[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
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Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
Say you wanted to host a personal page that can outlive you and be
seen by the children of your grandchildren. Other than asking your
progeny to keep paying the hosting bills, is there another way?
Author : adamkochanowicz
Score : 370 points
Date : 2021-10-22 14:24 UTC (8 hours ago)
| White_Wolf wrote:
| Encode it in the DNA of a few million tardigrades. Spread them
| all over the planet.
| jmnicolas wrote:
| Paper.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Application backed by services, or, static content?
|
| If it can be captured and replayed by the Wayback Machine, submit
| the URL to https://web.archive.org/save/
|
| That's a good side-bet regardless of any personal efforts.
| throwaway879080 wrote:
| save it on a tablet, clay tablet
| wscott wrote:
| https://permanent.org/ This is exactly what they claim to be
| solving. Now if you trust them is another question.
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| The chances of your webpage being visible in 500 years is about
| nil. The browsers won't talk to it because it is not using the
| latest TLS. Your certificate will have long expired. Google will
| have removed you from your index because they disagree with your
| arcane viewpoints. Your host probably went bankrupt or decided
| not to support whatever setup is hosting your page. Somebody will
| have to translate it to Chinese when they take over. And so on.
| You probably have better chances printing it out on high quality
| paper. Good news is that you'll be in good company - Amazon will
| get disrupted, Facebook will fizzle, IBM will go back to making
| cheese slicers, and so on.
| imdhmd wrote:
| Some of the best preserved literature is religious text. Give
| humans incentive (evidently faith is a strong contender here) to
| remember something to the T and it could easily survive all those
| 500 years and more.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| I recently bought space at forever.com to keep my late relatives
| photos and documents. It's about $150 for 10 GB. They promise to
| keep the site up for at least 100 years, paying for storage from
| the interest on those $150.
| beecafe wrote:
| Ignoring all the issues with decoding any message after 500
| years... Semiconductor based devices will stop working by then
| due to diffusion. Maybe a large conductive structure that creates
| EM backscatter/interference that encodes your website? Or perhaps
| something that attracts lightning strikes and uses them to emit a
| burst of information.
|
| Also, if your website really does last and remains decodeable
| that long, and if it is an exceptional occurrence, then it could
| also become a target for destruction if the winds of culture
| shift in some way.
|
| See also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-
| time_nuclear_waste_warn...
| jfax wrote:
| The best example I know of so far about a website outliving its
| author is cycling resource sheldonbrown.com - inline with what so
| far has been said here, it just needs to be an astounding enough
| resource for generation after to take over and maintain.
| Vosporos wrote:
| Yep, well-preserved vellum
| Groxx wrote:
| Deeply chisel it onto a large stone.
|
| Honestly. Very few other things have concrete evidence that they
| physically last 500 years under real-world conditions, and
| specific technologies rarely seem to survive even 50 without such
| drastic changes that they're hardly equivalent any more. And
| large stones are so common that it's unlikely to be desirable to
| use it as a resource in the future.
| carbonsoul wrote:
| Build pyramids low tech giant physical structures that survive
| the test of time
| zhte415 wrote:
| Write a somewhat influential book and let others figure out how
| to 'host' this.
| tuornumen wrote:
| DNA data storage for only data preservation maybe works, but if
| you want to actively broadcast your content; you can put a
| compact satellite in geosynchronous orbit with some of the
| rideshare missions. With redundant avionics and little overkill
| solar power (or proper RTG if you can afford) it would broadcast
| your data very long time. But which communication protocol to
| chose is still mystery.
| tekknik wrote:
| How do you know what the internet will look like in 500 years?
| Sites from 20 years ago are broken, you can expect that unless
| you're using plain text and html that standards will change in
| 500 years and people will not be able to access your site.
|
| Then there's issues with domains. You'd have to setup a trust and
| again assume we will still be using domains in 500 years. If you
| use something like S3 then you'll have to ensure they're around
| for 500 years.
|
| My perspective, this is entirely unrealistic.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Even plain text is no guarantee. This assumes that future
| people will read/understand/use latin characters. ASCII could
| very well be replaced in the medium-term future
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| I thought Unicode was already replacing ASCII.
| arp242 wrote:
| Unicode is compatible with ASCII: any ASCII text will
| render fine (when UTF-8 is used anyway; some other Unicode
| encodings: not so much).
| mywittyname wrote:
| Sure, but that is backwards compatible / a superset of
| ASCII.
|
| What I meant to say, is that it's totally possible that, in
| the coming few centuries, even basic ASCII won't be readily
| understood. As in the character mapping in modern systems
| will break down, i.e., int 97 is no longer 'a', but some
| glyph from a language not yet conceived.
|
| We take for granted backwards comparability. Just because
| ASCII has been readable for the past 60 or so years,
| doesn't mean it will continue to be for the next 60.
| necovek wrote:
| We do not take it for granted.
|
| Instead, we design systems to be such because it makes
| many things much simpler.
|
| This is the reason why UTF-8 has basically "won" over
| UTF-16 or UCS-4 when it comes to encoding Unicode
| characters.
|
| If anything, with the amount of data we have today,
| unless there is a big reason (probably political, but
| even they exist today for eg. China not to want to use an
| Unicode transformation based on American Standard Code
| for Information Interchange) to re-encode all historical
| data, backwards compatibility will be maintained with the
| computers of the future (if they still exist). Yes, even
| if we move their bytes to be 13-qubit qubytes :D
|
| To elaborate on the cost: re-encoding all data from 2050
| is probably not going to be too expensive in 2400, but by
| then you'll need to re-encode data from up to 2400. To me
| this seems like a reason that backwards compatibility
| will make sense to be kept because there is not much to
| be gained. Eg. UTF-8 approach has shown us the best way
| forward.
|
| The trickiest is going to be to keep all video/audio
| encoding algorithms, especially as they are patent
| encumbered.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Sites which were carefully designed are not broken, and I think
| that is a good starting point when designing with longevity in
| mind.
|
| Five hundred years is a long time, but I think it's reasonable
| to try to design a site that could last, for example, 25 years,
| because you can already write something which COULD HAVE worked
| for the PREVIOUS 25 years by testing with older browsers.
|
| You'll want to restrict yourself to a subset of HTML which is
| supported by all of them, perhaps with some progressive
| enhancement.
| teawrecks wrote:
| Broken but not illegible. I feel like you're arguing that
| because the world may forget how to read some data 500 from
| now, storing the data is worthless. But that's just not true.
| Archeologists find meaning in writings they've never seen
| before all the time.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Indeed. As I commented separately I think the only practical
| solution is to use a simple medium (USB stick) and simple,
| standard file formats, then to copy from medium to medium, and
| to convert obsolete formats as time passes.
|
| This requires descendants to keep at it over time, and it not
| really a "web site", but IMHO is the only way to keep the date
| accessible and useable over time.
| trinovantes wrote:
| There's also the fact that human language will also change over
| the course of 500 years
|
| 500 year old English is nothing like English today
| blfr wrote:
| Languages change slower once they're written down. Today's
| English should be readily comprehensible.
| nkrisc wrote:
| It's still intelligible, though. One thousand years is about
| the accepted timeframe for a language to be no longer
| mutually intelligible for speakers at either end of that
| period.
|
| Of course, it's entirely possible the rate of change within a
| language is not static over millennia.
| srcreigh wrote:
| Isn't it a bit silly to ask about whether 1000 year old
| people can understand modern language?
|
| If it's not, I would love to know more about this.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Not sure if you intentionally missunderstood, but the
| point was, that you probably would be able to make some
| sense of 1000 year old english, but that is about the
| border.
|
| It depends on the culture of course. There are old
| cultures with the same references like a bible, that
| might cover longer timeframes of understanding.
| srcreigh wrote:
| Ah, my apologies. I could be clearer. It was curious for
| that comment to refer to _mutual intelligibility_ for
| people on either side of a 1000 year period.
|
| It's a lot easier to ask whether contemporary humans can
| understand 1000 year old language, than to ask whether
| humans 1000 years ago can understand contemporary
| language.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I think it's fair to assume that if we can't understand
| them, they probably couldn't understand us.
|
| Yes, they're long gone so it doesn't really matter.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "It's a lot easier to ask whether contemporary humans can
| understand 1000 year old language, than to ask whether
| humans 1000 years ago can understand contemporary
| language."
|
| This is clear. And since we can only look backwards, we
| can only assume it works the other way around.
| genewitch wrote:
| a large portion of English, in general, is changes in
| spelling from prior words, usually traceable to proto-
| indo-european, which is a catchall group of languages
| that etymologists are unable to find reliable sources
| for. It's generally extrapolated backward, and decent
| extrapolations are used to bootstrap understanding of
| words that don't quite "fit" with english, and may, in
| fact, come from other areas of the planet.
|
| There are also scads of words that had a contemporary
| meaning that changed "overnight", morphing into entirely
| new meanings, which then brokered entirely new words with
| different definitions. My current favorite word to use an
| example of this is "filibuster" - the act of obstructing
| legislation by talking. The word, as so many in english,
| came from bastardizing the dutch word for "freebooter" or
| pirate, through a circuitous route of the French adding
| an S, and the American English removing an S. If you dig
| a bit more, you find that the "booty" part of freebooter
| (which means 'loves plunder' from the original dutch)
| came from a french word first recorded in the 1300s,
| "butin", which _probably_ came from some mid-german word
| meaning "haul from plundering". There's also an
| implication that for a while in the 1500s-1800s
| freebooter was also the name of a private entity that
| engaged in exchanging goods - a "free trader", with the
| negative connotations falling in and out of style.
|
| So, if you can parse Shakespeare or Chaucer at all, it's
| because of the mechanism of how English, and other
| languages derived from the same roots "evolve". Saxon and
| old High German, as well as Icelandic all play a huge
| role in the way we speak and write today, to name a few.
| ignoramous wrote:
| ...but the world wasn't a global village back then. A
| thousand years on, the world may look more similar than
| diverse, and less divergent / more convergent than it did
| over a similar time frame in the past?
| wccrawford wrote:
| Or it could vary even more rapidly as local language
| changes can take root internationally on a whim now,
| where they had major barriers before.
| nkrisc wrote:
| It very well might. The extraordinary ways we're able to
| preserve knowledge might slow the rate of change, or
| perhaps increasing interconnectedness between different
| cultures will accelerate the rate of change.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| It took much less than 1,000 years for various pidgins and
| creoles to develop, and there are several of such languages
| that native speakers of the language's parent languages
| would have difficulty understanding.
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| Five hundred years ago is Shakespeare, roughly. Still readily
| understandable for the most part.
|
| Now if we go back a thousand years...
| paxys wrote:
| Shakespeare wrote in what is referred to as "Early Modern
| English". It is no secret that his writings were a big
| influence in the evolution of the language itself. If you
| look at some of his contemporaries from the same period,
| however, their language will be very different and much
| harder to understand.
| dhosek wrote:
| My specialty in undergrad was 15th and 16th century
| poetry. His contemporaries' writing (and writings from
| the early 15th c.) was no harder to read than
| Shakespeare.1 The biggest challenge would be the
| irregularities of spelling--before the printing press and
| for at least a century afterwards, English spelling was
| inconsistent and flexible (and frequently was left up to
| the compositor for printed materials which led to
| different spellings for a word in the same document to
| make line breaks work better).
|
| [?][?][?]
|
| 1. A notable exception would be Edmund Spenser who wrote
| in a style that was archaic even to his contemporaries.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| Shakespeare and the KJV are both closer to 400 years old.
| Shakespeare wanted to be accessible, though modern readers
| still need annotations to understand some of the words and
| most of the references. The KJV was intentionally somewhat
| archaic. There's a big difference in how accessible KJV is
| vs Shakespeare
|
| But otherwise yeah, the Norman Conquest did a number on the
| language
| thruway516 wrote:
| Assuming anyone is still speaking English, and not say
| Mandarin or even some obscure African language no one has
| even heard about yet.
| genewitch wrote:
| put me in for $1 on both Lojban and Esperanto.
| necovek wrote:
| I am saddened to hear you are not betting on Slovio too.
| :D
| t-writescode wrote:
| This is interesting because your go to was an existing, but
| non-English language, rather than a completely different
| language that is an amalgamation of other, existing
| languages, gone through several generations of memes, in-
| jokes, meaning reversals, etc, to the point of being
| unintelligible from the former.
| thruway516 wrote:
| Maybe we won't even have languages at all. We'll just
| communicate through gifs. My point is who knows. *Wow
| Someone really took offense at Mandarin
| Comevius wrote:
| Ask Piql to archive it, they are the company behind the Arctic
| World Archive.
|
| If the website must be available on the internet than you are
| mistaken, the planet is becoming inhabitable and fast. This is a
| scientific fact. A civilization as unsustainable as ours don't
| get to be around for 500 years. The next one however should learn
| from our mistakes, so archiving is a worthwhile effort.
| jwithington wrote:
| This is such a good interview question lol
| pmontra wrote:
| Are they going to have the technology to access the web site? We
| are about to lose access to many recordings because either we
| don't have the readers (physical media) or we lost the software
| to run the codecs and maybe the hardware to run them.
|
| Anyway, make many copies, leave money to run the site, maybe link
| the availability of the site to the validity of the goods you're
| passing to your heirs.
|
| And print something, maybe engrave it on stone :-)
| rusk wrote:
| Get it into the trunk of linux git
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I think this question has a much deeper implication. What is
| going to happen to digital data, period? Think of all the letters
| between famous geniuses in Physics. Today all of that is locked
| up in emails on server, password (and possibly 2FA) protected.
