The accidental library: Why Elon Musk launched books to space that could last 14 billion years

Humanity's first-ever permanent space library was effectively founded this week, as the three books of Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy blasted into the solar system.

The novels weren't really expected to make it to space. They weren't deliberately chosen. But they will probably be out there for millions of years, zipping around the sun, moving out past Mars 20 times faster than a bullet — and they almost certainly won't be the last.

If you missed the news of the library's launch, that's probably because of the distracting packaging it was wrapped in. Asimov's stories are on a quartz disk in a case aboard a cherry red Tesla Roadster, delivered to space by the SpaceX Heavy Falcon rocket.

An improbable library
In this case, art is certainly in the eye of the beholder.

Visually appealing and whimsical to some, the Tesla Roadster represented a gauche billionaire's midlife crisis to others.

But whichever side you come down on, there's a case to be made that the books are a more important story than the flashy car.

Not only is this a milestone in the history of human literature — the story of how they got there is fascinating, improbable, and proves the worth of sending Elon Musk a tweet.

It's also fantastically ironic, given that Asimov's classic Foundation Trilogy is about a super-planned, millennium-long scheme to save the galaxy, that there was absolutely no plan or intention to launch the books into space, at least at first.

"We really just did it as a test," Spivack says of creating the disk. "If we'd known it would go to space, we would have put more stuff on it."