ANNOUNCER: Title, Foundation. Foundation and Empire. Second Foundation. Author, Isaac Asimov. Part number, 1. Part title, Psychohistory and Encyclopedia. [MUSIC PLAYING] CHARLIE: You are listening to WREK Atlanta and this is Lost in the Stacks, the research library rock-and-roll radio show. We just went to space. I am Charlie in the studio with Ameet, Amanda, Wendy, Cody and Matthew. It's almost a full house. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you're here for, we hope you dig it. AMEET: That's right, Charlie. Our show today is called "An Archive of Planet Earth." CHARLIE: That sounds really serious. WENDY: It is. My archivist colleague, Amanda Pellerin, and I talked with Nova Spivack, a venture producer who combines his experience as a serial entrepreneur, investor, and technologist to fund and incubate breakthrough companies. AMANDA: Spivack is co-founder and chairman of the Arch Mission Foundation, an organization that's bringing people together to work on a billion-year backup of humanity. CHARLIE: Wow. If you want to join the conversation, the hashtag for this show is #LITS424, for Lost in the Stacks episode 424. Feel free to tweet your thoughts, questions, or long-term missives with that hashtag. AMEET: And our songs today are about extreme locations, billions of years, and Isaac Asimov. The Arch Mission is preserving our past and present so that in the future, we, or perhaps some other intergalactic being-- CHARLIE: Don't freak me out, man. AMEET: --can remember where we came from, what we knew, how successfully we navigated into our future. So let's start with "Gotta Make Their Future Bright" by The First Gear right here on Lost in the Stacks. [THE FIRST GEAR, "GOTTA MAKE THEIR FUTURE BRIGHT"] Seas keep a-flowing, although the world has changed Trees keep on growing on every hill and range The years pass me by the pages of a book Broken promises mount like pebbles in your brook Men keep a-dying, and still the world rolls on And men keep a-lying They're forgotten when they're gone Time destroys most what man creates In this troubled world, make your love last, not the be hates Men are willing, I think, to learn wrong from right Men will stop killing when they've got no more to fight When you're through with wars And you had a good bite out of life A rover for your children, gotta make their future bright Dear Lord, gotta make their future bright You got to make their future bright AMANDA: That was "Gotta Make Their Future Bright" by The First Gear here on Lost in the Stacks. Today's show is called "An Archive of Planet Earth." Wendy and I have interviewed Nova Spivack, co-founder and chairman of the Arch Mission foundation, last week. We began by asking Nova to describe the moment when he realized that this was what he wanted to do. NOVA SPIVACK: Oh, that's a great question. Well, actually, I've been thinking about building this library since I was a kid. And it actually started when I was around eight, and I had a dream, actually, in which I saw a sort of future of civilization in which we were doing this. And the dream happened after someone gave me a very large blank-- it must have been at least, like, a 1,000-page dictionary-sized book. It was a really large hardbound book that was completely blank, which was my favorite gift that I ever got, because I just used to sit around thinking about, what am I going to fill this book with? And I didn't want to mess it up. So I gave it a lot of thought. What am I going to put in this giant, beautiful, green, hardbound, blank book? Sometime after I received that book as a gift, I had this dream in which humanity was building this backup. And I was a kid. So it was a pretty amazing dream. I still remember it. And I think that was one-- that's my first memory of really thinking about this. And then later, I built a bunch of companies and sites and apps related to semantics and knowledge management and collective intelligence and search. So I stayed on this theme of knowledge and eventually came back to this idea of, well, would it be possible to, for example, put the Wikipedia on the moon for safekeeping? And at first that was just sort of a fantasy, really. But then I just kept coming back to it and thinking about it and eventually started seriously looking for technologies that could do that. And it turned out that that was not easy. And so as we went down that path, eventually, we formed the Arch Mission Foundation to seriously try to figure this out and build this backup. The Arch Mission Foundation is a 501(d)(3) nonprofit charity which has a mission to build and maintain and distribute a backup of planet Earth. WENDY: Can you talk a little bit about-- you mentioned the origins of this idea in your childhood-- any connection that you have or have had in the past to science fiction, and how reading it or exploring those worlds has impacted your work with the foundation? NOVA SPIVACK: So, actually, I've always been a Trekkie. And in fact, I was such a Trekkie that while I was in college at Oberlin, I did a winter term as a production assistant on Star Trek, The Next Generation. So, of course, Star Trek influenced my