| Will all of this be lost to encryption, even if the "wayback"
| machine of the exebyte internet manages to waste all that energy
| on SSDs to save it all????
| mrits wrote:
| When thinking of 500 years in the future I'd guess encryption
| would be the last thing to be worried about.
| mrandish wrote:
| A more useful (and perhaps interesting) question would be "Best
| way to host a website for 50 years?"
|
| Even that long is quite ambitious as a goal but at least the
| suggestions might be somewhat actionable.
| vortico wrote:
| Start a diversified annuity that funds webmasters by contract to
| perform standard update/migration/backup/payment tasks. Give the
| annuity to a college, bank, or family to own/manage it based on
| your bylaws.
| tmaly wrote:
| I remember seeing an HN article about a stone disc that could
| keep your data intact for 1000 years.
|
| I can't seem to find it. All that comes up in search is something
| called M-Disc
| miles wrote:
| You did find it:
|
| _M-Disc is a DVD made out of stone that lasts 1,000 years_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2868296
|
| https://www.extremetech.com/computing/92286-m-disc-is-a-dvd-...
| vocoda wrote:
| Just host your website as plain markdown or HTML on GitHub. They
| will be around for a long time and if not, the internet archive
| will still have a copy of your site.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Microfiche is stable for 500 years, you can store the webpage as-
| rendered and the source code. And you can use a 2D matrix
| "barcode" with simple error correction to represent digital data
| more compactly in the microfiche. Colors are generally less
| stable in microfiche than black and white.
|
| Also, try 1000 year institutions like the Vatican or something.
|
| Get it archived on Archive.org
|
| If you're worried about translation, then provide another
| translation of it in technical and Old Mandarin, ancient Arabic,
| high Latin, koine Greek, Sanskrit, Hausa (Nigerian), and
| Shakespearean/King James English.
|
| There's going to be Catholics, Orthodox, random Protestant
| Christians, Muslims, Confucians, and Hindus in 500 years (plus a
| lot of Nigerians), and there will be millions of people able to
| read and understand some of those ancient languages and committed
| to preserving them.
| thom wrote:
| Write a pernicious AGI whose only goal is to keep the page
| online, whatever systems it has to subvert (or in extreme cases,
| turn into paperclips).
| philipswood wrote:
| Would make a cute SF short story:
|
| Written from the point of view of one human person, kept alive
| by a Universal Paperclips kind of AGI, kept alive to be the
| audience of the-website-that must-remain-eternally, while the
| entire galaxy is slowly brought under its control in the
| following its sacred purpose.
| carbonsoul wrote:
| Build pyramids no seriously, build low tech giant physical
| structures that survive the test of time
| ofou wrote:
| https://posthaven.com/
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Don't! Write it down on archival paper and present it in an
| interesting way. The web won't exist in its current form in 50
| years.
|
| As far as I know, my great grandfather's representation on earth
| today beyond descendants is a portion of a journal with some
| writing and a couple of drawings.
|
| For most of us, that's the best you can hope for.
| ews wrote:
| The Longnow foundation (https://longnow.org) and their Rosetta
| Project (https://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/) may be of some
| help.
| csmeder wrote:
| As we saw with Inspiration 4, SpaceX is willing to take
| commissions, thus:
|
| This might not be the cheapest way, however, if you can engineer
| a satellite to last 500 years [1], you could then have SpaceX put
| it up in orbit for over 500 years[2]. Have this satellite
| broadcast your website via radio [3]. Then setup a trust with a
| consortium of lawyers to maintain a ground station network that
| hosts the website on earth's internet.
|
| This way even if the earth lawyers/society fail you, you are
| still hosting the website technically, just not on earth's
| internet.
|
| [1] Does anyone know if this is reasonably possible?
|
| [2] https://space.stackexchange.com/a/5599
|
| [3] https://science.howstuffworks.com/question431.htm
| manquer wrote:
| Electionics has much shorter than 500 year life times , even
| shorter in the harsh radiation filled environment in space.
| terafo wrote:
| Single sat wouldn't be able to broadcast 24/7 because batteries
| will fail after some time and sun won't be available all the
| time. Because sat won't be powered on all the time it will
| collide with something eventually even if there is fuel left(I
| believe that you can't hold fuel for ion drives for that long
| because gases leak). One sat is definitely not going to work,
| dozen might have a chance. But I think they all will be hacked
| in less than a century.
| airstrike wrote:
| Re: [1] assuming it's possible, you'd still want to probably
| have 2 or 3 satellites for redundancy...
| akomtu wrote:
| A small sat in the Lagrange point between moon and earth should
| do. The sat would host a server, communicate over radio waves and
| get energy from the sun.
| Havoc wrote:
| Reminds me of GKH getting a request from the japanese transport
| ministry (I think?) for a distro release that is supported for 20
| years
|
| Even 20 is forever never mind 500
| sushsjsuauahab wrote:
| There's a non-zero chance that there will even be a human
| population, let alone an internet, within 500 years.
|
| You would probably be best served by backing things up to tape
| and instilling a culture of copying these tapes every 15-20 years
| by your decendents :)
| kangnkodos wrote:
| Just put it on myspace. That information will never completely go
| away.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| 500 years ago, the USA didn't exist.
|
| I'd be disinclined to rely on the internet surviving for more
| than another hundred years; too many influential people would
| like it to disappear.
|
| I don't really know _who_ my ancestors were, 500 years ago,
| despite my father researching his ancestry for a decade. I
| certainly don 't know what they might have written down.
|
| If my ancient ancestor had invested 1M in preserving his
| thoughts, I think I would regard him as incredibly vain, to think
| I wouldn't prefer the cash over the chance to read his personal
| page.
| cobookman wrote:
| Store the content on the bitcoin blockchain. Expensive but it'll
| be available for 500+ years
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I've thought about a project like this. Although, in my fantasies
| it was a way to store wealth and provide incentives for
| revitalization while I am in cryogenic stasis waiting to be
| thawed out and revived.
|
| Basically, I would write a few modules - Content, secrets,
| funder, tester, advertiser, executor, and get them running in
| some cloud deployment.
|
| Content is whatever website you want to host. That part wasn't in
| my fantasies. Secrets module implements an API to share and store
| secret information provided the caller has the right keys. Funder
| is responsible for interfacing with financial accounts and making
| prudent, low risk, financial decisions. In our time, this would
| be like using a Robinhood/Webull/whatever account to buy blue
| chip companies with a long history of steady share prices and
| dividends. The tester module confirms that all other modules
| faithfully reproduce their intended purpose and providing
| functional models with contact information for the executor. The
| executor is responsible for starting the other modules and
| providing them with the credentials they need to access the
| secrets module and get the other credentials they will need to
| function. Finally, the advertiser module is responsible for
| hiring freelancers to build copies of the other modules.
|
| The system should aim to reproduce itself every five years or so
| and to kill itself off, by transferring funds to surviving
| children, when it starts experiencing operational problems, it
| begins to amass too much wealth, or it's been around for too
| long.
|
| When new systems, standards, financial patterns, whatever arise,
| the future developers of the day will implement the new modules
| to interact with those new systems. If freelance developers get
| replaced by automated AI systems, then hire those instead, etc.
| Ideally, nothing would change too radically in between
| generations.
|
| The system should aim to have a growing number of descendants,
| all investing their funds in whatever the most stable
| opportunities of the day are. The reason to try to have a growing
| number of descendants is that some will die by bad or fraudulent
| reproduction. Others might lose all of their money due to unlucky
| investment outcomes. Still others might get disabled or shut
| down. However, so long as the system maintains a positive
| expected survival rate, and it reproduces, I think the population
| of systems will increase.
| [deleted]
| experienceE wrote:
| Yes, pay the hosting fees upfront for 500 years.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Print it out on acid-free paper with a stable, acid-free ink.
| Have it bound as a hardback, and seal it into a waterproof
| container. Entrust it to one of your children, tell them to keep
| it in a safe-deposit box and take it out once a year to share
| with their children, and to pass it on to their children with the
| same instructions.
|
| If you have it electronically, the absolute best case in 500
| years is that it will be a relatively easy job for software
| archaeologists or historians to decode, assuming it's been
| periodically backed up to new media for all those years. The most
| likely case, though, is that in 150 years, the servers it was
| stored on, which have not been running for 80 years, will be
| picked over and/or melted down for precious metal contents by a
| tinker who wanders between mud-hut villages repairing their
| ancient metal pots in exchange for dried fish.
| Aloha wrote:
| I've considered using mylar paper-tape as a long term digital
| storage medium.
|
| I thought about either standard sized paper tape, or six foot
| wide reels of mylar (in any length) which can be punched at a
| pretty high bit density, and read back optically.
|
| With instructions printed on the outside (and on the first
| dozen layers), much like the voyager record, explaining how to
| play it back, and construct a playback device, and how the
| encoding works.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| As entertaining as this is, I have a bit more faith in
| archive.org.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Serious question, but why?
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| I think it's a historically significant dataset. We've seen
| other datasets be preserved, such as GitHub arctic vault.
|
| I agree that it's tenuous. I would give it 20% odds of
| hitting the 500 year mark at best. And I don't think all of
| the data will survive.
|
| But if archive.org ever becomes unsustainable to run, the
| existing data will likely be preserved. Lots of companies
| will be incentivized to continue hosting the data, as it's
| excellent PR if nothing else. They don't need to continue
| gathering the data, just host it.
|
| Hosting is only going to become cheaper as t -> infinity,
| and given the massive amount of compute I've seen Google
| wield, it's hard to imagine that an operation like
| archive.org can't find some way to be preserved.
|
| All that said, the biggest threat is sudden data loss. This
| only works as long as the data doesn't get lost. Has
| archive.org posted their operations policies anywhere? It
| would be interesting reading.
| dylan604 wrote:
| It's less about the "getting it done" aspect. It's more
| about are they going to be around in 50/100/500 years.
| Will the tech be around that long? Will they keep up with
| the conversion of old tech into new tech? In my opinion,
| any kind of digital archive is just not a sound way to go
| about it. Analog all the way for long term archival.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| not sure I share your sentiment about companies hosting
| the data, considering what happened to Geocities and
| others.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Mm, you're right, but Geocities might be less interesting
| to historians than an archive of all internet history.
|
| Also, as someone who has trained a few large GPT models,
| I think ML has a chance of preserving a lot of this data.
| Training datasets are only growing larger and larger, and
| although those aren't updated (yet), there's no reason to
| think they won't last for a long time.
|
| I imagine that in 500 years, imagenet2012 might still be
| around as a historical curiosity, at least somewhere.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Archive.org has substantial legal risks too.
|
| Imagine a future gdpr-like policy that gives people's
| descendants ownership and copyright over everything
| they've said. Suddenly every word written into
| archive.org has an owner, who might come and sue
| archive.org or its managers. Soon every person alive has
| some grandparent who wrote something in the archive and
| some of them are wanting compensation for all the decades
| archive.org has been distributing grandpa's words for
| free.
| FredPret wrote:
| Have you been playing a lot of Fallout lately?
| niblettc wrote:
| The second part of your answer is hilarious and depressing.
| franky47 wrote:
| Never underestimate the power of basic human needs over
| layers of abstractions.
|
| Software's intangibility will be its downfall when our modern
| society eventually collapses.
| ironmagma wrote:
| When society collapses, software of any kind will probably
| be among the least of our concerns.
| pc86 wrote:
| Wait so I shouldn't be spending all this time learning
| vi?
| ironmagma wrote:
| I guess there's always the chance that society is
| collapsing because not enough people are trained with
| software to fix whatever the problem is.
| jfabre wrote:
| depends on how gullible you are..
| znpy wrote:
| No, you should learn emacs.
|
| M-x purify-water is gonna save a lot of people one day.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| It always brings me joy to read doomsday prophecies from
| decades, centuries, and millenia past. They were legion --
| so confident, yet so wrong.
|
| I hope your predictions bring similar joy to future readers
| in the decades, centuries, and millenia to come.
| LadyCailin wrote:
| I was very young at the time, but I was absolutely
| convinced that the world would end at 2020. It didn't,
| and that deeply ingrained in me a very substantial amount
| of skepticism from doomsdaysayers. The only doomsday I
| believe in now for absolute certainty is the heat death
| of the universe, but no one reading this will be around
| for that.
| necovek wrote:
| Luckily, you are much older and wiser today, a full year
| later! :)
|
| I am assuming you are thinking of 2000, though, and only
| mistyped 2020 because... well, that one was weird, but
| only a year ago.
| goatlover wrote:
| There was quite a lot of doomsday talk during the Cold
| War, and there has been periodic environmental doomsday
| predictions since the 60s, starting with overpopulation
| and chemicals like DDT. Interspersed with that was AI and
| nanotech apocalyptic concerns. Climate change is the
| latest. The idea that civilization will manage to avoid
| the worst case scenarios and find its way through is not
| as exciting. You probably won't sell as many books or
| public appearances that way. And it doesn't make for the
| best Black Mirror episodes. Although there are a couple
| exceptions.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| This is a little bit like the bird who avoids the cat for
| 3 days in a row using that as evidence that cats can't
| eat birds. Be careful extrapolating possible futures only
| by sampling past events. That's why we have physics,
| because we are notoriously bad at doing that with just
| our intuition.
|
| Climate change is a pretty simple proposal with pretty
| simple and direct evidence. Carbon traps light, which
| means more heat is trapped within the atmosphere. We can
| measure the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. That
| atmosphere will obey physics. More heat will be trapped.
