Most of all the species that have ever existed are extinct and it is certain that human beings will also one day be extinct, or our current cultural history lost through a Dark Age, most probably accelerated by our own doing.
In the spirit of the Internet Archive and the Long Now project, perhaps we should look at mothballing human knowledge somewhere very safe – like on the Moon. A reverse of Arthur C Clarke’s ‘The Sentinel’ – where we put a monolith on the Moon for others.
It seems like a text only archive would be around 30 Terabytes which could be stored in solid state form in a space the size of a large chest.
I wonder how much this would cost, what the requirements would be to protect against radiation and whether a solar powered transmitter could be built to last for an extremely long time?
I would certainly contribute to such a project.