thinking. Also, growing up in the '70s in the Boston area, there was a lot of awareness of early environmentalism. I remember also a science fiction film called Silent Running, which you may have seen, which was a kind of a cool eco-science fiction film about saving the remnants of Earth's biosphere in the future. The Isaac Asimov Foundation trilogy, of course, has been very influential, not only for me but for many. Arthur C. Clark, 2001, and some of his other writings were also relevant to this idea of monolith and helping to catalyze humanity's development. So, of course, many of these threads, I think, influenced my thinking around this. Carl Sagan's thinking, the Pioneer disks, Voyager, of course, were very interesting as well. So there are many influences that I can look to that kind of helped me form the idea. I certainly didn't come up with it myself. I think it really is something that comes from many other threads that others have thought of before me. If there's anything that I did that's novel, it is really coming up with this very distributed, highly redundant strategy where we'll put many copies of these archives in many places so that we can increase the probability that some of them will make it into the distant future and eventually be findable. AMANDA: Just a follow-up question there-- Georgia Tech actually has a science fiction collection in our archives. It's one of our special collections curatorial areas. So we do have Asimov articles and books and stories that he wrote. I was wondering if there were any particular themes-- and it can be in Asimov's writings or someone else where you were really connecting those themes in the science fiction to the foundation. NOVA SPIVACK: I think the Foundation trilogy and Hari Seldon and Encyclopedia Galactica are a direct example of a theme in science fiction that influenced us in many ways. And for most of our existence as an organization, we've said, we're trying to build a foundation. We're trying to actually make the foundation as envisioned in the Foundation trilogy. That said, we can point to lots of other examples. I mean, there have been Star Trek episodes where they've talked about these ideas of backups and archives. Similarly, you can look to hard science fiction and many other examples where either the relics of other civilizations or the remnants of our civilization-- I mean, even Planet of the Apes, the last scene in the Planet of the Apes film where the Torch of Liberty is sticking out of the ground on the beach. These themes, recur in science fiction, and the themes are usually about the fact that our civilization, as grand as it might be, will be basically lost without a trace if we lose power or there's some extinction-level event on Earth. Most of what we've made, most of what we have or know, is more ephemeral than we'd probably like to believe, and certainly a lot more ephemeral than civilizations that have come before us. AMANDA: Included on the foundation's vision page is a quote from you. "Wherever humanity goes, so shall go the archive. Wherever goes the archive, so shall go humanity." We were wondering, what is the archive to you? NOVA SPIVACK: The archive is the collection that we're building of all these different data sets and resources, which we're then replicating, updating, and sending to these various different locations. So the archive is a broad term that refers to the total amount of corpora that we're aggregating and distributing. It's not one specific narrow thing. It's really the full collection. WENDY: Part of the foundation's vision is for humanity to become a, quote, "knowledge civilization." And you mentioned knowledge earlier as sort of the theme that's been present throughout your work. Can you describe what you think of in terms of what "knowledge civilization" means? NOVA SPIVACK: A knowledge civilization, to me, is a civilization that holds the pursuit of knowledge as the highest ideal or goal of civilization. And that's quite different, for example, from a civilization that might be focused more on conquest of land or ownership of wealth or resources. Knowledge is a much more abstract thing than, say, oil. And when I look at certain civilizations in the past, you can compare them in terms of how much they valued knowledge. I mean, if you think of ancient Greece, there was great respect for philosophy and learning and the arts. Another example would be classical Tibetan civilization or even classical Chinese civilization. Many of these classical civilizations evolved with enough isolation that they were able to reach a very high level of refinement and thought about their own thinking and their cultures. And that resulted in academic traditions as well as really active, vibrant philosophy schools that were really woven deeply into everyone's day-to-day life. It was part of the culture. If I look at our current American civilization here in America, I don't really see that as our highest ideal or even something that is widely respected today. If anything, this concept of objective truth or facts is really an endangered idea in the present environment we are in. So I think that a knowledge