There's a library on the moon now. It might last billions of years.
Just four sentences were etched on old NASA landers, two on Apollo 11 and two on Apollo 17, both with Richard Nixon's signature. Other visible words include a memorial to fallen astronauts and logos on equipment (including Alan Sheperd's golf balls). One visitor donated a book — astronaut David Scott says he left his Bible atop a lunar rover in the Sea of Showers — but 53 years' worth of sunlight and gamma rays (which bombard the moon and break down paper) will not have left it in readable condition.
Then in late February, the moon received a massive donation of books — some 30 million pages' worth, to be precise. Also in the collection: 25,000 songs and a whole bunch of art.
How? Well, that groundbreaking lander Odysseus didn't merely deliver money shots from the moon's south pole, and it won't just be remembered for tipping over during landing. Something that landed right-side up is the first ever repository of human culture on a world beyond Earth. The Galactic Legacy Archive is its official name — but informally, we're more likely to think of it as the moon library.
No books can be checked out of this library. The pages are etched in nickel, on thin layers so tiny that you need a microscope to read them. (Forget microfiche, this is nanofiche). A good chunk of the archive, the digital part with music and images, requires that you read the nickel-etched primer on digital encoding.