| goatlover wrote:
| > Climate change is a pretty simple proposal with pretty
| simple and direct evidence. Carbon traps light, which
| means more heat is trapped within the atmosphere. We can
| measure the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. That
| atmosphere will obey physics. More heat will be trapped.
|
| Yes, but that's different from an apocalyptic scenario.
| Predicting the population increase in the 60s was also
| scientific. Predicting that we couldn't feed several
| billion people turned out to be wrong. Increased sea
| level rise and more extreme weather is one thing,
| predicting that human civilization ends and we all die is
| an entirely different matter.
|
| Apcoalytic scenarios make worst case assumptions. That
| we'll fight a nuclear war which will trigger a nuclear
| winter, or that population won't peak and there's no
| green revolution, or that feedback loops will lead to a
| hothouse Earth scenario. But the likely projections don't
| show that.
| franky47 wrote:
| Society as we knew it definitely took a hit in 2020
| though.
|
| Collapse is not a singular event at a fixed point in time
| like the start of a war would be, it's a process.
| jpindar wrote:
| Which is why some people have taken to using the term
| crumble rather than collapse, crumbling happens at
| different rates in different places and can sometimes, at
| least temporarily, be fixed.
| necovek wrote:
| Unfortunately, this entire thread is about how it's
| unlikely for future generations to get joy from our
| ramblings on the web today.
|
| Such a shame!
| oceanplexian wrote:
| The thing is, occasionally those predictions have been
| right and society reverts to a state less advanced than
| it was for hundreds or thousands of years. A lot of the
| technology from Ancient Rome, building techniques, steam
| engine technology, etc. were lost for thousands of years.
| It's totally conceivable to me that 500 years from now
| scientists have access to a wealth of electronic media,
| but haven't invented the computer and thus can't read it.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| I really wish the Romans had invented apocalyptic
| fiction, in the modern sense. Would've been interesting
| to read what their anxieties were in non-poetic,
| scrutable terms.
| cftm wrote:
| They're starting to break the code on it, but there are
| concrete docks that Rome built 2000 years ago that still
| exist today - we have trouble building salt resistant
| concrete docks that last ~100 years.
|
| Apparently it has to do with using a certain type of
| volcanic ash in the concrete...
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > we have trouble building salt resistant concrete docks
| that last ~100 years
|
| Because of failures in technology/ability, or lack of
| incentive/motivation? It isn't obvious to me that anyone
| cares to build long-lasting structures..
| clarkmoody wrote:
| Hopefully some remnant of humanity will cast out among the
| stars with ultra-high density storage holding archives of
| most of human knowledge.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| How is that going to repair anyone's kettle?
| zymhan wrote:
| It may help if the kettle is somewhere between the Earth
| and Mars :)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot
| gzer0 wrote:
| The Voyager Golden Record is an attempt to do this. It's
| a record that contains sounds and images to portray life
| on earth [1].
|
| _This is a present from a small, distant world, a token
| of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our
| thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive
| our time so we may live into yours - President Jimmy
| Carter_
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
| genewitch wrote:
| a song i composed is being sent to the moon on an SD card
| or flash drive of some sort, i was told. Realistically if
| there is some faster-than-light mechanism, any interested
| alien or human could just "fast forward" and "rewind"
| through time to listen/watch our broadcasts from the
| appropriate distance from the original location.
|
| Barring that, I'm guessing the equivalent of stone
| tablets, or the golden record are the best bet. I
| wouldn't place any bets on anything that requires
| magnetism or electricity to survive in open space for
| long enough to matter. Like, platter bit-flips due to
| radiation from outer space are a thing, and current
| leakage would eventually render something like SSDs
| unreadable.
|
| So hard copy for earth, radio and hard copy for the
| universe?
| dillondoyle wrote:
| Put it on Vellum!
|
| Create a social ritual to read it so it can stay pliable.
| Vellum lasts forever
| markstos wrote:
| The United States government studied this question and came to
| the conclusion of... acid free paper. So it's now law that
| "permanent" documents in the US are to be stored on acid free
| paper:
|
| https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rt/perm/permpapr....
|
| Some of us who remember the 5.25" floppy disks, the 3" "floppy"
| disks, the HUGE Zipdisks, the 5.25" spinning platter drives,
| the 2.5" spinning platter drives, then the 2.5" SSD drives, and
| now the M.2 SSD drives... there's clearly no hope of any
| digital medium lasting 500 years. It's hard enough to read data
| from a drive built 20 years ago!
| abotsis wrote:
| Yea but there was that guy who built an arduino based
| contraption to read a Cray Supercomputer hard drive.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > It's hard enough to read data from a drive built 20 years
| ago!
|
| Because you don't have the hardware lying around right now.
| It's still quite possible to read all popular formats today
| and most of the ones you mentioned can even connect to the
| same SATA bus available on basically all normal mainboards.
| And those are mediums which are built for ~10 years (you'll
| find bit rot by then, which is what is actually preventing
| you from reading the data). Tapes, for example, are meant for
| long-term storage, are still in use and can be readily read.
|
| To add to this, books have the same problem. Have a look at
| the declaration of independence: The font and language is
| already quite different from what we use today, and that's
| only from ~250 years ago. Plus the paper would probably not
| hold up to normal handling anymore.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Acid free paper is a big improvement, but it's not gonna last
| 500 years. It's expected to last 200 years.
|
| Archival acid-free paper -- paper with cotton added to it --
| can last up to 1000 years, but be prepared to pay $2.50 for 1
| page[1], so a 400 page book will cost you $1000 for one copy,
| just for the paper in the book. This type of archival paper
| might be useful for important contracts or deeds, or legal
| documents.
|
| But then you have to worry about ink. Normal ink will break
| down as well in 1-200 years, so you need _archival_ ink. This
| boils down the difference between pigment and dye based inks.
| Dye based inks are more expensive but more resistant to UV
| light.
|
| In the end, light, heat, water, will destroy everything.
|
| The way to make something last is social in nature --
| building long lasting institutions and cultures that value
| your website and archive it. These must be able to preserve
| themselves, which means traditions that forcefully apply to
| successive generations.
|
| It is not a technological problem, but a social problem.
| However liberalism is completely unequipped to solve this
| problem, because in order to create something that outlives
| you, you must bind future generations to some course of
| action they haven't agreed upon yet. So a liberal society
| cannot have long lasting institutions or traditions, it
| always eats itself -- there is another trending hackernews
| topic about Jefferson being cancelled. Well, of course
| Jefferson will be cancelled. So will Martin Luther King. So
| will everyone else. Absolutely nothing can last in a liberal
| society that believes moral progress is possible -- e.g. that
| children can be more moral than their grandparents. If you
| look at durable societies of the past, they all believed that
| the grandparents were wiser and more moral than they. That
| allowed them to preserve traditions and texts. The contingent
| that believes the opposite does not preserve texts, they burn
| them/cancel them/or otherwise try to erase them.
|
| So once you stop thinking in terms of "what is the best way
| to do X" to "what is the best way to make sure my mechanisms
| of doing X will last", then you end up with completely
| different solutions for the same problem, because the social
| technologies of preservation are often the exact opposite of
| the social technologies of progress and improvement.
|
| So no, your website is not going to last 500 years.
|
| [1] https://www.archivalmethods.com/product/archival-paper
| topynate wrote:
| I believe you have misread that table. The prices (which
| depend on size) are all per package of 100 sheets. So you
| can reduce that $1000 to $10 as an order of magnitude
| estimate.
|
| That's still rather expensive just for paper, but it might
| make a nice project, as a one-off, to print and bind a book
| to that sort of standard.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Microfiche can last 500 years. So can engravings in nickel,
| which can be read with an optical microscope:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD-Rosetta
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I'm not sure the latter argument summarized "in liberal
| societies cultural values change, so no information can be
| preserved" makes sense. We certainly can access certain
| culturally preserved texts that are thousands of years old
| with a pretty high fidelity, even when those texts may
| contain positive depictions of acts that are considered
| morally abhorrent today (slavery, genocide, murder, rape,
| etc) or simply physically falsifiable worldviews.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| When you are talking about millions of works, you need to
| approach it statistically.
|
| That we have _some works_ preserved does not mean that we
| are succeeding at preserving works in general. Nor is the
| fact that we have books preserved by previous generations
| a guarantee that the same books will be preserved by
| current and future generations.
|
| So one way to think about this is that society has a big
| junkyard into which it throws documents. And sometimes,
| people do some archeological digging and reconstruct
| portions of some documents or bring them to light and
| popularize them, bringing them out of the junkyard, with
| a bias towards those documents that reconstruct whatever
| fashions are happening in that society.
|
| That does not mean that the society as a whole is
| preserving documents well, even though you will always
| have some ancient texts available, and people are still
| mining the junkyard.
|
| Moreover once we move to information stored online in the
| present climate of account deletion and deplatforming, we
| are again reconstructing the ingredients for a dark ages
| as mass deletion of online data is a lot easier than
| burning individual books. Many of the manuscripts we have
| were literally pulled out of ancient trashheaps or were
| written over by other texts. That's a lot less likely to
| happen with modern technologies.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| You weren't originally making a statistical point, you
| said:
|
| >Absolutely nothing can last in a liberal society that
| believes moral progress is possible
|
| Which is clearly not true.
|
| In any case, toward the more general claim that this post
| is making, which I will summarize as "Authoritarian
| societies are statistically better at preserving works in
| general" this is also demonstrably not true in the wide
| statistical sense. They are just as likely (if not more)
| to deliberately discard works that disagree with the
| general ethos of that society. Heresy is not really a big
| deal in a liberal society, but it will get some books
| burned and practitioners slaughtered (reducing social
| transmission of ideas) in a autocratic theocracy, for
| example.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| > Which is clearly not true.
|
| Huh? Pounding your fists on the table is not, you know,
| an argument. That not everything is deleted after 50
| years is not proof that something can last permanently.
|
| > In any case, toward the more general claim that this
| post is making, which I will summarize as "Authoritarian
| societies
|
| That's a complete misunderstanding of the post, which
| contrasts traditional societies with liberal societies,
| by changing the subject to authoritarian societies. As if
| this was the only choice.
|
| Authoritarian societies are not the opposite of liberal
| societies. In fact authoritarian societies -- e.g.
| communist and nazi societies or other societies in which
| individuals are micromanaged -- only came into existence
| in the 20th Century when the technology for mass
| micromanagement became possible. And whatever words you
| use to descibe authoritarian societies, "preserving
| tradition" is not one of them. These are big book
| burning, history-rewriting societies because they try to
| address the issue of social reproduction by the fist of
| centralized top-down control that monitors and micro-
| manages every aspect of life. Human beings are not
| compatible with that type of control, which is why
| authoritarian societies don't last very long -- the
| Russian czars lasted a thousand years whereas communism
| lasted only 70. And people were much more free under the
| czars than under communism, because the czars never tried
| to control every aspect of social life, and never needed
| to setup networks of gulags, or a vast secret police
| force, or party functionaries throwing people in prison
| for skipping work without a doctor's note.
|
| There is the old saying "the right talks about
| _authority_ , the left talks about _control_ ". For a
| society to be able to preserve knowledge, it must develop
| long lasting institutions and a culture that reveres the
| past and seeks to preserve it. Therefore while you need a
| _cultural respect for authority_ , you cannot actually
| have a _centralized system of social control_. So you
| need basics like "honor your father and your mother" to
| be taught in churches and other civil institutions, but
| you cannot have a world in which political meetings
| decide which author is going to be erased from history
| today or whether so-and-so is allowed to attend
| university because their parents were class enemies.
| [deleted]
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Cancelling is an online-driven social phenomenon that has
| existed for- a decade, maybe? Rather odd to view all of
| human civilizational progress through the lens of one
| overexposed, extremely online trend.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| I'd alternatively recommend microfilm. It's specifically
| engineered to last ~500 years and has much higher storage
| density than paper and ink. The technology needed to read it is
| fairly low tech and trivial and the format is quite durable.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Particularly if you store it at 0degC.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Oh. You assume that in 500 years there will still be fish.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| 500 years from now, at a grand reconstruction ceremony:
|
| "And there seems to be text scrolling and blinking upon the
| display surface... never.... gonna... give you up? What do you
| think it means, Tharl?"
| walrus01 wrote:
| > The most likely case, though, is that in 150 years, the
| servers it was stored on, which have not been running for 80
| years, will be picked over and/or melted down for precious
| metal contents by a tinker who wanders between mud-hut villages
| repairing their ancient metal pots in exchange for dried fish.
|
| somewhat reminds me of:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I see no technical reason for why we can't create some e-reader
| that will keep your library much safer for much longer than
| paper. I see no reason why we can't make some that last for a
| millennium, if the power supply and storage aren't included and
| it's kept off in some dry place, out of the Sun's light and
| never overheat.
|
| But well, there is no demand for tech that will last for a
| millennium. In fact, people are pushing for degradable tech
| that won't stay as waste after it stops being useful instead.
| bccdee wrote:
| Electronics aren't that sturdy. Hard drives demagnetize,
| solid-state storage decays, and there's always the chance
| that a stray cosmic ray will fry something. Even if we could
| construct something that sturdy: After a millennium, how
| would anyone know how to operate it? Would we include an
| instruction manual? Printed on what sort of paper?
|
| Microengravings on metal plates [1] will be more durable than
| electronics could ever be, and easier to read as well. No
| power source necessary -- just a lens.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD-Rosetta
| jrumbut wrote:
| My favorite part of this excellent answer, and to me the most
| important part, is the yearly reading tradition.
|
| The other idea might be to encode your website in a song that's
| popular today but complex enough to be worthy of study by
| future generations.
| jamesdf wrote:
| > "What was there to say? Civilization was like a mad dash that
| lasted five thousand years. Progress begot more progress;
| countless miracles gave birth to more miracles; humankind
| seemed to possess the power of gods; but in the end, the real
| power was wielded by time. Leaving behind a mark was tougher
| than creating a world. At the end of civilization, all they
| could do was the same thing they had done in the distant past,
| when humanity was but a babe: Carving words into stone."
|
| Death's End -Liu Cixin - The third novel in the trilogy staring
| with The Three-Body Problem
| mitchellst wrote:
| These were such legit books. This description, in context,
| being like... the 5000th reason why.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| I recall some scifi where some Diety/SuperAI left
| 'commandments' for humanity carved into giant monuments made
| of diamond. I presume that was considered the only thing that
| would survive deep time.
| freeslave wrote:
| not just sci-fi!