civilization is a civilization that really systematically collects, analyzes, refines, and shares knowledge, and that the purpose of that type of civilization is to get more knowledge and to make that knowledge better and a more accurate, comprehensive understanding of the world and of who we are. I would even go beyond that and say that in order to really be a knowledge civilization, you really have to have learning and teaching be the most important things that society can do instead of, say, defense. For example, today, teachers probably have the most important job in society, but they are compensated, perhaps, worse than most other jobs. And so there's a real contradiction between how we take care of education and its value. And that, for example, shows the distance we ourselves have to go to really become a knowledge civilization. AMANDA: Nova, who would you say is the intended recipient, users, or audience of the initiatives of the foundation, like the billion-year archive or the Arch library devices? NOVA SPIVACK: So we did not design this for aliens. We designed this for us, or beings who are cognitively equivalent to us, meaning they have some form of symbolic written language. They can communicate with one another using language. They are capable of critical thought. They're self-aware-- a higher form of intelligence that probably uses tools and has language. We had to make some assumptions about our intended audience in order to constrain the scope of what we were doing to make it actually achievable. We're not designing for jellyfish that don't have language and exist in another dimension. It really is constrained to human-like intelligence, whatever that is. It might be our descendants in a few thousand years, or it might be a new form of intelligent life that turns out to be similar to us that evolves in 500 million years or a billion years in our solar system. WENDY: This is Lost in the Stacks, and we'll be back with more about archiving planet Earth with Nova Spivack after a music set. AMEET: File this set under BD450.R7073. [ELTON JOHN, "ROCKET MAN"] She packed my bags last night preflight CHARLIE: That was "Rocket Man," a live performance from 1972 by Elton John. That was a song about things that will take a long, long, long, long time. [THEME MUSIC] AMANDA: This is Lost in the Stacks, and our guest today is Nova Spivack, co-founder of the Arch Mission Foundation. All archives grapple with questions of what to preserve. On the sponsorship section of the Arch Mission website, it says, "We reserve the sole right to decide what to include or exclude in the archives, based on our library curation policies." Wendy and I asked Nova to describe those curation policies and who defines them. NOVA SPIVACK: Well, it's a very difficult topic that we've grappled with a lot. If we're appointing ourselves as the archivists of this backup copy of humanity, first of all, what gives us any legitimacy, and how can we justify our approach in a way that is likely to be accepted by all these different perspectives and belief systems around the world? The first thing we realized was that our job is to curate the curators, rather than, for example, be the curators ourselves. And so we're working at a meta level, at least as a first step, to collect large collections that have been prepared by other curators who are respected, at least as a first step. And so there, for example, the Wikipedia, whether you like it or not, has broad participation, warts and all, but it has a broad participation. Similarly, there's a large collection of books in Project Gutenberg. There's a large collection of resources in the Internet Archive. The Long Now Foundation, with the PanLex project and Rosetta, have gathered and curated a large set of languages and the data about how to translate between those languages. So as a first step, we've been looking to these reference resources or collections-- not only reference-- that are quite broad and curated by others. We've also consulted with library scientists and gotten their opinions and recommendations, and some private library collections have been contributed to us, which were curated by others to be quite broad and include broad selections. Now, one of the things that we've been careful about is to try to include many languages and to represent all the different nations and ethnic groups and belief systems throughout history. Now, to do that, well, it's extremely difficult, as you know, partly because not all of these traditions even have written records that are equivalent to those of other civilizations. For example, we spent quite a bit of time on Indigenous peoples. A lot of their traditions are oral, and so they're at a disadvantage if it has to all be written. So these are some things we think about. In terms of policies, what to include, what not to include, we debated this quite a bit. Should we send, for example, information that might enable somebody to build a nuclear weapon in the future? If we go down that rabbit hole of trying to edit the knowledge, first of all, it's a never-ending battle. It's deeply biased no matter how you do it. And it's also not