But here’s the thing. They’re trashing their books.
Houston, We Have a Problem… With Books
No, seriously. I saw this headline and I actually had to read it twice. NASA’s largest library – we’re talking the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s technical library, the one that probably holds some of the most incredibly niche, vital, and frankly, cool information about space exploration, rocket science, planetary geology, you name it – is shutting down. Permanently. On January 2nd. And the kicker? The books are gonna be “tossed away.”
Tossed away. Like old pizza boxes. Or last year’s tax returns you finally got around to shredding.
I mean, can we just sit with that for a second? This isn’t some dusty municipal library that nobody uses anymore. This is NASA. The brain trust. The place where some of the smartest people on the planet work on problems that, quite literally, are out of this world. And they’re just… getting rid of their collective memory. Their physical memory, anyway. It’s just so mind-bogglingly shortsighted, if I’m being honest. It’s like a chef throwing out all their old cookbooks because “everything’s on TikTok now.” No, dude. That’s not how it works.
The Myth of “Everything’s Digital”
Now, I can already hear the arguments. “Oh, it’s all digitized, old man! Get with the times! We’re in the 21st century!” And yeah, I get it. Digital is great. It’s convenient. You can search, you can share, you can access it from your phone while you’re waiting for your latte. But here’s the dirty little secret about “everything’s digital”: it’s usually not.
Not everything. Not completely. And certainly not perfectly.
For one, there’s the sheer volume. Do you really think every single paper, every technical report, every obscure memo, every annotated diagram from decades of groundbreaking work has been meticulously scanned, OCR’d, indexed, and made fully accessible online? Come on. Even the most ambitious digitization projects have gaps. Big ones. Things get missed. Things get misfiled. Things get scanned crooked or in low resolution. Some stuff just never makes it out of the physical archives because it’s too niche, too fragile, or frankly, too expensive to digitize.
And then there’s the fragility of digital itself. File formats change. Software becomes obsolete. Servers crash. Hard drives fail. Websites disappear. We’ve all seen it. A link from five years ago that now leads to a 404 page. Digital knowledge, while seemingly omnipresent, can be incredibly ephemeral. A physical book, on the other hand? You can pull that sucker off a shelf a hundred years from now, dust it off, and read it. Provided nobody “tossed it away.”
What Are We Even Doing Here?
This whole thing just feels like another symptom of a bigger problem, doesn’t it? This weird, almost aggressive, push to discard the past in favor of a shiny, often incomplete, digital future. It’s like we’ve collectively decided that anything that isn’t instantly searchable on Google isn’t worth knowing. And that’s a dangerous, dangerous road to go down, especially for an institution like NASA.
Think about it. Space exploration isn’t built on brand new ideas every single day. It’s built on a foundation of physics, engineering, chemistry, and mathematics that stretches back centuries. And the specific applications, the trials and errors, the breakthroughs and the dead ends documented within those JPL library walls? That’s the institutional memory. That’s the stuff you can’t just recreate with a quick search engine query.
“The past isn’t just history; it’s the bedrock for future innovation. Discarding it is like trying to build a skyscraper without foundations.”
It just seems so… hubristic. To assume that every piece of information that might ever be needed by a future engineer, a future scientist, a future historian of space exploration, has been perfectly preserved in a digital format. It’s like saying “we know everything we need to know from these books, so bye-bye.” Who cares what someone might need 20, 50, 100 years from now, right?
A Dangerous Precedent, Or Just Bad Housekeeping?
I’ve seen this pattern before, and it always makes me nervous. Libraries everywhere are struggling, fighting for relevance, fighting for funding. And when an institution as prestigious and well-funded as NASA decides to just scrap its physical library, what kind of message does that send? It basically says: physical books, physical archives, they’re obsolete. They’re a burden. A cost center.
But what’s the actual cost benefit here? Is it really cheaper to trash thousands upon thousands of priceless technical documents than it is to, I don’t know, find a warehouse? Offer them to other academic institutions? The Library of Congress? The Smithsonian? Hell, I bet there are dozens of universities that would kill to get their hands on a collection like that. To just “toss them away” feels less like a strategic decision and more like a lazy, thoughtless clear-out.
And the loss isn’t just about the specific facts. It’s about the context. The marginalia. The way information was organized and presented in a physical space. The serendipitous discoveries made by browsing a shelf, finding a related volume you never knew existed. You lose that in the digital realm. You really do. Algorithms show you what they think you want to see, not what you might stumble upon by chance.
My Two Cents, And Then Some
Look, I get it. Space is tight. Budgets are tight. But this isn’t some old phone book collection we’re talking about. This is the intellectual legacy of one of humanity’s greatest endeavors. And to treat it with such casual disregard… it just grates. It really does.
My honest take? This is a mistake. A big one. Some poor grad student or an engineer working on a future mission is going to be banging their head against a wall trying to find some obscure reference, some forgotten design detail, some historical context for a material failure from the Apollo era, and it’ll be gone. Lost. Because some bean counter decided that physical books were just “clutter.”
It’s a slap in the face to all the people who contributed to those books, who relied on them, and who will never get to rely on them again. We preach about the importance of science, of knowledge, of pushing forward, but sometimes, to push forward, you need to remember where you came from. And you need to keep those blueprints, those old maps, those original notes. Because you never, ever know when you’ll need them again. And once they’re gone, they’re gone for good. That’s just a sad truth.
