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Strictly speaking you only need books enough to teach the reader to build up to an optical 100x microscope and then use that to access the rest. Eventually you

Strictly speaking you only need books enough to teach the reader to build up to an optical 100x microscope and then use that to access the rest. Eventually you teach them how to build blue lasers and rockets to scan the silica bricks you engraved and stashed in a moon cave for "everything else".

bastawhiz 3y ago
How useful are books about building an optical 100x+ microscope from scratch to people who have survived a global catastrophic event? Relearning how to make blue lasers is probably extremely low on the list of priorities compared to, say, farming or desalinization. You'd be relying on a fairly niche group of apocalypse survivors to actively preserve the knowledge of microscope production so that someday in the not-very-near future someone might want to learn about quarks or sixteenth century music. It makes a lot of sense to make the most useful information for apocalypse survivors the most accessible information. Just make books about that information and keep them maintained. Then there's at least incentive to keep the books protected and maintained. Edit: it sounds like you'd probably need a 1000x to 10000x microscope to really read the nanofiche described in this article. So a potter's wheel is probably not sufficient. Plus, you'd need the materials and tools for working with glass, which might not even be feasible in an apocalypse.
- vorpalhex 3y ago
  An apocalypse is not a weird time reset. You still have giant glass furnaces and propane and even industrial control systems. The tech that survives is probably an odd amalgamation, but chemistry is basically the thing you really want for society - antibiotics, explosives, and fuel.
  - bastawhiz 3y ago
    How can you keep propane production, giant glass furnaces, and industrial control systems working but you can't maintain a few hundred warehouses of "normal" archival material? Or just continuing to print books?
    - krisoft 3y ago
      The trick is that you would need to keep the archival material “continously” while the microscope tech can be lost, forgotten, rediscovered, and then used to read the material. That is if you have a thousand year gap in your archival material warehouse maintenance the data is lost. If you have a thousand year gap in your ability to make microscopes the data will wait around patiently.
      - bastawhiz 3y ago
        The point is that the time scale of "lost, forgotten, rediscovered" is perhaps orders of magnitude longer than it is to be useful for much of humanity. And you similarly need to cross your fingers and hope the facility isn't burned to the ground or blasted apart or whatever. An indestructible nanofiche disk at the bottom of a forgotten pile of rubble is going to do little good to anyone.
        vorpalhex 3y ago
        You can have a whole bunch of caches of preservation materials in a variety of formats. Clay tablets, nanofiche, laser etched silicon, etc.
        krisoft 3y ago
        > And you similarly need to cross your fingers and hope the facility isn't burned to the ground or blasted apart or whatever. Except you don’t need a “facility”. A lot of lot of knowledge fits on a bank card size nanofiche. You make ten thousand of them, and people put them away as best as they can. Some will melt in a fire, or get blasted apart, some will be burried and forgotten forever. But some will be more lucky, by just chance they will end up in an atick or crawlspace where nobody disturbs them. Not counting that we can hide some of them in places where they are unlikely to be disturbed, such as place a few on the moon or place a copy on every single geo and lagrange point destined satelite. Heck, burry a few on a glacier and they will naturally re-appear in a few thousand years.

bastawhiz 3y ago

How useful are books about building an optical 100x+ microscope from scratch to people who have survived a global catastrophic event? Relearning how to make blue lasers is probably extremely low on the list of priorities compared to, say, farming or desalinization. You'd be relying on a fairly niche group of apocalypse survivors to actively preserve the knowledge of microscope production so that someday in the not-very-near future someone might want to learn about quarks or sixteenth century music. It makes a lot of sense to make the most useful information for apocalypse survivors the most accessible information. Just make books about that information and keep them maintained. Then there's at least incentive to keep the books protected and maintained. Edit: it sounds like you'd probably need a 1000x to 10000x microscope to really read the nanofiche described in this article. So a potter's wheel is probably not sufficient. Plus, you'd need the materials and tools for working with glass, which might not even be feasible in an apocalypse.

vorpalhex 3y ago
An apocalypse is not a weird time reset. You still have giant glass furnaces and propane and even industrial control systems. The tech that survives is probably an odd amalgamation, but chemistry is basically the thing you really want for society - antibiotics, explosives, and fuel.
- bastawhiz 3y ago
  How can you keep propane production, giant glass furnaces, and industrial control systems working but you can't maintain a few hundred warehouses of "normal" archival material? Or just continuing to print books?
  - krisoft 3y ago
    The trick is that you would need to keep the archival material “continously” while the microscope tech can be lost, forgotten, rediscovered, and then used to read the material. That is if you have a thousand year gap in your archival material warehouse maintenance the data is lost. If you have a thousand year gap in your ability to make microscopes the data will wait around patiently.
    - bastawhiz 3y ago
      The point is that the time scale of "lost, forgotten, rediscovered" is perhaps orders of magnitude longer than it is to be useful for much of humanity. And you similarly need to cross your fingers and hope the facility isn't burned to the ground or blasted apart or whatever. An indestructible nanofiche disk at the bottom of a forgotten pile of rubble is going to do little good to anyone.
      - vorpalhex 3y ago
        You can have a whole bunch of caches of preservation materials in a variety of formats. Clay tablets, nanofiche, laser etched silicon, etc.
      - krisoft 3y ago
        > And you similarly need to cross your fingers and hope the facility isn't burned to the ground or blasted apart or whatever. Except you don’t need a “facility”. A lot of lot of knowledge fits on a bank card size nanofiche. You make ten thousand of them, and people put them away as best as they can. Some will melt in a fire, or get blasted apart, some will be burried and forgotten forever. But some will be more lucky, by just chance they will end up in an atick or crawlspace where nobody disturbs them. Not counting that we can hide some of them in places where they are unlikely to be disturbed, such as place a few on the moon or place a copy on every single geo and lagrange point destined satelite. Heck, burry a few on a glacier and they will naturally re-appear in a few thousand years.