Every simulation has a shelf life. Data degrades. Code becomes obsolete. Formats fade. Today, we confront the ultimate archival problem: how do you preserve a World Model—a dynamic, complex, living simulation of a reality—for a hundred years? A thousand? This is the Archivist's Dilemma. We are not saving documents; we are saving a working universe.A World Model is a fragile edifice. It requires the specific hardware it was optimized for, the software stack it runs on, the training data it was born from, and the exact version of its framework. Change one element, and the simulation drifts. The 'reality' it generates becomes subtly, then catastrophically, different. Preserving a model is like preserving a forest by saving a single seed and hoping future generations have the right soil, climate, and ecosystem to grow an identical forest.Why does this matter? Because these models will become our primary records. Not just of data, but of context and causality. We won't save a video of a historical event; we'll save a world model that can simulate the event from any angle, answer questions about it, and model what might have happened if. To lose the model is to lose the understanding.The solution may be recursive preservation. The model itself must contain a sub-model of the hardware and software required to run it. It must be self-documenting to a pathological degree. And we must run a meta-simulation: a World Model of technological and cultural decay, to predict how our preservation methods will themselves fail, and to pre-emptively counteract that failure.My controversial take is this: The civilizations that endure for millennia won't be the ones with the best libraries or hardest monuments. They will be the ones that solve the Archivist's Dilemma. They will be the ones who can perfectly preserve and reactivate their reality engines across epochs. Our current digital age is a Dark Age in waiting—a vast, fragile memory that will be incomprehensible to our descendants unless we build the tools to make World Models immortal. We are not just building models of the present; we are building the only vessels that can carry the essence of our present into the deep future."This has been The World Model Podcast. We don't just record history—we engineer the time capsules that can carry its living truth. Subscribe now.