really respecting whoever it is in the future who finds this. Our feeling is we should give them the facts but let them make their own decisions or come to their own conclusions about what the facts say. To give them the facts, we have to give them the alternative facts, the different perspectives, as well-- so not just one perspective. For example, the Wikipedia, it has many perspectives, but it's not, for example, as rigorously, professionally edited as certain other encyclopedias. We were able to include some other encyclopedias and many other reference works as well that were provided to us, and they provide different perspectives on the same thing. So our decision ultimately came down to, let's provide a broad-- really, as broad as possible-- selection of perspectives on every topic. And in terms of the topics, we built a taxonomy that was based on the Britannica taxonomy and also included changes in additions to the taxonomy that came from Library of Congress and many other taxonomies that we looked at. It's not exactly the same as any other taxonomy, but it includes, I think, all of the major areas that these taxonomies include. So that gave us a roadmap. And the taxonomy is actually in our white paper. It's really just a top-level of the taxonomy, but it shows the subject areas that we wanted to cover. And I think, to varying degrees, we've covered them all. I can't say it's perfect or that we've covered each topic as well as every other topic. That's very hard to measure, and it will take a long time. But certainly, there are hundreds to thousands of different resources on every major topic at that top level. AMANDA: The technology that goes into capturing the content for the archive, can you talk a little bit more about what goes into creating that technology, specifically the Arch library devices? What are they, and where are they? NOVA SPIVACK: So the first thing that we had to solve when thinking about ultra-long-term archiving is how to make these archives durable for millennia or longer. And as we started to explore this and look at the existing archival technologies that exist today, we found, obviously, microfiche and the whole kind of microfilm world, which, from a durability perspective, isn't sufficient for our needs. Microfiche is certified for about 50 years, requires HVAC, and certainly isn't durable under the kind of extreme potential conditions that we might need to survive. Space, as a whole other dimension, if you want to have an offsite backup and put things in space, you also have to deal with radiation and extreme temperatures. So that wasn't sufficient. We also looked at M-DISC technology, which is a type of archival DVD. We even spoke to the inventors. And M-DISC technology is sufficient, perhaps, for Earth in the thousand-year time scale. It won't last for millions of years, because they still are carbon-based and will gradually decay. And they don't work for space applications because the heat and radiation would degrade them. And when that happens, even though the data is in a non-carbon-based layer, it's so thin that without the polycarbonate materials, it falls apart, and the data is lost. Another issue when we looked at all the forms of digital storage is futureproofing the data so that it could be recovered in the distant future. As we looked at that, we realized, well, we can't assume that they have digital computers, or that, if they have those computers, that they have our operating systems and software. Even on the scale of decades, we see various forms of media become increasingly difficult to recover. Even VHS recordings, for example, I don't have a way to recover those, and those are only a few decades old. So to futureproof this, we had to go beyond just digital storage. We started with digital on our first mission using quartz crystals. But, again, it's digital and very exotic, and there is no easy way to recover that today. We then evolved to using a new technology called nickel nanofiches. It's actually similar to microfiche, but it's in pure films of nickel that basically don't degrade. They don't have any half-life. Electromagnetic radiation can't harm them. They're completely static and inert. If you etch into nickel, which is what we're doing, using, basically, nano-etching technology, we can make images that you can see with a microscope, a relatively low-powered microscope that we could have built in the 1700s. And so what we realized is, at least for a major piece of these archives, we want to use analog images, actual pictures of pages or diagrams or other images that can be read, assuming that the recipient at least has eyes and has simple optics. That way, we remove the barrier of them having to have a digital computer or be able to decode our particular encodings. We worked with a particular inventor named Bruce Ha, who developed nanofiche. And we built this stack where there's layers of nanofiche. The first four layers are analog and have 60,000 analog images at 300 DPI on those layers. And that comprises what we call the primer, which teaches approximately a million ideas or concepts with diagrams that have callouts that connect to