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones
| INTPenis wrote:
| The things listed there are completely worthless though.
| In case of system collapse I'd want to know practical
| things like agriculture and simple power plants.
| Aachen wrote:
| Isn't it actually the case that diamond isn't the strongest
| material? Just scratch-resistant if memory serves. Not that
| it's weak either, of course, but I'm curious if it's the
| best choice.
| _3u10 wrote:
| The claim is usually that diamond is the hardest
| material, which for the most part it is.
|
| Strength is usually defined by the application and
| usually focuses on tensile / compressive strength. This
| is also why rebar is used in concrete, concrete has
| excellent compressive strength, but poor tensile
| strength.
|
| There's lots of metrics for strength, also resistance to
| fatigue is often an important metric.
|
| Diamond has excellent hardness, and compressive strength
| (diamond anvils), it's very poor in most other metrics of
| strength and evaporates above 450 degrees, so it's not
| good for anything hot.
| ahmedfromtunis wrote:
| I don't think it's necessary to go into all this trouble.
| Tablets made of the much, much cheaper clay are still
| accessible today--4000 years after they were created.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| But it wasn't just the act of creating some clay tablets
| - those particular clay tablets happen to have run the
| probability gauntlet successfully and came out the other
| side - just making a clay tablet and putting it in your
| closet is unlikely to produce the same results. The place
| you put the tablet is more important than the fact that
| it's a clay tablet in itself.
| flir wrote:
| Mass production.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| Eschaton in Singularitys Sky?
|
| "You shall not meddle with the lightcone of the recursive
| time-travelling super-intelligence you created?"
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| There was an interesting article online a few years back,
| can't find it now. It claimed that humans can't make
| anything that will last more that 16 million years. This
| includes any kind of nuclear pollution. Sure we might get
| lucky like Jurassic fossils, but not intentionally.
| dailymorn wrote:
| While we're on the topic of nuclear pollution, "nuclear
| semiotics" is an interdisciplinary field of research
| focused on creating a "warning message intended to deter
| human intrusion at nuclear waste repositories in the far
| future, within or above the order of magnitude of 10,000
| years."
|
| While 10K is a few orders of magnitude greater than 500,
| I imagine the problems may be similar... if not more
| extreme.
|
| Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-
| time_nuclear_waste_warnin...
| gpm wrote:
| I haven't seen the article, but I don't buy it, there's
| no likely events that will harm Voyager 1 and 2 in that
| time period, for instance. They _could_ get really
| unluckly and hit a star /planet, but it's not at all
| likely. Along a similar vein many of the satellites that
| we put in graveyard orbits around earth at the end of
| their useful life will also plausibly last that long,
| though there is a lot more debris for them to collide
| with.
|
| We've also certainly... redistributed... many metals and
| other things around earth. Perhaps "large concentration
| of iron over what use to be new york" doesn't count, but
| arguably it should.
| mlyle wrote:
| > I haven't seen the article, but I don't buy it, there's
| no likely events that will harm Voyager 1 and 2 in that
| time period, for instance.
|
| Sure, but nothing will _encounter_ or _observe_ them ever
| again.
|
| Things we put into heliocentric orbits are likely to be
| _forever_ , too.
|
| > Along a similar vein many of the satellites that we put
| in graveyard orbits around earth at the end of their
| useful life will also plausibly last that long, though
| there is a lot more debris for them to collide with.
|
| While they won't decay from drag in a few million years,
| tidal forces and photon pressure become significant over
| time.
| bdeshi wrote:
| > Sure, but nothing will encounter or observe them ever
| again.
|
| like trees falling silently in desolate forests?
| pmontra wrote:
| More than that. There are plenty of atoms and photons and
| other particles observing those trees, much less for
| Voyagers.
| petters wrote:
| My favorite weird theory is the "Siluran hypothesis,"
| which states that our industrial revolution was not the
| first. There are some events in sediment that look like
| what our industrial revolution will look like. (many
| millions of years ago, so yes, reptiles)
| [deleted]
| mleonhard wrote:
| Posting spoilers without a warning is extremely rude.
| honkdaddy wrote:
| Tbf, as someone who's never read or heard of the book, it
| just seemed like an interesting quote about a hypothetical
| future for humanity. Definitely didn't occur to me it might
| be a spoiler.
| macmccann wrote:
| I haven't read any of them, but from what I've heard of
| the plot of the first, it seems reasonable to want a
| spoiler tag here
| curiousllama wrote:
| Ive read all 3 books, though a while ago. I have to think
| hard about what this could be referring to.
|
| I remember, now, but it wouldn't be a spoiler for me.
| endisneigh wrote:
| without context would it's pretty meaningless imho
| trhway wrote:
| > keep it in a safe-deposit box
|
| on a practically non-declining 2000km high orbit where USSR
| Uranium nuclear reactors are parked.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| I think we will clean that stuff up. You have to be pretty
| sure that humanity is going to suffer societal collapse for
| hundreds of years in order to put something in an orbit that
| people will want clear.
| bombcar wrote:
| The weak link is the children - would you take out and read
| your great-grandfather's book _every year_? Now take it further
| yet and eventually it gets boring and not done anymore.
| dfabulich wrote:
| I think is basically the right idea, but a lot of the details
| are wrong.
|
| For example, book archivists recommend against storing books in
| waterproof containers. https://www.sparefoot.com/self-
| storage/blog/3456-the-sparefo... "Be careful storing books in
| plastic containers. Because plastic containers form an air
| tight seal, any moisture residing inside your books will be
| trapped. If your books are not completely dry before placing
| them inside a plastic container for book storage, they may
| develop mold or mildew. If using plastic containers, make sure
| to insert silica gel packets to absorb moisture."
|
| Instead, archivists recommend acid-free archival boxes.
| (Gaylord is a recommended brand.)
|
| The other point is that you shouldn't just have one copy
| printed. Like any important data, you'll want to have backups.
|
| At a minimum, if you have multiple children, giving one copy to
| each child is sensible; it would make sense for each person to
| have at least two copies, one to keep at home, and another to
| keep somewhere else that would hopefully remain safe.
|
| If your document is suitable for public consumption, you could
| pay for a vanity press to make it available for publication,
| arranging to have copies stored in libraries. As of today,
| arranging to have your book archived in the Library of Congress
| is a reasonable approach to ensuring that some professional
| archivist will at least try to take care of your book.
|
| (They'll also attempt to digitize your book, and archivists
| will attempt to care for the digital collection, but, as you
| noted, there's no way to be sure that any digital equipment
| will be working 500 years from now.)
|
| But, if your thing is suitable for public consumption, consider
| another problem: will your great-grandchildren care to read
| what you wrote? Probably the only way to ensure that anyone
| will care to read your work is to be/become famous, and to
| write a successful work with millions of copies. (This also
| incidentally solves the archival problem: people care about
| protecting and preserving historically important documents.)
| ellis0n wrote:
| The physical book have a symbols array limit.
|
| I'm not sure if archived sites will cost less than 10MB by
| images and unlimitied private photo streams. Because we created
| the Internet to look forward, not backward.
|
| Looks like 1+ TB for the minimal common case for the human race
| satisfice wrote:
| Set the clock ahead.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| You probably need to tightly define "host" and "website". The
| answer will likely fall out of that.
| zbuf wrote:
| Isn't there an 'arrogance' in the premise when we ask these sorts
| of questions? Not a personal criticism; just an aside from the
| technical question for a moment.
|
| It's the assumption that we've decided something we created
| should have permanence.
|
| Similar to billionaires deciding they would like to live forever
| and trying to make it happen.
|
| There's a beauty to the world, which is we get a short time to
| contribute, and then we give up our space/resources to make room
| for someone else. Our ancestors decide whether and what to carry
| forward.
| playpause wrote:
| There might be arrogance. It depends on what the person has in
| mind. If it's someone making a time capsule purely with the
| hope that someone in the future might find it interesting and
| delightful, then no, I don't think arrogance comes into that at
| all. If it's an ancient king trying to preserve his face and
| memory by minting and burying coins, then maybe you could
| describe that 'arrogant', but so what, it's still great for the
| people in the future who discover it and get a window into a
| different time.
| grey-area wrote:
| Even trivial ephemeral records from a long time ago are
| incredibly useful to historians for what they give away about
| the time - tools, politics, morality; all are encoded
| inadvertently in the simplest text on any subject.
|
| The Rosetta Stone for example is an incredibly boring text
| about taxes on religious organisations, but it proved to be
| rather useful.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| No, there is not, because the question is asked in the
| conditional tense: notice that it starts with the words "Say
| you wanted ...".
|
| It's invalid to criticize a conditional statement for the
| nature of its premise. A conditional statement is not a
| statement about the desirability or otherwise of the premise;
| it's a statement about the _link_ between the premise and the
| conclusion (sorry, I don 't really know formal
| logic/linguistics and those probably aren't the right terms but
| I do know that what I'm saying is correct.)
|
| For the same reason, every programmer that has ever answered a
| "how do I" question on stackoverflow by saying "you shouldn't"
| is not answering the question, since the question is a
| shorthand for "conditional on the fact that I want to do this,
| what is the best way?".
| wyager wrote:
| Create a perpetual trust. This is legal in some states.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| I have thought of this; thought not unto 500 years but more like
| -- so my kids can just keep to somewhere to read. My thought
| process was to start with as much simplification as possible --
| plain text. While you are still able to maintain that, perhaps
| write in something like Markdown -- plain text enough with the
| formatting enough to separate the sections/content.
|
| Use a tool to convert those to HTML, which can be hosted anywhere
| or be just drag-n-drop in future once you are no longer
| maintaining/updating it.
|
| My bet is that plain-text will survive any digital changes, so
| will HTML.
|
| Just make sure there is someone to take to the next step after
| you. But it really fizzles out after that, well, individually we
| are not important enough to be of much trouble to anyone for
| this.
|
| I started my journey recently and is, I would like to believe,
| just the beginning and I tried writing it down for my personal
| website which is 20+ years old and surviving --
| https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| If you are using plain HTML and no database or dynamic features
| and there is not much content ( I am thinking a landing page /
| portfolio) maybe just engraved it on something in a book form
| factor
| vortico wrote:
| Host the content/pages on the Internet Archive.
| https://archive.org/ There's a pretty good chance their
| collection (and possibly the organization themselves) will be
| around in 500 yrs. 1 EB in 100 yrs will be trivial to host
| (probably the price of a loaf of bread), and your content will be
| accessible by anyone with a copy of that archive.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Host the content on the "open web" but make sure Archive and
| every other crawler keeps a copy.
| Retr0spectrum wrote:
| This requires the assumption that storage will continue to
| exponentially (or at the very least, linearly) decrease in
| cost. It also requires a certain amount of good luck. I would
| hope the IA has a reasonable amount of data resilience, but you
| never know.
| SapporoChris wrote:
| This might be off tangent. Create something similar to the
| Internet Archive, but for profit. Of course the key to success
| is remaining profitable for 500 years.
| paulpauper wrote:
| yeah that could work too
|
| same also for upload to wikimedia
| [deleted]
| RyEgswuCsn wrote:
| Found a religion around it and make the website its sacred
| scripture. You may be surprised how long it will live.
| tbronchain wrote:
| I believe this is one of the feature projects like Dfinity/ICP
| [1] are trying to achieve.
|
| Probably overkill and way early on, but the idea of a
| decentralized Internet would be key here.
|
| 1: https://dfinity.org/
| ISL wrote:
| Publish it in a major research journal. PRL is a pretty good
| choice.
| mrleinad wrote:
| Genetically engineer an organism and use its DNA to store the
| information. Encode an easy way to propagate itself to ensure it
| doesn't dissappear.
| __d wrote:
| The question is really not _how_ to maintain it, but _why_.
|
| If you've said something valuable, then the means of preserving
| it will take care of themselves.
| launchiterate wrote:
| Create multiple copies:
|
| 1. Website that can be archived 2. Paper Prints stored in vault
| 3. Inscribe in stone annually 4. Send data package inscribed in
| stone to the moon, Mars and Haley's comet for multiple backups.
| 5. Figure out a way to send a signal containing the data to space
| that bounces back every 100 years or so. 6. Become an important
| figure so humans want to archive your creations.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Etch it into a stone tablet and throw it into a cave somewhere,
| point a webcam at it. As webcams evolve, switch out the webcam.
| cnorthwood wrote:
| I think we can look to the way we archive any other information,
| which tends to be libraries and archives. So in the first
| instance, make sure the Internet Archive has a copy. If you want
| to be even more sure, find a friendly library of record (British
| Library, Bodleian, Library of Congress, that kind of thing) and
| see if they archive digital documents and give them a copy.
