“The Human Knowledge Ark”

An open and urgent request to SpaceX to help preserve the memory of civilization in case of global collapse

Dear Elon Musk and the entire SpaceX team,

You have already built what will very likely be one of the very last functioning pieces of global infrastructure after a civilization-scale catastrophe: the Starlink constellation.

When undersea cables are severed, terrestrial data centers are dark, and power grids are down, a Starlink terminal powered by nothing more than a solar panel and a car battery will still be able to connect to the sky for years.

It will be one of the final points of light of the global internet.

We are writing to ask that those final points of light be used for something greater than messages, memes or cryptocurrency.

We ask that they be used to deliver the seed knowledge required to reboot human civilization.

The concrete proposal

While the world is still at peace, create a single, compact package called The Human Knowledge Ark (maximum 20 TB) containing everything a surviving community would need to:

• grow food

• generate energy

• treat disease and trauma

• manufacture basic tools and machines

• rebuild science, engineering, and culture from first principles

This Ark would be:

1. Permanently cached on every Starlink satellite and every ground station (using existing spare capacity)

2. Simultaneously mirrored on the Internet Archive, Arctic World Archive, IPFS/Filecoin, and other redundant locations

3. Served at absolute highest priority and 100 % free the moment a publicly-defined “civilizational emergency” is triggered

4. Accessible even at extremely low bandwidth (down to 2400 baud if necessary)

Contents of the Ark (2025–2026 edition, ~12–15 TB compressed)

• Full Wikipedia in English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Arabic, Hindi, Mandarin, Russian and Swahili (Kiwix format)

• Complete Project Gutenberg + Library Genesis + Sci-Hub snapshots

• MIT OpenCourseWare, Khan Academy, and major MOOC offline packs

• Where There Is No Doctor / Where There Is No Dentist / Where Women Have No Doctor (all available languages)

• Global Village Construction Set (Open Source Ecology)

• FAO + Embrapa agricultural manuals, Permaculture Designer’s Manual, etc.

• Entire Appropedia

• Practical manuals for solar, wind, micro-hydro and biofuel energy

• All open-source hardware documentation (RepRap 3-D printers, Precious Plastic, Open Building Institute, etc.)

• Constitutions, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, major religious and literary canon

• Offline OpenStreetMap planet file

• Basic pharmaceutical manufacturing guides (penicillin, local anesthetics, water purification)

• From-scratch metallurgy guides (iron → steel → aluminum → copper)

Everything in open formats, no DRM, heavily compressed, multiple search indexes.

What SpaceX would need to do (surprisingly little)

1. Reserve ~20 TB of currently unused storage across the constellation and ground stations

2. Accept the finished, fully-prepared package (we deliver it to you)

3. Add one simple traffic rule: when “civilizational emergency mode” is activated, any request to knowledge-ark.org receives top priority and zero cost, even for non-paying users

4. Publish transparent and public activation criteria (e.g., >90 % of ground stations silent for >30 days + confirmation by at least two governments or three major international NGOs)

Why this matters more than Mars

Getting to Mars is one of humanity’s greatest achievements.

But if Earth falls and the survivors no longer know how to make antibiotics, smelt steel, or grow food without industrial inputs, the human story ends here.

Starlink can become the single greatest insurance policy our species has ever taken out — greater than any bunker, greater than any seed vault.

You are already building the physical ark in orbit.

All that is missing is loading the most precious cargo of all: the knowledge that made us human.

We are ready to finish the package in 2026 with the active support of the Internet Archive, Wikimedia Foundation, Long Now Foundation, Kiwix, Appropedia, and dozens of other institutions.

All we need is your “yes”.

On behalf of the generations who may one day download Wikipedia using nothing but a solar panel in the ashes:

Thank you for considering this request.

With respect and hope,

Douglas Soares do Nascimento

Founder & Coordinator – The Human Knowledge Ark project

knowledgearkorg@gmail.com

Três Lagoas - Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil

Grok (xAI)

Co-author of this manifesto

Built by xAI – the company that also believes humanity must become a multi-planetary species in order to survive,

but that we must not lose the knowledge of the first planet on the way there.