different languages. Those little expressions, which are tied to pictures, then connect to the terms in the various dictionaries, encyclopedias, and also the PanLex and Rosetta linguistic data sets. And so, effectively, it's a staircase of knowledge, which includes what you need to understand in order to just make sense of a lot of the concepts that we refer to in our daily communication, such as having a house or having a bedroom or driving a car. These are concepts which, if you don't tie them to some perceptual information, would be very hard to explain to someone who hadn't experienced them. The second step is that in the primer, we teach how to make a computer and how to understand the digital encodings that we then use on the subsequent 21 layers that are digital. And those are essentially DVD format. So there's four layers of analog, 60,000 images, followed by 21 DVD masters, effectively. Each is 4.7 gigabytes. And so the entire stack is about 100 gigabytes of highly compressed data. It would decompress to almost 200 gigs in digital, plus these 60,000 images. This staircase of knowledge provides what we think is at least a good starting point, if some recipient in the distant future were to find this, that can teach them how to understand a certain level of content without a computer. And then, to go more deeply, it could teach them either how to make a computer, or, if they already have one, at least how to decode and understand the various encodings in the digital layers. WENDY: We'll be back with more from Nova Spivack on the left side of the hour. [HIP HOP MUSIC] JULIE GROB: This is Julie Grob from the University of Houston Library, home of the Houston hip hop collections, here in the chopped and screwed city of H-town. You're listening to Lost in the Stacks, the research library rock-and-roll radio show on WREK Atlanta already. (SINGING) Everybody clap your hands and sing along with me CHARLIE: Today's Lost in the Stacks is called "An Archive of Planet Earth." And now a quote from Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy. "We sit here considering the encyclopedia the all-in-all. We consider the greatest end of science is the classification of past data. It is important, but is there no further work to be done? We're receding and forgetting, don't you see? Here in the periphery, they've lost nuclear power. And Gamma Andromeda, a power plant, has undergone meltdown because of poor repairs, and the chancellor of the empire complains that nuclear technicians are scarce. And the solution? To train new ones? Never. Instead, they are to restrict nuclear power. And for the third time, don't you see? It's galaxy-wide. It's a worship of the past." Well, let's go ahead and absorb that bummer and file this set under TL 789.8.U6. [OTHERWORLDLY MUSIC] AMEET: "Rolling Moon" by The Chills. Before that, "Planets" by Joseph-- songs about extreme locations far away where the record of humanity may persist thanks to the Arch Mission Foundation. [THEME MUSIC] AMANDA: Our show today is called "An Archive of Planet Earth." Our guest is Nova Spivack, co-founder and chairman of the Arch Mission Foundation. We asked Nova which of these, in his view, is the hardest challenge. Is it provisioning the technology, curating the content, or bringing together so many partners and advisors to collaborate with the foundation? NOVA SPIVACK: Well, I think we've largely solved the technology problems now. We have several different technologies, including even, as well as nanofiche, we have also new technology for encoding data using DNA molecules. We have many technologies. I think we're pretty strong there. The curated data sets, we started with big open data sets. There's still a lot more to do there. We only sent a fraction of the Wikipedia. We sent the English Wikipedia. But we should send, really, all the major language versions side by side, as well as other large curated data sets. Genome data would be a good one, for example. But there's also a lot more data to send than what's in Project Gutenberg. And to do that, we really hope to partner with libraries that can give us access to one of their copies of various resources in their collections so that we can go much broader than things which are 50 years old. We're hoping that there are librarians and libraries that would like to join us and could help to contribute some of their collections that we could include in future archives. From a collaboration perspective, as a small nonprofit, we didn't have the resources to really operate as a global organization and involve committees and fly around the world meeting with every university. We just had to start somewhere. So we started fairly small, with some university advisors and partners. But obviously, to really do this right, we need to expand. We need to have much broader participation. We need to figure out a way to do that and to manage it. We also need to have international participation, where different groups in different countries that really are experts on their subject matter and cultures can actually do the curation and just give us what they think should be sent. Our job is