Civilization has no backup. If an attack or natural phenomenon wiped out our infrastructure tomorrow, most of the information gathered by our species would be gone within a decade. I co-founded the Arch Mission Foundation to backup humanity. We build ultra-durable archives of human knowledge and put them in secure locations like the Moon, solar orbit, or deep underground.

The first archive launched in 2018 inside the glovebox of Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster on SpaceX's Falcon Heavy. It carried Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy on a 5D quartz disc and will orbit the Sun for about 30 million years.

In 2019, we sent a 30-million-page Lunar Library to the Moon aboard SpaceIL's Beresheet lander. It crash-landed. NASA imagery suggests the disc survived. In 2024, another Lunar Library made it to the lunar surface on Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lander. A duplicate is on display in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

The data archives are etched onto nickel nanofiche and quartz crystals. The data is analog, so you can read them with a microscope or a few drops of water. No operating system to worry about or file format that might be obsolete in a century. That was the point. We also encoded the entire Wikipedia into synthetic DNA with Microsoft and the University of Washington.

I co-founded the organization with Nova Spivack and Nick Slavin and served as Executive Director through four space missions with SpaceX, SpaceIL, Blue Origin, and Astrobotic.