Space X - Carried more than that astronaut driving a red car

[packman]

Last year, Elon Musk's personal Tesla might have gotten all the headlines during SpaceX's historic rocket launch back back in February, but the Falcon Heavy also carried a second, secret payload almost nobody knew about.

Stashed inside the midnight-cherry Roadster was a mysterious, small object designed to last for millions (perhaps billions) of years – even in extreme environments like space, or on the distant surfaces of far-flung planetary bodies.

Called an Arch (pronounced 'Ark'), this tiny storage device is built for long-term data archiving, holding libraries of information encoded on a small disc of quartz crystal, not much larger than a coin.
....
The Arch looks like a shrunk-down DVD or Blu-ray, but its potential for data storage goes way beyond any optical discs you have in your home.

The technology, developed by physicist Peter Kazansky from the University of Southampton in the UK, can theoretically hold up to 360 terabytes of data, about the same amount as 7,000 Blu-Ray discs

https://www.sciencealert.com/spacex-hid-a-second-hidden-payload-aboard-falcon-heavy-and-it-sounds-amazing

[madinmaryland]

1. Wow. Imagine all the cat videos and pics that disk could hold.

[tblue37]

2. K&R and thanks! nt

[MineralMan]

3. I wonder if, and why, anyone could identify

And use any of that data. I've always seen such things as futile. While it might get recognized as data, converting it to usable data would be a difficult challenge.

[denbot]

4. It's but another message in a bottle, tossed into a vast ocean from a lonely shore.

I would bet my last beer it was first done shortly after pottery and writing first arose in the same society.

[MineralMan]

5. Still, suppose it was found by a 12-tentacled,

Silicon-based, sentient creature which was things only in the ultraviolet spectrum. How would it view the data, even if it recognized the thing as data storage in the first place? Futility.

[Blue_true]

6. Humans shape everything in our image.

You have a point about futility, but the stuff is sent out, even the record on Voyager, under an assumption, a 1 in 700,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 chance that beings that understand it will find it, or make the connection that it was sent out be an intelligent (I use that term loosely) galactic being. But such is human logic, we create angels and demons in our image, as do we create God and Jesus in our image, we really can't imagine anything else because it is completely unknown to us.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

9. it would appreciate the snack, of course

[MineralMan]

10. Exactly. A little quartz crystal cookie.

Silicon dioxide. Very tasty for one such critter.

[EarthFirst]

7. I imagine a citizen of a far away galaxy attempting to cob something together from the storage cages

...in an effort to read the data written to this device.

Similar to one of us searching through the back of the garage to find a cassette player to play an analog tape found in a recently deceased relatives estate...

[Mr. Quackers]

8. The aliens want to contact us

but they don't because we smell so bad to them.

[hunter]

11. Fortunately for any space aliens or future humans who stumble upon it...

...not enough data capacity to recreate Elon Musk's ego.

[FSogol]

12. Groan, another tech company selling our data to the aliens...