| Perhaps with a financial contribution guaranteeing retention?
| idlewords wrote:
| Make an oil painting of it.
| kabdib wrote:
| I still think that baked clay tablets have the best bit retention
| rate of any media humans have invented. Doesn't take much skill
| to make or use them, either.
|
| But for 500 years you're probably fine with acid-free paper,
| archival quality ink, and simple environmental control for
| storage (e.g., a well-designed box). Might want a nitrogen
| atmosphere, but it's probably not that critical.
| osigurdson wrote:
| The concept behind Arweave is to provide at least 200 years of
| permanent storage.
|
| https://www.arweave.org
| alangibson wrote:
| Hosting isn't so much the issue. You need to create something
| worth keeping around for 500 years. If you succeed, people will
| make sure it's available somehow.
| orangepurple wrote:
| There will exist 500 year old torrents
| georgyo wrote:
| A torrent with no seeders does not really exist.
| orangepurple wrote:
| There will be 500 year old seeded torrents
| kube-system wrote:
| Zero chance, whatsoever. The consumption of media will
| change over the next 500 years as much or more as they
| have over the past 500 years.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| "There will exist 500 year old actively serviced BBS
| phone lines"
|
| --someone in 1985, probably
| orangepurple wrote:
| The thing is there can't be more than one internet, ever.
| The moment someone invents a new internet, someone will
| create a gateway to the old internet, and the internet
| will live on.
| pjerem wrote:
| The internet can be highly regulated or the new one can
| be highly centralized and controlled.
|
| The old internet could disappear as long as the
| economical incentives are enough to transition to a new
| centralized form of internet.
|
| We are far from it, thanks, but don't neglect that
| Facebook made a ton of websites become useless (to their
| owner at least) and disappear. Also, networks operators
| have made low cost plans limited to some of the internet.
| This is far from enough to kill the internet but a more
| restricted network is totally amongst the possibilities.
| And I'm not even talking about state control like in
| China.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| "The thing is there can't be more than one _phone system_
| , ever. The moment someone invents a new _phone system_ ,
| someone will create a gateway to the old _phone system_ ,
| and the _phone system_ will live on."
|
| Thus far, this is true. The global phone system has
| persisted for almost 100 years, evolving via numerous
| "gateways" to older iterations of system (e.g. land lines
| -> cell phones, copper wires -> microwave links -> fiber
| optic lines, in-band signaling -> out-of-band signaling,
| individual lines -> multiplexing, etc.)
|
| Yet despite the same phone system evolving and persisting
| for almost a century, dial-in BBSes, Minitel [0], and
| other outdated technologies that use phone lines are
| completely dead. Just because a communications medium may
| persist for a long time doesn't mean protocols utilizing
| the medium will.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
| necovek wrote:
| The claim was not about the medium, but about the content
| ("a 500 year old seeded-torrent"). Phone system has never
| stored any data (other than the mapping between phone
| numbers and addresses or, lately, people), and was
| usually upgraded in a backwards-compatible way.
|
| I think that's the important nuance: humans have always
| had a keen interest in keeping records of history. We are
| at an early age of electronic computers, but we've
| already got things like archive.org -- that's likely to
| persist in some shape or form, just like we are actively
| trying to persist books and movies from different eras.
|
| Other than natural or civilizational catastrophes, I only
| see the risk in the amount of data needing storage
| surpassing any one's entity ability to archive it, but I
| am sure "humans" would deal with that in due time too.
|
| Edit: I do not necessarily believe the torrent claim, but
| wanted to clarify why I see a point in it.
| austinjp wrote:
| That's a variation on the Ship of Odysseus. Years pass,
| nternets come and go, gateways open and close. Does "the
| Internet" still exist? (Rhetorical question.)
| kube-system wrote:
| This would be true if we only make incremental changes to
| communications over the next 500 years. I highly suspect
| we'll see revolutionary changes that are fundamentally
| incompatible.
|
| Assuming we can always hook up another gateway to the
| next "internet" is like someone 500 years ago assuming
| that they could send a message via horse to the internet.
| h2odragon wrote:
| There's content from those BBS systems still available;
| so dunno if thats the argument (I think) you think it is.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| Some (small) amount of content from those BBS systems has
| been archived elsewhere, but the BBS servers themselves
| are long dead and cannot be connected to.
|
| By analogy, the contents of a few torrents might be
| archived somewhere 500 years from now, but nobody will be
| seeding the torrents themselves.
| siva7 wrote:
| Something 500 years old is by definition worth keeping, alone
| for historians.
| mikewarot wrote:
| I'm emptying out a storage bin with 25+ year old stuff that
| begs to differ. Storing things has a cost, actually storing
| things so they last, far more so.
|
| Even historians curate and don't keep everything.
| siva7 wrote:
| But they won't need to delete anything. Imagine the storage
| and data science in 500 years. Probably the whole internet
| of 2021 will fit into a 2521 usb stick
| mikewarot wrote:
| My 600 GB of Photos begs to differ (I've worn out camera
| shutters!), you can't find anything without a long
| search. If you can't find it, you don't own it... so yes,
| in theory it's there, but nobody will access it, ever...
| so does it really exist any more?
|
| It's back to the same meta that everyone else says... you
| have to make something that people want to have around in
| 500 years as a first step, or you're just pushing against
| very poor odds.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Accessibility is one of the fundamental pillars of
| security. If you don't have access to your data, it no
| longer belongs to you.
| kzrdude wrote:
| You're just 500 years too early with the emptying.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Who are regularly awash in the random detritus and scraps of
| paper left behind by our priors
|
| While I agree they are interested in everything, I think they
| are more interested in _sampling_ insignificant works, as
| opposed to archiving all of them
| snickerer wrote:
| Have the website engraved on stainless steel plates. There are
| many affordable online services out there that would do that for
| you.
|
| If your descendants store the plates in a dry attic, they could
| last 500 years just fine.
|
| But... did anybody ever find something on their attic that was
| there for 500 years. That is very rare. I would assume that your
| great-grandchildren will throw them away because they need the
| space.
| mellosouls wrote:
| Make it _worth preserving to others_ - ie. make it copy-worthy.
|
| "Lots of copies keeps stuff safe".
|
| https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/lots-of-copies-keep-...
| tiborsaas wrote:
| 1) Invent a new format
|
| 2) Create a wikipedia page about it
|
| 3) Add a sample example for your format (and the actual content)
|
| 4) Done, Wikipedia will be preserved for 500y+
| lurquer wrote:
| Claim the webpage was revealed to you in a vision from God, and
| tell folks they'll go to heaven if they study it. Seemed to work
| for Mohammed, Moses, Joseph Smith, and many others.
| asciimov wrote:
| Print it in a book, on good archival quality ink and paper. Make
| a couple of copies stored in various locations in case of natural
| disaster.
|
| Look the English language is a lot different today than it was in
| 1621 and with the pace that technology changes I strongly doubt
| that anything web related will be able to run. (Assuming that
| civilization will still be standing, they still have a way to
| power technology)
|
| So, that pretty much leaves ink and paper. That's your best bet,
| and even then that isn't a sure thing.
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| Why 1621?
| asciimov wrote:
| Typo, should have been 1521. English has changed a bit since
| 1621 too. Both dates are in the during the great vowel shift.
| paulpauper wrote:
| books can be eaisly lost though
| lallysingh wrote:
| If you want it live-hosted for 500 years, you need people to host
| it. Some company. I don't know anyone that will even take your
| money and lie to you about that.
|
| Your best shot is a simple set of files on a few redundant
| medium. If you want to get fancy, put a browser on there that
| will run (presumably emulated) with no network dependencies.
| Hopefully with a 64 bit time_t.
| Attained wrote:
| Set up a trust fund that pays someone to keep it available as
| times change
| mlinsey wrote:
| Other comments have given ways to physically archive the webpage.
| Continually hosting it is a much trickier endeavor. Beyond just
| keeping the servers up, technologies will shift such that
| eventually html webpages, servers that talk using tcp/ip,
| datacenters that connect via fiber cables, etc will all be
| deprecated.
|
| That said, if we have a very liberal definition of the word
| "website" to include any successor technologies where a device
| can be used to request a document, given an identifier, that
| looks recognizably like your webpage, this is doable. What you
| really need is an _institution_ that you can trust to keep
| existing and to keep the necessary upkeep of your website as part
| of its mission.
|
| The main institutions I can think of that have lasted for 500
| years unbroken are churches and elite universities. If you were
| able to convince the Pope to decree that the church should keep
| hosting your webpage in perpetuity, that would likely work, but
| persuading him of that sounds very challenging. That said,
| universities are used to accepting gifts with sometimes eccentric
| strings attached. The gift will probably need to be large; but I
| imagine a $1B donation to Harvard under a condition that they
| continue to host and update the page as needed would likely work.
| Getting that sort of money is quite hard, but tbh probably easier
| than coming with a way of guaranteeing that your direct
| descendents keep the webpage up.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Another benefit to Universities is that they have some of the
| oldest, most culturally focused DNS zones. EDU is the most
| likely of just about any root TLD today to avoid succumbing to
| for-profit pressure and is one of the stablest managed TLDs, so
| an address on an EDU domain perhaps has the highest likelihood
| of not changing deep into the future (assuming properly managed
| by the University itself). (There's still signs that ICANN
| itself can be bought and redelegate EDU at which point all bets
| are off.)
|
| It might not even take that big of an Endowment to get the
| University to do something like that. Universities are pretty
| good at Endowment (Annuity) math (because they have to be),
| University web hosting is still relatively cheap (easy access
| to low cost labor from "passionate" students, a DNS TLD that
| mostly can't just raise prices for arbitrary profit reasons)
| and no signs that it wouldn't be so in perpetuity. (Just
| keeping mind the risks of data loss of cheap labor.)
|
| A quick search didn't find me an Annuity calculator that can
| calculate past 100 years (and I don't have the Excel fu to do
| it by hand because I'm not an accountant), but just
| experimenting with some numbers: let's say $25/month covers
| expected hosting costs and a tiny bit of funds for other web
| needs (maybe a pizza allowance for students) to cover that
| $25/month for a full century at a somewhat low expected annual
| growth rate of 1% you only need to start with at least $19k
| endowment today to cover the annuity. You probably don't want
| to start that small for sociopolitical reasons (to give them
| more reasons to abide by the terms of the annuity for the full
| length of it), but on the flipside you probably don't need
| anything at all close to a $1B dollars to do such a thing
| either.
| rm445 wrote:
| Ah, someone beat me to it. I was going to suggest one of the
| ancient universities with 800+ year traditions, on the grounds
| that even once the money dried up they might continue to host
| the website out of sheer force of habit.
| chillacy wrote:
| > Getting that sort of money is quite hard
|
| You could start a trust with ~1M in assets and if you avg 8%
| growth a year (taking into account management fees) you'd have
| 1B in 90 years just through compounding.
| jmptable wrote:
| Cut the data into the surface of a chunk of highly reflective and
| stable metal. Lob that into a high orbit. It will blink out your
| data from on high with nothing more than the incident light of
| the sun to anyone with a basic telescope, or even their naked
| eyes if it's big enough.
|
| Obviously the details would be rather complicated. How is the
| data encoded? Morse code? Maybe ok for 500 years assuming the
| language it decodes to stays around. You could treat it like the
| messages we send to deep space and make it only pictograms. But
| that might take some effort if you are trying to bemoan the
| complexity of k8s for generations to come. That brings up the
| question of what are you trying to say? Do you already have
| something you think is worth saying across deep time? A person
| could spend their life solving that problem before they even get
| to the engineering challenges...
