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1Data Capsule, has launched its mission to ensure that a “comprehensive digital backup of humanity” is created by the people of earth and transmitted (seeded) beyond earth, before any catastrophic event takes place. The message serves as a time capsule and a scientific way to preserve events that took place on planet Earth and as recorded by Humans, so that it may be discovered by alien species in the distant future.
Anyone may participate and send their data as part of the crowdsourced digital backup from all of humanity – at www.1datacapsule.net
Back in the 1970’s NASA launched the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space crafts. They are now zipping beyond the solar system but, the message aboard them is analog and limited in content. Moreover, there was a small committee that decided the content of the message and it was a closed group of scientists that built the space crafts.
Like the spacecraft Voyager1 and Voyager2 before it, 1Data Capsule will carry a message and data from humanity.
However, this time around it will be a collective and more encompassing message from all of humanity – that will primarily serve as a backup of humanity’s existence – should “doomsday arrive shortly”. The 1DataCapsule mission is about creating and seeding safe digital backups of the Earth, were such events to occur.
The beauty about 1Data Capsule is that everything about the mission is open, and is 100% crowdsourced. This includes the message and data stored on the mission modules, the effort to build the mission, and the funding for the mission itself.
“We’re always backing up our data on devices and servers on Earth. But, who is backing up or ‘saving’ humanity’s existence in case of obliteration due to some random or uncontrollable event?” asks Vishal Lamba, the originator of the idea and who was later joined by his close online buddy genius who goes by the pseudonym “Cap’n Cirk” (but chooses to be anonymous at this point of time).
1Data Capsule was conceived initially by Vishal Lamba who lives in India, and his friend Cap’n Cirk, who lives around Area 51 in the USA. Cirk is a mathematician, programmer, engineer, physicist, philosopher, musician and a ham radio enthusiast and possesses a slew of other talents, that would make even the great Da Vinci proud.
Vishal and Cirk are both humbled by Carl Sagan’s missions to send a message from humanity into the cosmos through the Voyager spacecrafts – and the 1Data Capsule project draws its inspiration from these missions.
The technology itself to create such an idea and launch it into space already exists today – but the prohibitive cost to send (digital data as) payload into space, made the 1Data Capsule vision completely out-of-reach from the financial angle.
SpaceX’s reusable rocket technology has made the associated costs for sending payload into space and beyond, extremely low. The potential cost to now send a megabyte into space has fallen by over a factor of 100x – making sending large amounts of digital data affordable to a much larger percentage of humanity.
The capsule will be pre-loaded with data from millions of humans, the people of Earth – voices, pictures, the written word: all can be digitized and sent by means of radio.
A collective community of thinkers, engineers, designers, futurists, artists and sci-fi fans will band together on the mission forums and come up with the best proposed ideas for the mission and the construction of 1Data Capsule. Since this mission is 100% crowdsourced and democratic in nature – there will be a vote to shortlist significant ideas and things related to the mission. A “core mission team” that has the final word will be formed online.
The financial backing to help build the 1Data Capsule mission at a global scale will come from the “power of the crowd” itself. The duo plans to setup a non-profit initiative shortly, and activate their crowdfunding project – only after an initial core committee is formed. This is because they yet need to determine and calculate the tentative mission costs – before opening up the crowdfunding initiative and associated data packages that will be offered at various price slabs.
However, as a mission announcement offer – currently, anyone may reserve 100 MB of data for free. Once signed up, anyone may optionally support the mission and help it get off the ground – by buying the mission crew team some “tang and tea”.
“We do not want to wall-off anyone from participating in the mission, based on their financial position in life. Everyone will be able to participate and be part of this altruistic mission” Vishal concludes, “I’d consider the mission to be 100% successful only if, anyone and everyone can store and send their precious memories and digital data forever into the cosmos.”
Release ID: 187640