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> For example a 20 x 20 mm nickel Nanofiche sheet can hold up to 8,000 pages of text rendered at 150 dpi. How do we expect someone will be curious enough or ha

by amtamt 3y ago

> For example a 20 x 20 mm nickel Nanofiche sheet can hold up to 8,000 pages of text rendered at 150 dpi. How do we expect someone will be curious enough or have right gear to read these sheets?

nielsbot 3y ago
Guess you could include instructions for building the right gear on a larger version of nanofiche, readable with the unaided eye... (1m x 1m?)
mlyle 3y ago
> How do we expect someone will be curious enough or have right gear to read these sheets? ~.1 micron. Pretty small feature size. Typical letters might be 30 by 15 dots in a 10pt font with their 150DPI assumption. But it's not -that- exotic. A cheap compound optical microscope might do .4 micron, resulting in letters being 8 times and 4 times the spatial resolution. This is in the range where things are slightly annoying in fuzziness but still easily legible. My crappy LCD microscope for my classroom cost about $50 and has a resolution of roughly 1 micron. It could probably read, with difficulty, 12pt text.
jiveturkey 3y ago
it just needs analog magnification, so very achievable. i'm more worried about how scratch or defect resistant it is, given the small feature size. if you have to store it in some kind of case to protect against scratches, then how long does the case last? do you have to do this in ultra clean room conditions, to prevent fungus etc from being encased with it?
- lxgr 3y ago
  Biological factors are pretty unlikely to be a concern on the moon :)
  - seanhunter 3y ago
    I think the problem with the moon as a storage location is getting the archive to the moon in good shape and then retrieving it to recover the knowledge post whatever cataclysm caused all the primary sources to be lost. On their website they even say the archive is "believed to be on the surface of the moon". So maybe they have saved human knowledge and maybe they haven't and somehow post apocalypse people just have to figure out how to get to the moon and maybe it will be there waiting for them. Doesn't seem tremendously reassuring.
  - jiveturkey 3y ago
    Space fungus is a thing. https://www.space.com/fungus-in-space-long-duration-astronaut-missions https://www.space.com/fungus-in-space-long-duration-astronau... > In 1988, astronauts aboard the now-retired Russian space station Mir realized that something had blanketed one of their windows — from the outside. [...] This fungi had managed to adapt to the space environment, and so well that it not only survived but thrived on windows, control panels, air conditioners and cable insulators. It even contaminated the crew's precious food and water supply. Not a one-time event.
    - lxgr 3y ago
      The ISS goes to great lengths to support life in space – it's just hard to be selective about which types of life. So unless the nanofiches are somehow stuck to the heat exchanger of a secret lunar base or similar, I'd assume that they would go biologically inert (or at least dormant) very quickly.

by amtamt 3y ago

> For example a 20 x 20 mm nickel Nanofiche sheet can hold up to 8,000 pages of text rendered at 150 dpi. How do we expect someone will be curious enough or have right gear to read these sheets?

nielsbot 3y ago

Guess you could include instructions for building the right gear on a larger version of nanofiche, readable with the unaided eye... (1m x 1m?)

mlyle 3y ago

> How do we expect someone will be curious enough or have right gear to read these sheets? ~.1 micron. Pretty small feature size. Typical letters might be 30 by 15 dots in a 10pt font with their 150DPI assumption. But it's not -that- exotic. A cheap compound optical microscope might do .4 micron, resulting in letters being 8 times and 4 times the spatial resolution. This is in the range where things are slightly annoying in fuzziness but still easily legible. My crappy LCD microscope for my classroom cost about $50 and has a resolution of roughly 1 micron. It could probably read, with difficulty, 12pt text.

jiveturkey 3y ago

it just needs analog magnification, so very achievable. i'm more worried about how scratch or defect resistant it is, given the small feature size. if you have to store it in some kind of case to protect against scratches, then how long does the case last? do you have to do this in ultra clean room conditions, to prevent fungus etc from being encased with it?

lxgr 3y ago
Biological factors are pretty unlikely to be a concern on the moon :)
- seanhunter 3y ago
  I think the problem with the moon as a storage location is getting the archive to the moon in good shape and then retrieving it to recover the knowledge post whatever cataclysm caused all the primary sources to be lost. On their website they even say the archive is "believed to be on the surface of the moon". So maybe they have saved human knowledge and maybe they haven't and somehow post apocalypse people just have to figure out how to get to the moon and maybe it will be there waiting for them. Doesn't seem tremendously reassuring.
- jiveturkey 3y ago
  Space fungus is a thing. https://www.space.com/fungus-in-space-long-duration-astronaut-missions https://www.space.com/fungus-in-space-long-duration-astronau... > In 1988, astronauts aboard the now-retired Russian space station Mir realized that something had blanketed one of their windows — from the outside. [...] This fungi had managed to adapt to the space environment, and so well that it not only survived but thrived on windows, control panels, air conditioners and cable insulators. It even contaminated the crew's precious food and water supply. Not a one-time event.
  - lxgr 3y ago
    The ISS goes to great lengths to support life in space – it's just hard to be selective about which types of life. So unless the nanofiches are somehow stuck to the heat exchanger of a secret lunar base or similar, I'd assume that they would go biologically inert (or at least dormant) very quickly.