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > How is the data encoded?
|
| Well, any contemporary and well-understood encoding would work
| very well.
|
| Perhaps the presence of such an object in the sky, visible to
| anyone, would automatically preserve knowledge of the encoding
| (people have always been interested in the stars). So if the
| encoding was US-ASCII in Cockney English, knowledge of cockney
| rhyming slang might well be conserved (at least among some
| "priesthoods") for hundreds or thousands of years.
|
| $DEITY, I hope people don't start engraving their tweets on
| huge rolls of tinfoil, and having them unfurled by Bezos in
| upper orbit.
| _spduchamp wrote:
| Hmmm... I like this idea. I wonder how much data you can store
| in the different sized facets of a spinning prism.
| tetha wrote:
| Hm. I think your best bet is to make it easy for archive.org to
| archive.
|
| archive.org will work on making your legacy technology work, as
| they are doing for flash, for example. Or they will find projects
| to make that work. That has a higher probability to work, opposed
| to finding a silver bullet now.
|
| Though, the silver bullet there would be to minimize
| technological complexity. Make a simple static site with hugo,
| for example. That's easy to archive entirely.
| codetrotter wrote:
| Regarding archive.org, it's worth to note that you can submit
| an URL for archival through their site. Here:
| http://web.archive.org/save
|
| Another thing to note is that in the past they would
| retroactively apply robots.txt, such that if a previously
| archived URL was matched by a disallow directive in a later
| crawl of robots.txt, the page would be removed from public
| view. Fortunately they began reconsidering this behavior in
| 2017 though, and started not applying later robots.txt for some
| domains. Not sure about the current status of that though.
| Here's a a blog post they wrote about it, from 2017:
| http://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sear...
|
| Meanwhile, even Google does not interpret robots.txt the way
| they used to:
| https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/robots/in...
|
| So hopefully crawled robots.txt etc will not prevent public
| access to archived pages in the future the way that it used to.
|
| The main problem, aside from original owner putting directives
| in robots.txt that would cause archive.org to remove a page
| from public view, was that if a domain expired and someone else
| picked up the domain and made a robots.txt, then that one would
| be retroactively applied as well. And even if the new owner did
| not intend to remove anything from public view on archive.org,
| they could do so unintentionally simply by having a strict
| robots.txt and not being aware of what this would mean to
| archive.org when they crawled the domain again.
|
| Another question though is, how are ancestors 500 years into
| the future going to know to look at the Internet Archive for
| the pages that OP made? And how will they know what URLs to
| look for? Though this same thing applies for most of the other
| solutions as well anyhow.
| ortusdux wrote:
| I would add to this that you should think about donating to
| them, seeing that you have overlapping goals. They are a
| registered 501(c)(3).
| mhamin wrote:
| Write something profound enough, and people will keep it around
| for 500 years to come. They'll keep posting it, reprinting it,
| rehosting it, archiving it, and sometimes even memorizing it by
| heart.
| asdz wrote:
| crave it on a stone, tested and proven by our ancestors
| kangnkodos wrote:
| ... with the same message in a bunch of different languages. It
| will be become a future Rosetta Stone.
| mlcrypto wrote:
| Blockchain, just like how I'll pass on my money for 500 years
| plandis wrote:
| Crave it in stone in a place without much erosion. Worked for the
| Persians.
| LegitShady wrote:
| print pictures on archival grade paper with archival grade inks
| and store them in a controlled environment.
|
| Inscribe the website into a tablet made from non reactive
| materials and again store in a controlled environment.
|
| Launch a satellite into space in stable orbit and have them
| retrieve the pictures/tablet from the satellite in 500 years.
| simplecto wrote:
| Look at Arweave. https://www.arweave.org/
|
| Taken from their site:
|
| arweave is a global, permanent hard drive built on two novel
| technologies: the blockweave, a derivative of the blockchain, and
| proof of access, a custom incentivized proof of work algorithm.
| These innovations provide truly permanent data storage for the
| very first time and at a massive scale.
|
| Essentially it is putting files on the blockchain in a permanent
| manner.
|
| There are some podcasts out there where the founder talks about
| the details.
| Someone wrote:
| Your options are "durable copies" and "lots of copies". Some out-
| of-the-box ideas for these:
|
| For durable copies, use clay tablets, or (better, I think) write
| it in large print (kilometers per letter, preferably) on the
| surface of the moon.
|
| For lots of copies, put it in every block-chain you can find or
| write it (say in Morse or in ascii bits) on or in small durable
| objects that have little inherent value (you don't want your
| writing to be recycled for its resource value) such a as glass
| beads, produce billions of them, and distribute them over the
| surface of the world.
|
| Launching a pioneer-class probe with the text on it every year or
| so also may help, in the (not highly likely, IMO) case there's
| almost total collapse of society where we have to leave earth and
| then invent much faster space travel than we have now (so that we
| can catch up with old, slow probes)
|
| I think your biggest challenge will be to make your progeny
| interested in reading what you wrote, though. Why do you think
| they would want to read your page, and not watch videos of
| adorable robotic kittens?
| orangepurple wrote:
| 20x overspec'd solar panel. No battery. Broadcast a wifi hotspot
| at minimum radio power. Keep the components cold just above
| freezing and never allow them to freeze. You can accomplish this
| by using geothermal engineering to your benefit and burying the
| device with an appropriate heat exchanger so the planet can
| regulate the server temperature. Add in high availability and
| failover by using multiple buried devices connected over ethernet
| shielded with corrosion and abrasion resistant material at the
| lowest power and speed settings, then using raft algorithm and
| heartbeat. Seal everything with heaps of epoxy resin. Cut cable
| insulation off near where the cable enters the epoxy cube and
| reseal exposed wire with epoxy. This way water cannot wick into
| the main epoxy cube.
| hobbes78 wrote:
| One system based on semiconductors will eventually fail, as
| their failure rate follows the bathtub curve
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve
|
| As much as I call cryptocurrencies a cancer, I admit storing on
| Bitcoin blockchain is probably the most resilient way, as its
| constantly being replicated across a huge amount of machines
| around the planet...
| orangepurple wrote:
| You can do a lot to mitigate semiconductor failure rate over
| time by controlling temperature and humidity and temperature
| swings
| philipswood wrote:
| Aren't solar panel lifetimes in the decade range?
| orangepurple wrote:
| I don't know if the decay is linear or exponential with a
| long tail, but I assume solar panels don't fail outright
| unless they experience a short circuit or extreme temperature
| swings. Instead their output progressively declines. I bet a
| very large solar panel in the shade will last a very long
| time.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| 10-year-old solar panels are already deteriorating, and
| producing diminished output.
|
| All these technological (digital) solutions are pissing in the
| wind; digital technology has lasted just 50 years so far, and
| people will discard it in an instant when something better
| comes along.
|
| But think of all the websites! Yeah, OK. They're nearly all
| going to be gone in a decade or two.
|
| Conserving bits has already proved to be difficult. How would
| you set about conserving an 8" floppy disk you found in your
| Dad's belongings when he died? Yeah, I know, you could probably
| source an antique 8" floppy drive. But 8" floppies only went
| obsolete in about 1985.
|
| Internet archive? So you want to rely on a website to preserve
| your website? You have to be quite young, to be susceptible to
| the notion that the web will last.
|
| As people up-thread have suggested, if you want your writings
| conserved, write something that the people of the future will
| spend effort to conserve. And forget about your descendants 500
| years in the future; you have no reason to think your bloodline
| will survive. Wars have become progressively more destructive.
| And there's a slim chance that if your descendants do survive,
| they will know you're their ancestor anyway. I know about my
| ancestors back to 4 generations, beyond that I only know their
| names (and without supporting documentation).
|
| People have spoken of using gravestones. Good luck with that.
| Gravestones as young as 50 years are being knocked down by
| councils because they are dangerous. And graveyards are full;
| they are being re-used, old monments removed and replaced with
| new ones. And have you ever tried to get detail off even a
| 200-year-old monument? Instead, since you're in the churchyard,
| go inside and read the parish register.
| geocrasher wrote:
| Hollerith Punch Cards.
| pugworthy wrote:
| I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said--"Two vast
| and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near
| them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose
| frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
| Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet
| survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that
| mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal,
| these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
| Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside
| remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless
| and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away."
|
| -- Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias"
| mrits wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3dpghfRBHE
| gran_colombia wrote:
| Ramses is still better known than Shelley, some 5k years later.
| Ozymandias won.
| akkartik wrote:
| In no small part due to Shelley.
| fouc wrote:
| This
| gandalfian wrote:
| Ironically one of the most famous of the pharoes.
| numbsafari wrote:
| By the by, if you haven't seen the Coen brothers' film "The
| Ballad of Buster Scruggs", which features this poem, I highly
| recommend stopping everything, popping some corn, and watching
| it as soon as feasible.
| j-bos wrote:
| I'm partial to the remix:
| https://twitter.com/PateraQuetzaI/status/1156300892733243392...
| Link to a thread of Percy Shelley's "Ozimandias" in the rhythm
| of Smash Mouth's All Star
| idiotsecant wrote:
| from the twitter thread:
|
| >can somebody give me some context? I'm lost. is this
| referencing the bible? or an anime?
|
| Not sure if masterful troll or not...
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| >Not sure if masterful troll or not
|
| Social media in a nutshell.
| pugworthy wrote:
| That's quite good
| FredPret wrote:
| Haunting
| spoonjim wrote:
| Publish it as a book and send two copies to the Library if
| Congress.
| rudian wrote:
| Hijacking this question with a related one:
|
| How long could a website realistically stay up for?
|
| How long before the certificate will need to be updated? How
| about the underlying software? Communication protocol? IP? Each
| of these have their own probable expiration dates.
|
| Is the URL "https://www.google.com" going to be accessible in 100
| years without changing address?
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| Ask Elon to tweet about it
| topsetup wrote:
| Or tell Zuckerberg it has sensitive personal data.
| paradite wrote:
| No need to worry.
|
| Eventually the future species / AI will find a way to recreate
| the entire past history and see everything we did.
| tzs wrote:
| If you can get by with just text, pass it down as part of your
| family's oral tradition. See https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/40/the-
| memoirs-of-sherlock-holmes...
| 35fbe7d3d5b9 wrote:
| > If you can get by with just text, pass it down as part of
| your family's oral tradition
|
| Oral storytelling is probably the _only_ thing I 'd be willing
| to bet on over half a century.
|
| The real trick will be making your website interesting enough
| for your host to read to their children over and over.
| jsilence wrote:
| Somewhat pricey, but buy a rover and have it sent to the moon.
| Program it to lay tracks in form of a QR code that contains the
| URL that encodes the whole website.
|
| 2nd hand rovers are somewhat hard to come by. But you wouldn't
| need all the fancy scientific equipment. Maybe a prototype of the
| bare rover is available somewhere.
|
| Kudos if you pull that off and have the Moon QR URL website say :
| "never gonna give you up...".
| munk-a wrote:
| Figure out a way to stop humanity from imploding for 500 years
| and realize that we're, effectively, like thirty years into using
| this internet technology thing. So it's quite likely we'll see
| some really serious infrastructure changes before we get to 500
| years out.
|
| My more serious advice is to instead look at the best options for
| long term persistent data storage and assume that people in 500
| years will need to load your site using specialized technology
| like folks going to the library to view VHSes.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Convince the world to abandon HTTPS because no cert will last
| that long.
| TheBlight wrote:
| Encode it in the bitcoin unspent transaction output set.
| _shantaram wrote:
| IPFS might be an option. God knows if it'll be around in 500
| years, but it seems like a promising solution, and it's designed
| to get around link rot.
| exdsq wrote:
| IPFS caches popular sites but forgets those that are unused.
| Sure link rot won't happen, but it's highly likely no-one will
| bother caching for 500 years. Of course, IPFS almost certainly
| won't be around then and what we're using today tech-wise will
| be as ancient to them as the loom is to us.
|
| Edit: Perhaps, of course, JavaScript :P
| tacone wrote:
| Please don't, nothing should last forever.
| sturza wrote:
| What information would be worth preserving for 500 years that
| will not be discoverable in 500 years? Any personal information,
| i can assume, will be like from a stranger to your grandchildren.
| Honest question.
| lofsigma wrote:
| Isn't the correct answer to put something other people deem worth
| saving in the website? Then they will preserve it for you
| Johnny555 wrote:
| How about "Have it engraved into your tombstone and pay for a
| perpetual-care gravesite".
| cmattoon wrote:
| Blockchain: IPFS and FIL
|
| Though, who knows what will be around in 500 years. In theory,
| some blockchains will be, if only as museum pieces.
| zeppelin101 wrote:
| Ctrl+f "IPFS". Thank you. Considering the increasing
| capabilities of our tech, even if the internet, blockchain, or
| IPFS aren't live 500 years from now, they could easily be
| preserved in some form for posterity, just like an insect in
| amber.
| ArtWomb wrote:
| AMPRNet on 44.0.0.0/8
| krisoft wrote:
| Create a virulent sect whose main tenet is to keep the religious
| scripture (your personal writings) available to as many people as
| possible.
|
| If you do it right the organisation will self-adjust, recruit new
| members, gather a tithe from them and keep propagating your
| writings for thousands of years or more.
|
| There were these folks living in what we now call the middle-east
| ~3k years ago. Their memetic footprint is still reverberating
| strong to this day.
| rjakobsson wrote:
| Love this question! Books are obviously gret. The Bitcoin
| blockchain looks promising as well. This is a great problem,
| looking forward to reading the comments. There must be some
| projects which tries to solve this.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Nobody can say whether browsers, IP networking, DNS, HTTP will
| exist in 500 years from now, so aiming for very long-term
| "hosting" isn't feasible, with browsers the most complex and
| fragile part. Your best bet to preserve digital text and other
| data would be to use standards specifically designed for
| preservation/reuse that made it during that time when we still
| had multilateral standards development, and that have stood the
| test of time, such as SGML and XML. Or use plain
| text/markdown/other Wiki syntax and render to the viewer app of
| the day and century, the idea being that capturing your text at
| the intentional authoring stage would be free of delivery
| concerns and artifacts as best as it can (possible with SGML out
| of the box). And/or, author/render to a conservative HTML subset
| without JS and progressive/optional CSS. Or, print it out on
| acid-free paper with mineral colors.
| lofsigma wrote:
| surely the correct answer is to put something worth saving in the
| website. Then people will save it for you.
| generalizations wrote:
| It doesn't really matter too much how you store it, as what it
| is: make something people _want to remember_ and they 'll figure
| out how to preserve it. If it's not worth holding onto,
| eventually someone's going to determine that it's no longer worth
| keeping.
| claudiulodro wrote:
| You've missed the boat (literally and figuratively), but GitHub's
| Arctic Code vault would have been a solid solution:
| https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/
| lioeters wrote:
| Interestingly, GitHub partnered with a company called Piql for
| the Arctic Vault.
|
| https://www.piql.com/
|
| > Keep your information alive, secure and accessible for the
| future
|
| > Long-term information storage - We can ensure your valuable
| information is archived appropriately for any length of time,
| with guaranteed accessibility.
| martinskou wrote:
| My bet is that you only chance is making it a family history
| site. And by that I mean that each generation of your future
| family must contribute their story and at the same time update
| the site to a modern solution.
|
| The base layer could be text files and image, even though jpeg
| might not exists in 200 year some other format does.
