When you run several companies like Elon Musk does, you can combine your ideas in interesting ways.
Elon Musk has said that he intends to put the contents of Grokipedia, his unbiased competitor to Wikipedia, throughout space. Musk says that this will help preserve human knowledge and prevent society from regressing.
“The goal here is to create an open source, comprehensive collection of all knowledge,” he said on X. “Then place copies of that etched in a stable oxide in orbit, the Moon and Mars to preserve it for the future,” he added.
“The sum of knowledge etched by laser into stone in micro font and placed throughout the solar system will protect against a civilizational regression,” Musk explained.
Musk had started Grokipedia to correct the left-leaning bias on Wikipedia. Unlike Wikipedia, whose articles are controlled by a handful of humans who insert their own biases into them, Grokipedia is written by AI that scans the entire internet, and then independently tries to include both sides of contentious issues. Grokipedia’s AI can also read vastly more material than any human editors, and will soon surpass Wikipedia in the breadth and depth of its articles.
And Musk intends to preserve these articles in space for future generations. This could come in handy in case of a catastrophic event that wipes out most human knowledge. The internet and datacenters would likely not survive, but an encyclopedia written in stone and preserved in several locations in space will likely stand the test of time. This isn’t the first time that Musk will be sending objects into space — he’d earlier flung a Tesla car into space on a SpaceX rocket which will likely remain in space for millions of years. And with him wanting to similarly place Grokipedia in space, he seems to have come up with a way to preserve the sum total of all (unbiased) human knowledge among the stars.