In addition to its cargo of satellites, SpaceX’s latest and literal Moon Shot had in its manifest a
back-up copy of human civilisation, a thirty-million page anthology of history, literature and genetic code stored in a
format meant to be prone to obsolescence.

This lunar library—part of a larger initiative to preserve a record of humanity flung around the Cosmos and lasting a billion of years, irrespective of what transpires on Earth, since other
hedging for doomsday seems already under threat—we seriously have to do better. A privately funded landing module (
Beresheet, which means “In the beginning” in Hebrew) will ferry this curated disk and primer on the human condition to the surface of the Moon in mid-April.