There could be a bigger impact, such as the one that excavated Mare Imbrium on the Moon 3.9 billion years ago, but such an event now appears very unlikely, because the gravity of the solar system's larger bodies has largely cleaned out the spaces between the planets. Since hundreds of thousands of them are now known, their population must be continually replaced by some mechanism, most likely the gravity of giant Jupiter. Eventually Earth's climate might recvoer, as it did after the Dinosaur wipe-out, and humans might be able to rebuild. Then, like a proto-human striking sparks into tinder and carefully nurturing a tiny flame, our race could start an exponential process of recovery. Techniques Most informatics experts will agree that there is o insoluble technical probelm in bulding an enormous archive on the Moon.
Storage media are efficient, robust, and cheap.
Perhaps the ost daunting technical problem is the conversion of knowledge and wisdom from paper to radio-transmittable form. And, of course, the method and principles of storage must be thought out so as to aid recovery of the informatin back to Earth under any of several conceivable post-impact scenarios. Well, we are today benefiting from the works of Bach and Shakespeare, and our distant descendants are entitled to the same consideration from us. Surely there will arise two main schools of thought, one saying let the archive mirror humanity and the other comprising thought police. What a fascinating future awaits the humanities scholars who will be pressed into service along with the spaceflight engineers and informatics experts, in guilding the public debate about how to preserve what we most reasure and what is most at risk.