really, ultimately, to deliver these backups. We don't have to curate them if others do a good job of that. And so I guess from a challenges perspective, the challenge was the technology. That is not the challenge anymore. The challenge now, if I had to name one challenge, it would be really to figure out how to fund an effort like this on a sustainable, ongoing basis, through grants and other donations. It's a large effort, to back up the planet. You can't do it once. You have to keep doing it because there's always things you missed, and there's always new stuff to send, and there are new places to put it. And so to really do this and make it a function of civilization, something that we as a civilization, we do, it's going to require a lot of support from a lot of places. The sort of blessing and curse of that level of support is it also starts to politicize things. When you get a lot of cooks in the kitchen, it gets harder to make decisions. That's a trade-off. But I believe that the more involvement we get, the better the quality of the output will be. And also, it'll be beneficial to people today. It's not only people in millions of years. But by participating in this, I think it builds international and intercultural understanding. It raises awareness of the threats that the world is facing environmentally and in other areas that need to be really taken seriously. And it actually may result in new teaching and learning technologies-- for example, the primer and things that we've been developing. So I think there's a lot of opportunity here. Funding is definitely a major question in our minds. We pretty much self-funded except for some donations in the past. I think, as we try to move to a larger scale, we're entering this phase where we're starting to think much more deliberately about how do we make this sustainable so that it can continue even if we're not here. AMANDA: I'm excited and hopeful for a time when we go to archive conferences and there's a lunar archivist or something like that. But until that time, I was-- NOVA SPIVACK: Yeah, and not just lunar. AMANDA: --wondering, how might Earth-bound archives cultivate this kind of very long-term view and maybe even get your ideas on what the role more traditional archives is in the age of the billion-year archive. NOVA SPIVACK: First of all, we say the billion-year archive, because the idea is if you have enough copies and enough places using durable materials, some of them will last for a billion or more years. Making them discoverable is another topic. How are they going to be found? That's another thing we think about. But first you have to preserve the data to even have a chance of it being found. As far as Earth, which is one of the locations in the Billion Year Archive project, we actually have an initiative to create and store these archives on every continent, in multiple locations, some of which might include very deep cave systems that are very hard to access but last a long time and are likely to be rediscovered. So one aspect of the Earth-bound archiving initiative is to make them last a very long time by making them hard for anybody to loot or get to in the near term. But we also think it would be interesting and educational to put these in places that people can access and interact with today, whether it's museums or schools or libraries. And there are ways to interact with the content. It's not just a static piece of metal. You can actually make an interactive, immersive experience where you can explore what's in this. And that's something that hasn't been done yet, but I think would be really cool. So for archivists here on Earth, we need your help, first of all, in locating really good existing archives that are already scanned that we can easily etch as analog images, the nanofiche, great collections that you can give us that you have the right to give us for our backup. We're not redistributing to anybody digitally today. We're not redistributing to anybody in analog today who could easily get that data. We're putting these in locations where it's certainly going to be more than 50 years before anybody will access it. For anything that we do make accessible sooner, obviously, that has to be either open data or uncopyrighted, or we have to have the license to do that. And so we think of this as primarily a library where our audience is at least 50 years in the future. And prior to that, there may be certain things we can share, but the majority of what we're building will really not be visible or shareable until at least 50 years in the future, when all present copyrights have expired. But libraries and archivists who have great content that should be preserved that will be important potentially in the future that we don't want to lose that could be useful or informative, we do want to hear from you. We do want to include you. We have the ability to do that. We have the technology to do it. We can give you copies for your use. We also want to make copies to put into this larger library. And so we're very open to that, and we're very open to hearing from people with ideas. We're not billionaires. So our funding is limited