Elon Musk wants to create a 'modern-day Library of Alexandria' - and send copies to deep space

"Grokipedia is like a 'modern-day Library of Alexandria,' the Tesla CEO said. 'It was the great tragedy that the Library of Alexandria burned down,' Musk said. 'In order to preserve this knowledge, I think we want to literally etch it in stone, in sort of stone microfont, and distribute it widely.' One of the world's largest libraries, the Library of Alexandria, burned to the ground in 48 BC during the Roman Civil War between Julius Caesar and Pompey. The knowledge within the library was lost."

"Musk sees Grokipedia as a way to protect against this knowledge loss. In the worst case, Musk said, future civilization will 'see what we learned' from the encyclopedia and 'pick things up from there' - an idea reminiscent of the premise of one of Musk's favorite sci-fi series, 'Foundation,' by Isaac Asimov. Grokipedia doesn't seem entirely immune to destruction just yet. This morning, the site was down due to a Cloudflare outage. It is now back online."

"It's a knowledge repository - and one that will make it to Mars. Musk has high visions for his online encyclopedia, which he launched in October. In a recent conversation with Baron Capital founder Ron Baron, Musk said that Grokipedia will maintain the status of human information. It's also unclear whether Grokipedia is expanding to incorporate new knowledge. The site currently says that it comprises 885,279 articles - the same number it listed at the time of its launch last month."

Grokipedia launched in October as an online encyclopedia with roughly 885,279 articles. The project aims to preserve human knowledge by creating durable, stone-etched microfont copies distributed widely, including the Moon, Mars, and deep space. The initiative is presented as a modern equivalent of the Library of Alexandria, intended to prevent catastrophic knowledge loss and enable future civilizations to learn and rebuild from recorded information. The site experienced a Cloudflare outage but is back online. It remains unclear whether the encyclopedia is actively expanding its article count since the number of entries has not changed since launch.

Read at Business Insider