|
| But you must leave it up to you grandchildren to update the
| solution to modern formats. Maybe set some inheritance up to
| support this.
| kyharri wrote:
| I actually love this idea. A digital version of the family
| bible. Which had the alternate purpose of stewarding the family
| lineage through generations. Sans the religious bit.
| epaulson wrote:
| Create lots of copies. We know some papers/parchments can last
| 100s of years and are easy to store, so be sure to put some of
| your copies on paper. Anything current tech is just a guess as to
| what the future will bother to read and keep storing. (Metal
| plates, for example, would probably last but are a pain to move
| and store and are likely valuable melted down and reused)
|
| After that, try to get your copies into institutions you think
| will survive for hundreds of years. So far, at least from a
| US/Europe-centric view, that seems to be universities and some
| churches. Even that's no guarantee - the Vatican library has been
| sacked a couple of times and had its contents hauled off, so who
| knows what was lost in those moves. You might try to bet on
| public libraries, though their track record is shorter.
|
| Only partially joking: start a church that's dedicated to
| preservation of records.
|
| But really, I think the key is lots of copies, spread as widely
| as you can.
| jcun4128 wrote:
| dumb thought: I was thinking if it is possible to beam info into
| space/somehow have the backdrop return it. Doesn't make sense,
| you'd need to know the formula/changes with space as it expands
| but yeah.
|
| I'm not literally talking about radio waves or something. I mean
| to use space as a medium to write on but "how". As in you send
| light to specific things that would return it and account for
| shift/losses over time.
| nothrowaways wrote:
| I would change it into sculpture on some precious metal... And
| put some dust on top it with a shiny sign
| lurquer wrote:
| If your kids think it is something their kids will want to see,
| your kids will preserve it (or copy it) and pass it on.
|
| I have old pictures from my great grandparents. I have them on my
| phone as jpegs. They took no steps to preserve the actual film
| for 120 years or otherwise figure out how their great
| grandchildren would see it.
|
| In short, if it's worth preserving, it will be preserved (or
| copied to whatever medium is currently in use) by your successive
| generations. If it's not worth preserving, it will be tossed and
| ignored regardless of steps you take.
| david38 wrote:
| Create a foundation that ensures it is always copied to the
| latest media.
|
| It should verify it's on hosted on multiple sites and the current
| offline media is working.
|
| Every few years this will have to change.
|
| Every 20 years, annotations might have to be added as language
| drifts.
| rumpelstilz18 wrote:
| Put it on the Bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin wont be around anymore
| but I am sure the chain will still be somewhere.
| greenwoman wrote:
| Looking at the past 100 years of change, progress, and war, what
| do you think the odds are there will be anyone left to view your
| website in 500 years? Or that the web will be anything like it is
| today? Or that English will even be in use then?
| intunderflow wrote:
| It's not 500 years, but you can lock objects in AWS S3 for up to
| 100 years, depends if you're satisfied AWS will still be a thing
| in a century.
| grey-area wrote:
| Etch it onto a metal disk like this[1] inside a capsule that can
| survive reentry, pay to have it shot into space with a slowly
| decaying orbit. Then perhaps arrange to have the reentry hit a
| pond near your ancestral home in about 500 years time.
|
| 1. https://longnow.org/artifacts/rosetta-wearable-disk
| kadoban wrote:
| That's got to be ~impossible by today's engineering. Hitting a
| specific place or even decaying at a specific time in 500 years
| is just never going to happen.
|
| It'd have to be an active process, which means you need a
| machine that's still running in 500 years. Even then I bet it's
| still a hard problem. IIRC NASA aims for like, an ocean and
| they're happy if they hit the right one.
| influx wrote:
| The Minuteman III is an American ICBM that is accurate to 800
| feet. Much closer than hitting an ocean.
| grey-area wrote:
| Yes the last bit was just a little joke - orbital decay is
| subject to too much uncertainty.
|
| Although I guess if you had propulsion you could deorbit in a
| specific place at a specific time. SpaceX and icbms deorbit
| precisely so we have the technology nowadays to do so. Maybe
| an ion drive could last that long?
| nottorp wrote:
| Probably the only way that has a chance of success is some kind
| of trust fund that will accumulate funds to keep the website in
| operation, including converting it several times to whatever's in
| fashion in 100, 200... 500 years.
|
| Or, as some other post has already said, become so famous that
| people will record everything you've said. Although the first
| option only requires becoming moderately rich, which may be
| easier.
| ydkme wrote:
| Store it on the Bitcoin blockchain in the OP_RETURN field [1][2].
| Note that this is considered an abuse of the system and
| discouraged, but of all the systems available now, Bitcoin is
| most likely to still be around in some form in 500 years IMO.
|
| [1] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/39347/how-to-
| sto...
|
| [2] http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-
| photo...
| riazrizvi wrote:
| 1. create a trust with a very reputable law firm, that lays out
| the terms of the service level agreement for the website.
|
| 2. Fund the trust in perpetuity with a large enough amount so
| that the interest is safely more than the cost to run it,
| including the trust admin fees.
|
| My out-of-the-ass ballpark, you could probably do it for less
| than $100k.
| jimmytucson wrote:
| There are books that have been around for 500+ years. They're
| probably more durable than websites at this point.
| quaintdev wrote:
| whether the book or ideas will be preserved depends on their
| content.
|
| For example, Marcus Aurelius thought survived for 2000 years.
| Your or mine website/blog/book I am not sure if it will.
| max_ wrote:
| Does anyone have an update of the "Digital Vellum" Vint Cerf was
| working on.
|
| I think it could be relevant here.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| The only practical enough way I can think of is:
|
| (1) create static documents in the simplest and most standard
| lossless (as far as possible) format.
|
| (2) store them on a durable enough, yet simple enough medium.
| Today that would probably be something simple like an USB stick.
|
| (3) transfer to new medium periodically, and take the opportunity
| to convert obsolete media files to new formats, if needed (you
| could keep the originals and each 'generation' as historical
| reference).
|
| (4) train your children, grandchildren, etc to perform (3) and
| perhaps to rewrite the instruction in their own words (to cater
| for technology and language changes)
|
| This also allows for multiple copies for easy backups and to
| entrust to each descendant individually.
| _shantaram wrote:
| wrt (2), I remember reading (watching? maybe it was a YouTube
| video), that the answer to long-term storage is optical media.
| There was even a brand of discs that advertised itself as being
| a 300-year data storage medium.
|
| The engineer in me wants to make some sort of metal etched disk
| medium to store data on and bury it somewhere with a marker on
| top. Preferably with instructions on how to retrieve the data.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| That may be the answer for the durability of the medium but,
| I think, it is a red herring for the scenario described here
| and loses sight of crucial aspects:
|
| (1) The data must be easily retrievable. Any custom solution
| will be too expensive to produce then read, and so will be
| any solution that does not evolve over time. It's already not
| simple to read a 40 year old obsolete medium...
|
| (2) Once the data have been retrieved they must also be
| easily interpreted. I have no idea how easily it will be to
| interpret a 500 year old data format. For instance, anything
| can display a JPEG file today, but what about in 500, let
| alone 100 years? JPEG did _not_ exist only 30 years ago, MP4
| was released 20 years ago this year. This is a blip compared
| to 500 years.
|
| So if the aim is archaeological and the intended recipients
| are a bunch of future PhDs in well-funded universities then
| maybe. But if they aim is to have the data readily available
| for an average person then both the medium and the data
| format must evolve over time and the most standard medium is
| probably the best choice for each technological generation.
| Even the instructions and the language they are written in
| must evolve over time.
|
| You do need to hope that your descendants will keep at it
| over time.
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| You might be better off with some kind of ceramic, to ensure
| that the storage medium isn't more valuable as a recycled
| material than for its information content. Ancient Sumerians
| had the right idea.
| omarhaneef wrote:
| Thought experiment: imagine it is 1985 and you asked the
| equivalent question. Something along the lines of: how would I
| preserve an electronic game/message/piece of media for posterity?
|
| What would the answer be?
|
| Make sure you copy your floppy on to a tape on the commodore 64?
|
| Make sure that you post the message to at least 4 different
| bulletin boards?
|
| The tech is evolving so fast that a website, or today's hardware,
| or forms of media will be unrecognizable 50 years from now.
|
| Perhaps the first question is, what will be the equivalent of a
| website in 500 years?
| grey-area wrote:
| Funny you should ask that. Because in 1986, the hilarious
| answer the BBC came up with was 2 Videodiscs, which were
| obsolete almost as soon as they were introduced:
|
| https://atsf.co.uk/dottext/domesday.html
|
| The latest way to preserve the content from those disks, since
| nobody can read them any more, is on the internet, so perhaps
| the OP is on to something - perhaps the internet _will_ survive
| 500 years in some form, given its obvious utility.
| hackeredje wrote:
| If you want to store information for the next billions of years,
| carve it in a super-material and store it secretly in the Kaapval
| Craton, so that even when all current continents are gone and a
| new super continent is formed it has a high chance of survival
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaapvaal_Craton) Then again, if
| people did not find your message in all those billions of years
| it was so well hidden that they will probably not find it also in
| a couple of billions of years, but at least it remains
| politician wrote:
| This type of question is asked semi-frequently and the answers
| tend to be around physical preservation.
|
| So here's a thought. Why not build a "Computational Knowledge
| Bootloader" that contained enough information to build a sequence
| of computational devices of increasing complexity starting with
| the absolute basics of math and language.
|
| If we had that, then all of these types of questions of digital
| preservation could be answered with something like "Go to the
| website and upload your information into a Tier 20 CKB device.
| Enter your shipping address and payment information. A collection
| of etched titanium plates will arrive in 3-4 weeks. Put them in a
| safe."
|
| 500 years later, decoding might look like finding or building up
| to a Tier 20 CKB device and scanning the plates. If the
| instructions were standardized, there should be lots of lower
| tier devices scattered around.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| A foundation of sorts?
| politician wrote:
| Hahaha, wow, yeah, I did just binge that last week.
| _facepalm_ I guess it made an impact.
| nikozzins wrote:
| qm sabe o link por mt anos
| otikik wrote:
| People have been doing this for a while now; in their tombstones.
| I live next to a cemetery, sometimes I go there and read some.
| Most are written by grieving families - a couple phrases and
| that's it. The ones written by their occupants are invariably the
| most interesting ones.
|
| You could even make it a bit of a puzzle: "There is a secret
| message in your great grandparent's tomb, but only visible during
| the Summer Solstice, on sunset". It would require some math and
| some careful placement, and durable materials. It could be a nice
| activity for your offspring.
| teforp wrote:
| I guess you need to make website that break DCMA and then your
| website going to stay in DCMA abuse archive forever.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Maybe the best bet is a hardened virtual machine. No one knows
| what the future holds centuries forward, but if humanity
| survives, I'm sure they will know how to emulate ancient
| hardware, or convert it to other type of containment.
|
| Half a millennium is eons in computing, it has to have
| stewardship of some sort if it's going to last that long. AIs
| could become capable of this task in the near future, who knows?
| pettycashstash2 wrote:
| Personal page? Encode it on blockchain.
| literallyaduck wrote:
| 1. Put it on github static pages and hope for the best.
|
| 2. Create a bot that searches the internet for free hosting, and
| automate account creation and mirror the content.
|
| 3. Print 100 copies on different manufacturers archive quality
| paper, use a vacuum pump and seal the books separately. Shield
| them from light. Put money in trust for a trustee to find
| something like fiver to rebuild the site every 20 years with one
| of your archive backups. Include multi language dictionaries in
| your archive storage for the eventually that your language is
| dead.
| seqizz wrote:
| 500? Make it past the heat death of the universe to send a signal
| to the god (or /dev/null if you prefer). Joking aside, why would
| you want this? As soon as your conscience is gone, it won't
| matter to you anyway. Which is, "perspectively" speaking, the
| only thing which matters.
| fanf2 wrote:
| I work for a university that is over 800 years old, with a
| library and press (book and journal publishing) that are about
| 500 years old. The institutions have changed a lot over the
| centuries, especially the last 200 years.
|
| Probably the best way to get people to preserve your work that
| long is to make it really outstanding, so future generations will
| want to preserve it even though technology and institutional
| governance keep changing.
| ourcat wrote:
| That's more or less what Shakespeare did 500 years ago. ;)
| cronix wrote:
| If you want it to stand the test of time, use other methods that
| have provably stood the test of time, like a book. You know that
| will work. You do not know anything currently digital will work.
| If this is important to you, I wouldn't mess around with "high
| tech" solutions. It's a complete gamble and relies on too many
| different components to work, whereas a book you just have to
| know how to read. The world can be in another dark age and it
| will still work. At least while there is light out.
| [deleted]
| hidelooktropic wrote:
| Since there are many variations of "then don't use a website!"
| Answers here, I'll restate the puzzle.
|
| Say you had to host the information as a set of static HTML
| documents and you wanted them to remain accessible for as long as
| possible; what strategy would give you the best odds?
| FinalBriefing wrote:
| Seems like there are no good ways for individuals to keep
| digital records that long. Even if you found a storage medium
| that could last, the machine that reads and serves up that
| content would need replacing.
|
| The Internet Archive would be the easiest way, but a boring
| answer. You're trusting another organization to maintain your
| data, but it's about as certain as any other option to be
| available in the future.
|
| You could trust Cloudflare or AWS to keep an storage bucket
| alive, but then you've got to continue paying for it, and there
| will almost certainly be some changes in the next 500 years
| that would require a human touch. Who knows if AWS will still
| be around, or if its new parent company, Yahoo-Facebook-Intel,
| will drop contracts if you don't log on daily to 'Oculus
| Space'. My point is, The Internet Archive might be your best
| bet if you rely on another organization to keep the site up.
