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Interesting proposal, I have to wonder though:

Why do they have to be off-planet? Assuming a civilization reboot -- by the time the next civ is at the point where they could discover it, wouldn't they have advanced beyond us in many respects? At least in space travel capability.

Why not store it underground, or in orbit and continuously transmitting down to us? The first people to rediscover RF would basically win the lottery.

It's really difficult to get a stable orbit that won't eventually decay, and even if you did manage to get a long-term stable orbit, a random piece of space junk could send it into a decaying orbit.

The Lagrange points would be an ideal area and shouldn't decay.

As for space junk, fill up each Lagrange point so its redundant. Basically hope for the best that all of them don't get hit. Even still, no guarantees.

I'm no expert on orbital mechanics but aren't the Lagrange points unstable critical points? Or is that only certain Lagrange points that are unstable?

There are 5 Lagrange points. Two of them are stable, and the other three are unstable.

The two points that would make sense for something like this are in the orbit of the Moon exactly 60 degrees ahead, and 60 degrees behind.

Are you aware of the Rosetta project (http://rosettaproject.org/about/)?

They claim their Rosetta Disk will "easily last and be legible for thousands of years". If humanity was sent back into hunter-gatherer mode for a few decades, the Rosetta Disk would be invaluable in unlocking access to other material this new civilisation would come across (assuming they share at least a passing familiarity with one of the 1000 human languages the Rosetta Disk encodes information in). Thats the closest I've seen to what you talk about.

Not to mention, there's actually one of the first disks aboard a ESA comet exploring probe[1], set to park on " Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko" some time next year.

[1] http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta/Rose...

This reminds me of the novel "A Canticle for Leibowitz". The novel is broken up into 3 periods, each 600 years apart, following a nuclear war that nearly wiped out humanity.

The first section, "Fiat Homo", revolves around an abbey in the desert, during a very harsh time in history, several generations after the war. There is almost no technology as man has been thrust back into the dark ages. People are just struggling to survive. The few books and relics of the past are copied by the monks with little to no understanding of what they contain with the hope that one day they may be useful in rebuilding society.

The second section, "Fiat Lux", revolves around the same abbey but now the world is in a period of a second renaissance. Great thinkers akin to Galileo and Copernicus emerge and start rebuilding what we knew of science. One man travels to the abbey who is considered to be one of the great thinkers of the age. When he finds remnants of a physics book on optics in the abbey he is dismayed because he had wasted years of his life re-discovering the principals within the book himself.

The last section of the book, "Fiat Voluntas Tua", takes place when man now has nuclear weapons again and technology has advanced to beyond the point of the first near apocalypse event.

What happens in Fiat Voluntas Tua? Did (or will) humanity learn from its mistake and not destroy society for the second time?

No, there is a second nuclear war. Some people escape on rockets, but human life on earth is ruined.

The author was an American bomber pilot in the second world war, and took part in the bombing of ancient church buildings in Italy. After the war, out of guilt, he became a Catholic wrote the book. He seemed to share the same kind of pessimism that George Orwell had, having lived through one destructive war only to see another war come on the horizon.

It's a very good book, and despite its themes it is readable and in parts humourous (especially the first section).

The third section though, as you suggest, is hideously depressing. Certainly a book worth (re)reading in any case.

Thanks for the book recommendation. Will read it, by and by.

>> Some people escape on rockets,

And one presumes, albeit facetiously, that one of the rockets contained a baby named "Jor-El"? :-)

Thanks for bringing this up. IMO, one of the best takeaways from this book, and what makes it somewhat unique among sci-fi, was how it contextualizes the act of scientific research building on itself and evolving. As a graduate student working on my own publications this context is fascinating to me.

You might also enjoy The Originist a short story by OS Card. It is a fanfic set in Asimov's Foundation universe.

Without spoiling the plot, it takes place at The Library and involves the consequences of what happens when you have 10000 years of scientific history but limit yourself to the most recent 1000 years of publications. It also features a very close approximation of wikipedia, for being written in 1989.

Thanks! I'll have a look.

Just beam it into space and plot an intercept course. You'll have to deal with signal recovery a bit below the noise floor, the problem is that most likely a civilization in need of those documents would not be able to recover the data.

Still, it's the cheapest and longest lasting form of back-up available.

Other options:

Dump a couple of titanium cannisters with the current state of the art on golden media on the moon.

I think a radio equivalent of the "10,000 year clock", placed on the moon, might be a good way to go. Fairly low barrier to read from the thing. Perhaps you could have it only broadcast just enough data to bootstrap any society that wanted to get to it to read the rest.

You would need to bury most of it though, and have a great deal of redundancy. The moon doesn't have an atmosphere to protect it from meteorites.

You could do the same thing on Earth probably much cheaper. Bury it in a remote location like Antarctica or something. Just have a manual switch on it that will stop it from broadcasting for 20 years or so. That way it doesn't interfere with any radio traffic in the present, but if something happens to humanity that prevents us from going to it, it resets and starts broadcasting again. Anyone remaining on Earth will be able to listen to it. Even if all humans die out, it would still leave a legacy for (possibly) other intelligent races to find.

It wouldn't have to be terribly expensive, though you would want to add things to make sure it would survive such a long time, which would add to the cost. I don't know how you would store information that long though. At least in a way that would be machine readable and not take up a ton of space.

Antarctica would work well for physically isolating the installation from those without some baseline technology, but I imagine it would be harder to build a long-lasting facility there. Less radiation and meteors, but a great deal more moisture, wind, etc. There are some other places on earth that are more "stable", but I don't think most of those places would do a good job of keeping looters and vandals from getting at it.

Machine readable yet long lasting is indeed a big problem.

Redundant Array of Intelligence Depots :)

You'd just have to make multiple copies and put them in various locations. If you're going through the trouble of making 1, you might as make more than 1, in case the primary gets destroyed.

Good point. I think you would have to choose the number of depots carefully though.

If you only have a single very famous depot then you can perhaps count on it being remembered in legend, particularly if it is somewhere very unique (the south pole perhaps). More depots increase redundancy but could perhaps reduce the "interesting" factor. After a certain point though you could probably have enough depots that, since they are all over the place and constantly being discovered, they would stay in the minds of humanity.

> We need an off-planet backup of all data contained on the internet in anticipation of an apocalyptic event

Well, that's cool and all.. but screw apocalyptic versions of myself. What about just downloading papers for immediate use, for ourselves? So that we can read and use them now? Plus, you can beam up as many copies into the sky as you want once we commit to building this collection. I wouldn't mind. I promise!

I like this idea, but...

  "Hey pre-industrial civilization, did you know that if you pack enough purified 
   uranium together in a small space, it will chain react and you'll get a big 
   explosion? I mean REALLY big, huge actually. Don't do that."

and the cycle begins a-new.