> Paper disintegrates without maintenance. Tape disintegrates. Hard drives lose magnetization. SSDs lose their charge states. Stone erodes. Several of these won't survive fire, water, magnetic fields, or radiation.
Computers, peripherals, microscopes, and any other devices needed to access some incredibly durable archival format will also degrade. The information needed to produce new ones will need to be archived, and that material will degrade and need archiving.
Do you know how much information is necessary to describe all of the details relevant to producing an extremely good microscope from scratch? It's not just the parts and materials, it's the entirety of the supply chain: the mining, refining, electronics, power production, and everything else. All of that information needs to be accessibly preserved.
So it begs the question, is it really easier to make the prerequisite for the information's use be a working precision instrument or is it easier to just actively maintain lots of copies of less durable materials like books?
If the sky falls tomorrow, how many years is some archive really useful for in any format? Most of a sturdy, well-designed library of books will probably survive for a decade. A good percentage will probably survive a century. On the other hand, a high precision microscope probably won't "just work" after a decade or two of sitting around disused in unideal conditions. A working power supply would probably last even less time.
We must accept that there's some ongoing upkeep of an archive regardless of how durable its contents are. And while a book isn't as durable as some quartz or other fancy material, you can pretty easily make books to replace old ones even in pretty miserable conditions (we did it for centuries, albeit at great cost). There's a remarkably high cost to making sure there's a working microscope around, and keeping the information and resources necessary to make new ones and repair existing ones available.
I think it would be reasonable to store a fixed-focus compound microscope as part of your archive. That's basically a tube and a couple of lenses, and it gets you to 500x right off the bat.
But if you want to be doubly sure, include instructions for making a hand lens at 1x, and instructions for making a microscope at 5x.
We've been able to manage to make very good microscopes for quite a while. It won't take much more than industrial revolution level tech for this to work
The counterpoint is the same: what happens to all the nanofiche disks next to a pile of crushed microscopes that were destroyed when the roof fell in? In one case, the information which mattered to the people at the time persisted. In the other, no information persisted.
The whole point is that the operation persists for longer than a human lifespan. If we have to rediscover 100 years of making lasers and rockets, who cares? If we have to rediscover 2000 years of agriculture and medicine, that's a problem.
Maybe it would be possible to make the archive in "stages"? Like the first stage is readable without any equipment and describes how to make equipment to read the next stage. Repeat until you have a high-precision microscrope and can read the nanofiches.
> We must accept that there's some ongoing upkeep of an archive regardless of how durable its contents are.
That's a good point too. Archiving is a living process.
Computers, peripherals, microscopes, and any other devices needed to access some incredibly durable archival format will also degrade. The information needed to produce new ones will need to be archived, and that material will degrade and need archiving.
Do you know how much information is necessary to describe all of the details relevant to producing an extremely good microscope from scratch? It's not just the parts and materials, it's the entirety of the supply chain: the mining, refining, electronics, power production, and everything else. All of that information needs to be accessibly preserved.
So it begs the question, is it really easier to make the prerequisite for the information's use be a working precision instrument or is it easier to just actively maintain lots of copies of less durable materials like books?
If the sky falls tomorrow, how many years is some archive really useful for in any format? Most of a sturdy, well-designed library of books will probably survive for a decade. A good percentage will probably survive a century. On the other hand, a high precision microscope probably won't "just work" after a decade or two of sitting around disused in unideal conditions. A working power supply would probably last even less time.
We must accept that there's some ongoing upkeep of an archive regardless of how durable its contents are. And while a book isn't as durable as some quartz or other fancy material, you can pretty easily make books to replace old ones even in pretty miserable conditions (we did it for centuries, albeit at great cost). There's a remarkably high cost to making sure there's a working microscope around, and keeping the information and resources necessary to make new ones and repair existing ones available.