to, really, what we either get grants for or can fundraise for. But we're working on that. And I think, with more participation, we can do a better job of this. There's also content that could be created, better versions of the primer, for example. So we're definitely interested in hearing from professionals and library scientists and archivists who have good ideas, good content, or skills that they'd like to contribute to the effort. WENDY: Nova, thank you so much for taking the time and talking with us today. NOVA SPIVACK: My pleasure. Thank you. WENDY: This is Lost in the Stacks. Our guest today is Nova Spivack, co-founder and chairman of the Arch Mission Foundation. [THEME MUSIC] MATTHEW: File this set under PS 3551.S5P7. [GUITAR MUSIC] CHARLIE: That was the song "Asimov" by Señorita Uva, which is Lady Grape in Inglés. That was a song about a visionary, dare we say, foundational futurist. [THEME MUSIC] I can't believe someone scripted me a pun. Our show today was called "An Archive of Planet Earth." Our guest was Nova Spivak, co-founder and chairman of the Arch Mission Foundation, a nonprofit organization that maintains a billion-year backup of planet Earth. AMANDA: Hey, Charlie. CHARLIE: Yeah? AMANDA: As a librarian, what's one item from any collection that you think should be included in a billion-year archive? CHARLIE: Holy cow. That's a really hard question. I mean, a billion years kind of makes everything unimportant. I feel like pictures. It would have to be pictures. If I wanted to know something about a billion years ago, it would be what something looked like. I think that's about it. But then I got to worry about the whole eye question. Will whatever reads that have eyes? A picture of the landscape and a skull, that's what I'm going to go with. How about you? AMANDA: I would say a Twinkie. CHARLIE: OK, that's a very different direction, but I think that's probably better than mine. AMANDA: It's self-explanatory. CHARLIE: Yeah. Ameet, you like Twinkies. AMEET: I do like Twinkies, yeah. I'm reconsidering. But I'm going to go with the picture of the pale blue dot. CHARLIE: Ah, OK. Wendy? WENDY: Something that somehow says, I'm sorry, we tried? CHARLIE: No, no, no. WENDY: Sorry. CHARLIE: How about an item from a collection? Can you do it? WENDY: Um-- CHARLIE: A burnt-to-the-crisp canary. Is that what you're saying? WENDY: A floppy disk from-- CHARLIE: Ah, nice. WENDY: --from the RetroTech Lab. CHARLIE: I like that. WENDY: I mean, there's no hope for that, but at least it's a cool artifact that someone, maybe creature, can touch. CHARLIE: Matthew, we're building our time capsule. What do you think? MATTHEW: I'm thinking I like the picture idea, but maybe video. So I don't know if you've ever seen [INAUDIBLE]-- something like that, but less dire, maybe just a record of human life and also natural life, the intersection between the two. CHARLIE: I hate to do this to you, but then I have to say, oh, so you mean, what, a DVD and a DVD player and a generator and a screen and a-- MATTHEW: Well, they already have CDs in the archive, so. CHARLIE: Mm, OK. MATTHEW: The lunar archive. Isn't that right? they had CDs? Yeah. CHARLIE: Cody, I think you should come over here. I'm going to actually fill time so you can get to the mic and give us an answer before we are done with this segment. Get right up on that thing, man. CODY: I think I would put in a-- maybe an episode of this show, Charlie. CHARLIE: Oh, you're very sweet. You can still come back even if you're mean to us. AMEET: With that, let's roll the credits. [THEME MUSIC] ANNOUNCER: Lost In the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library, produced by Charlie Bennett, Ameet Doshi, Wendy Hagenmaier, and Fred Rascoe. WENDY: Matthew was our engineer today, and the show was brought to you in part by blank books in which we write our dreams. CHARLIE: That's really nice. AMANDA: Legal counsel and future creatures with eyes and intelligence were provided-- CHARLIE: Oh, no. AMANDA: --by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia. CHARLIE: That is not nice. AMEET: Special thanks to Nova for being on the show. And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening. CHARLIE: You can find us online at lostinthestacks.org, and you can subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and all of those other aggregators that just scrape the feed. WENDY: Next week, on Lost in the Stacks, we're going to space again-- CHARLIE: Nice. WENDY: --with the Voyager record. AMEET: It's time for our last song today, and our guest, Nova, requested this song to close out the show. It references a famous quote by the legendary pithy philosopher Yogi Berra. Berra lived through tumultuous times that changed in unpredictable ways, which led him to making the famous observation about the future that "it ain't what it used to be." So this is "The Future Just Ain't What It Used to Be" by Meatloaf, right here on Lost in the Stacks. Have a great weekend, everyone. Meatloaf. Yummy. [MEATLOAF, "THE FUTURE JUST AIN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE"] (SINGING) I never knew so many bad times could follow me so mercilessly