>if you can get that far from Earth then you might be responsible enough to deal with the archive.

Seems a little bit optimistic; could you imagine if the Cold War's space race had the additional prize of an archive of advanced alien technology?

It didn't? ;)

Oh, I concede that there is no guarantee that an organization or country advanced enough to launch a mission to the Moon would be responsible custodians of the information (alternate timelines where Germany or the Soviet Union land men on the Moon come to mind). But they might be less inclined to destroy it outright instead of seeing what they can use for themselves.

The best we can hope for is to make data available to the future; what they do with it is ultimately out of our hands.

But our successors may not have the technology to access an archive on the Moon - e.g., post-nuclear war - which defeats the whole purpose.

Edit: Just noticed your last remark. What does responsibility have to do with being able to access an archive of human knowledge and culture?

My thought was that if a party can coordinate a flight to the Moon then that party is intelligent enough to recognize and appreciate such an archive...rather than destroy it. As opposed to the likes of the Taliban, who made a point to destroy historical works.

None of this means that multiple, redundant archives cannot be created. I just think that the Moon offers a unique level of protection from those would would destroy or otherwise degrade such a collection.

Who cares about any possible "successors"? I say we should put this archive on the Moon (or better yet, copies on the Moon, Mars, and all the geologically-inactive planets or planetoids in this system), not for us, but for any alien archeologists who happen to make it here, so they can document our existence and use it to learn about the mistakes of a failed civilization. Because if this information is ever needed, we'll probably have wiped ourselves out, and this planet is not a safe place to store such information as it'll either be destroyed by our weapons of mass destruction or by natural forces over time after we're extinct. If we actually do have successors, they'll probably destroy the archive when they get their hands on it, just like the Taliban do to everything historical they find.

Seems a bit puerile, like writing "I was here" on a planet then joy-riding home with a big grin on your face. Humanity just got over doing that on all continents, though it still exists in some small communities (eg. mountain climbers). We have a long way to go.

Leaving a complete historical record for your civilization hardly equates to writing "I was here". I'm sure Wikipedia's diligent workers will be happy to know that all their efforts equate to graffiti in your view.

As a Wikipedia administrator myself, I do believe it's important to take a distant perspective at times. The capacity to laugh at your own efforts and predicament certainly has value. At the time scales of the rise and fall of civilizations, one should not take oneself so seriously!