser on quartz silica glass,” and its data is “encoded digitally as 20nm gratings, formed by plasma disruptions from the laser pulses.”

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Post Author: martin

Martin is an enthusiastic programmer, a webdeveloper and a young entrepreneur. He is intereted into computers for a long time. In the age of 10 he has programmed his first website and since then he has been working on web technologies until now. He is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of BriefNews.eu and PCHealthBoost.info Online Magazines. His colleagues appreciate him as a passionate workhorse, a fan of new technologies, an eternal optimist and a dreamer, but especially the soul of the team for whom he can do anything in the world.