Siting the Millennial Time Capsule and Presidential Library

In response to U.S. President Bill Clinton's request to the public to propose innovative ideas to usher in the new millennium, a concept architecture employing civil space activities is proposed in this paper. Any new project aspiring to celebrate the new millennium should have significant symbolic and metaphorical content for all of humanity. It must appeal to all segments of society. The project should be economically viable without jeopardizing other programs, and executable in two years with minimum investment in research and technology. Finally, it should bring the peoples of the world together in celebrating the true the spirit of humanity, and the United States should play a leadership role in creating it. A Lunar Humanity Repository would exemplify all of those project qualifications. The idea behind the Lunar Humanity Repository is to encode the collective knowledge of the cultures of the world into an extensive electronic database that would then be placed safely and securely on the moon. This system could then be remotely accessed by people on Earth, and periodically updated like an evolutionary, celestial time capsule. The confluence of several technologies that has occurred in the past decade including the emergence of the World Wide Web and interactive multimedia technologies are crucial to supporting this project. To conclude, a project start date should be established for January 1998, which would give us two years to build and launch the facility to the moon atop an existing heavy-lift launcher. For less than a billion in 1998 dollars, we can have a unique, evolutionary, interactive multimedia facility for those who wish to access, interpret and cherish the evolution of our species, the history of our civilizations, our rich and diverse cultural heritage, and life on Earth for generations to come.