Convenience is one of the key factors when picking a place to store your stuff. Perhaps you’re keeping your possessions in a storage unit three miles from your home. So imagine if your storage unit were about 238,000 miles away. That’s not a typo—we’re talking 238,000 miles.
That’s not an out-of-this-world concept. Well, actually, it is.
Some folks on Earth are looking 238,000 miles away to the moon as a potential place to stash important documents, such as religious scriptures. Someday, of course, people could be on the moon along with those artifacts.
Torah on the moon?
Talk about storage on the moon has taken off recently thanks to the Torah on the Moon project. The project wants to send a Sefer Torah—a Hebrew Bible scroll—to the moon, where it would be stored in an airtight case. Other artifacts could follow, project organizers say.
The scroll-in-space initiative would “celebrate the ancient book’s innumerable contributions to morality, justice, education, culture, art and sciences,” according to the Torah on the Moon website.
At this point, it’s uncertain how the Torah and other artifacts would make it to the lunar surface. Organizers of the project are trying to enlist the help of participants in the Google Lunar XPrize competition.
“Eventually, commercial moon landers may help carry a diverse library of cultural and biological records to the lunar surface, where they would be preserved in case Earth suffers a pandemic plague, nuclear holocaust or lethal asteroid strike,” according to New Scientist.
‘Cosmic tombstone’
For now, the storage of artifacts, or anything else, on the moon may be nothing more than a flight of fancy. However, experts aren’t necessarily dismissing the notion.
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins told New Scientist that the moon could become a “cosmic tombstone” if humans become extinct. “We should be using it to store the best humanity has ever had to offer, like the works of Michelangelo, Beethoven, Schubert and Shakespeare,” Dawkins said.
In this infographic, SelfStorage.com examines the connection between earthly items (and creatures) and lunar and space storage.
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