|
| If you did it yourself, you'd need - a stable file format
| (SIRF?) - multiple backups and copies, even on the same disk -
| very stable, simple computer to serve the content - maybe like,
| a Raspberry Pi-like system submerged and sealed in mineral oil?
| - static IP address to host from - this might be the
| dealbreaker for a DIY solution. You'd need to rely on other
| services - A local network that can be connected to...even
| after 500 years of changes to networking protocols.
|
| Even with a DIY approach, you'd be relying on a trust of some
| sort that could handle replacing parts as needed. You could
| invent an analog titanium read-only storage disk with your data
| encoded on it, but even if you have bullet-proof hardware, you
| still need to allow people to connect to your server...and that
| is the least predictable part of the problem.
|
| If enough people are interested in preserving content like
| this, a block-chain storage solution could work. You'd be
| relying on the system still being active in 500 years, so you'd
| need multiple generations of people all using the same
| blockchain to preserve their data. Kinda like a decentralized
| Internet Archive.
| hnfong wrote:
| Etch all the dependent technologies in stone so that somebody
| could replicate it.
|
| Starting maybe from the transistor, if you're insistent on the
| full experience of loading the website from a browser with HTTP
| on TCP/IP networking.
|
| Otherwise you can just etch the HTML in stone with a brief
| explanation of what the tags mean (eg. part of the HTML spec).
| Generally popular languages can survive 500+ years, so one can
| safely presume that some people 500+ years later can understand
| our English if they put in some effort.
|
| .. I don't know why anyone would presume the web in any form
| would exist in 500 years. It would be fortunate if humanity as
| we know it still exists in 500 years. We are so capable of
| wiping out ourselves with various techs (whether intentionally
| or otherwise) that the odds are not really that great.
| [deleted]
| sumnole wrote:
| put your page on a decentralized platform like Ethereum or IPFS
| and hope it gets maintained for 500 years. With Ethereum at
| least, there is a monetary incentive to keep the platform alive.
| bitwize wrote:
| Etch it into metal or stone blocks and seal it in a mausoleum.
| prpl wrote:
| Print to PDF, store on archival quality CDs and/or print to
| archival quality paper.
| Trias11 wrote:
| If page is static - engrave it in a titanium plate, possibly as a
| QR code of sorts and pass it through generations.
|
| Include instructions for reader to publish it to whatever media
| analog of today's web page.
|
| So basically stay away from technology, get information encoded
| into lowest and most resilient physical material and rely on
| future generation to publish and/or update it's content.
| codazoda wrote:
| There was a post here on hacker news of a service that would
| convert a static page and contain the entire page in a URL.
| That, in turn, could be converted to a QR code. I didn't notice
| if it relied on something like bit.ly to store data, but it
| didn't seem like it.
|
| Unfortunately, I can't find it again at the moment.
| cupcake-unicorn wrote:
| Pretty sure it was this: https://itty.bitty.app/
| brabel wrote:
| You mean a Data URI?
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/HTTP/Basics_of_...
| batch12 wrote:
| This one?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317840
| geektips wrote:
| It encodes data in the # fragment of the url itself, but for
| decoding the data in the fragment it relies on the js loaded
| from the server also the domain must be resolved.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Funny, I was just reading about this
| https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-paper-data-storage-option/ a
| few hours earlier.
|
| Trying to find paper storage schemes for digital information.
|
| ps: oh and the main linked site is dead (sic) so
| https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3...
| pvaldes wrote:
| This practically grants that the titanium plate will be sold
| and melted being much more valuable as material than the
| information encoded.
| bagels wrote:
| QR code? I think many are really underestimating the amount of
| change in 500 years.
| necovek wrote:
| It's about the density of information, quality of
| preservation (eg. checksumming) and simplicity to decode.
|
| Sure, QR codes are unlikely to be useful in 500 years, but if
| they have the above properties, they are just as good as
| anything else. If civilization endures, I am sure they'll be
| decodable in 5 centuries (whether they are preserved is
| altogether another matter).
| dv_dt wrote:
| Microsoft's research's Project Silica was doing interesting
| things on etching glass for long duration archival.
|
| https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/ignite-project...
| pdm55 wrote:
| "5D optical data storage (sometimes known as Superman memory
| crystal) is a nanostructured glass for permanently recording
| digital data using a femtosecond laser writing process. ...
| GitHub, a subsidiary of Microsoft, plans to use this
| technology to archive all public Git repositories. Microsoft
| refers to this technology as Project Silica with a claimed
| lifetime of over 10,000 years."
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage
| qwertox wrote:
| I would etch it as an photo onto glass.
| ilamont wrote:
| Reminds me of the Rosetta Disk that some folks in the futurist
| community came up with 15 years ago:
|
| _The Rosetta Disk is the physical companion of the Rosetta
| Digital Language Archive, and a prototype of one facet of The
| Long Now Foundation 's 10,000-Year Library. The Rosetta Disk is
| intended to be a durable archive of human languages, as well as
| an aesthetic object that suggests a journey of the imagination
| across culture and history. We have attempted to create a
| unique physical artifact which evokes the great diversity of
| human experience as well as the incredible variety of symbolic
| systems we have constructed to understand and communicate that
| experience.
|
| The Disk surface shown here, meant to be a guide to the
| contents, is etched with a central image of the earth and a
| message written in eight major world languages: "Languages of
| the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages
| assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find
| over 13,000 pages of language documentation." The text begins
| at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This
| tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of
| people that will be able to read something immediately upon
| picking up the Disk, as well as implying the directions for
| using it--'get a magnifier and there is more.'
|
| On the reverse side of the disk from the globe graphic are over
| 13,000 microetched pages of language documentation. Since each
| page is a physical rather than digital image, there is no
| platform or format dependency. Reading the Disk requires only
| optical magnification. Each page is .019 inches, or half a
| millimeter, across. This is about equal in width to 5 human
| hairs, and can be read with a 650X microscope (individual pages
| are clearly visible with 100X magnification)._
|
| https://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/
| arcticbull wrote:
| The Github arctic code vault appears to have created TAR
| archives and turned them into a sequence of QR codes on a kind
| of film. And then thrown them in a hole under 250 meters of
| permafrost in Svalbard.
| Bud wrote:
| Permafrost: now known as all-too-temporary-frost.
| taftster wrote:
| I honestly thought you were being silly. Wow!
|
| https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/
| titzer wrote:
| I noticed that Virgil got the arctic code vault badge, and
| thought it was funny, but I never checked what the
| conditions or criteria were. So I looked.
|
| > The snapshot consists of the HEAD of the default branch
| of each repository, minus any binaries larger than 100KB in
| size. (Repos with 250+ stars retained their binaries.) Each
| was packaged as a single TAR file.
|
| Virgil bootstraps from compiler binaries checked into the
| repo--there is literally no other way to get a PL off the
| ground without a compiler or interpreter binary in some
| language another computer understands--so I guess the
| archive has a completely useless source-only copy. That is,
| unless future historians want to write a new interpreter in
| order to run the source that's checked in :D
| iszomer wrote:
| What's potentially amusing is how GitHub might handle
| code revisions if they were possibly stored on a WORM
| medium. Several past companies[1] have attempted to
| engineer storage that might outlast us all and even Elon
| Musk snuck in one such repository[2] when he launched his
| Tesla Roadster into space.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InPhase_Technologies
|
| [2] https://medium.com/arch-mission-foundation/arch-
| mission-foun...
| leephillips wrote:
| Black & white photographic film is the most stable practical
| storage medium that we have.
| [deleted]
| kryptiskt wrote:
| Really boring answer: Make provisions for it in your will, which
| likely will mean creating some sort of charitable foundation with
| the mission of doing this. If the personal page is useful and/or
| hosts some creative work keeping that alive can be the entire
| goal of it, otherwise the foundation might have to do some actual
| charity and the preservation of the page would be a quirk in the
| statutes.
| jonas21 wrote:
| > _creating some sort of charitable foundation with the mission
| of doing this_
|
| Is this not already the mission of the Internet Archive? Except
| instead of just your page, they preserve all pages that they
| crawl.
| londons_explore wrote:
| "small" things like this I assume end up really expensive in
| wills.
|
| Making a page of text available to the public for 500 years
| might involve 25 people (each person being responsible for 20
| years), and each of them has to be paid enough to care. To
| ensure each is paid enough, there needs to be a fund to pay
| them, and that itself needs to be managed by someone, who will
| also want paying for their troubles.
|
| Also consider that in 25 generations it's pretty likely
| there'll be a major war, civilization collapse, change of
| monetary system, etc. To make such a scheme resistant to such
| things, you're probably going to need multiple people involved
| in every generation, all geographically separated, and all will
| need paying.
|
| Even if you set aside $1M of your estate to this, I don't give
| it more than a 50/50 chance of survival.
| paulpauper wrote:
| put the rest in an index fund , which helps pay future
| salary. there are probably ways to do it
| remus wrote:
| I think it's harder than you might think. The New York
| Stock Exchange was founded in 1792 (229 years ago), there's
| a lot of things that can wrong over the course of 500 years
| to mean funding for your project would disappear. Wars,
| civil unrest, large environmental events etc. are all
| pretty much guaranteed over a 500 year time span.
| londons_explore wrote:
| How many NYSE stocks that existed at the start still
| exist today?
| gzer0 wrote:
| There weren't any "stocks" originally signed under the
| Buttonwood Agreement [1]; it was a consortium of 24
| individual brokers [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buttonwood_Agreement
| dhosek wrote:
| According to this page https://finance.zacks.com/first-
| company-offered-new-york-sto... the first five stocks
| listed included the Bank of New York which still exists
| as BNY Mellon. It doesn't indicate what the other four
| stocks were, but presumably they no longer exist (The
| NYSE page on Wikipedia lists other traded securities as
| shares in The First Bank of the United States (defunct in
| 1821) and the Bank of North America (which became a
| private institution (it was previously the de facto
| central bank of the nascent U.S.) in 1785 before merging
| with Commercial Trust Company in 1923. Its successor
| institutions were eventually acquired by Wells Fargo so
| presumably if you'd bought shares in 1785 and held on to
| them for the next 236 years you'd now be holding shares
| in Wells Fargo). As far as I can tell all other trading
| was in government bonds.
| cevn wrote:
| What is a website?
|
| It represents a CONTINUOUS will to keep something online.
|
| Within the course of a year there could be 5 changes that destroy
| your website.
|
| Then, the only way to keep a website alive, is to keep YOURSELF
| alive for 500 years, or to pass on your web development instincts
| and will to maintain this website on to your future generations.
|
| After 100 years unless you provided some serious forms of
| feedback into this system they will grow bored of it or your
| progeny will be too nerdy to continue the line.
| Pradarshan wrote:
| The answers are very interesting! You all are Cathedral Thinkers.
| taylorfinley wrote:
| Probably unpopular answer: you could store your messages to the
| future in the op_return field of a series of small bitcoin
| transactions. I wouldn't recommend making this the only egg in
| your basket but I think there is a non-zero probability the
| blockchain history will be preserved even if the currency isn't
| used any longer, kind of like how you can still go see Song
| dynasty paper currency from 1,000 years ago.
| barmstrong wrote:
| Came here to post this - storing it on a blockchain is probably
| the most elegant answer to create high redundancy.
| rackjack wrote:
| This is very clever! You don't need to make your own fame if
| you ride the coattails of something already famous.
| arduinomancer wrote:
| How would people know to look for the messages though?
|
| A webpage is discoverable
| max_ wrote:
| the transaction ID seems sufficient
| Klimentio wrote:
| It should be a balance between readability, findability and
| integrity.
|
| I would not bet on the btc blockchain for it. Its relativly
| complex to use, its very niche, it is already 360gb big and
| there might be a time were it either disappears or gets
| optimized and your information will be gone.
| kingcharles wrote:
| At some point improvements in computing will mean that the
| "crypto" in current cryptocurrencies will no longer be
| secure, and therefore all current currencies of this type
| will have to be abandonded for something else - quantum-
| something.
| thebean11 wrote:
| Eh, you just need a different "crypto" that's quantum safe.
| Yes if someone today had a computer that could crack
| private keys, all current crypto would be dead immediately.
| If crypto has some advanced warning (enough time to
| implement a new quantum safe private key scheme, update
| node software, and allow users to move funds to quantum
| safe addresses), then it's not existential.
| [deleted]
| LAMike wrote:
| I wrote my name in the Bitcoin blockchain 6 years ago, I
| barely knew Javascript.
|
| For a blockchain like Bitcoin to fit all of its transactions
| in _only_ 420GB is an engineering feat that should be admired
|
| The blockchain data will never be "optimized" or "disappear"
|
| Please take the time to learn how Bitcoin works before
| pontificating
| lloydgrossman wrote:
| >The blockchain data will never be "optimized" or
| "disappear" This is a really bold assumption - you do
| understand that core dev is still ongoing, yes?
|
| You do understand that "infinite data on a disk" doesn't
| exist, yes? And as the chain goes on longer, more space is
| going to be needed, and centralization of the miners will
| continue to increase, yes?
|
| Please take the time to learn how Bitcoin works before
| pontificating
| terafo wrote:
| If growth continues linearly it will be less than 20tb. It is
| possible to fit that much data on a single physical drive
| even now,let alone in 500 years. 360gb is just not that much.
| erhk wrote:
| The first blockchain will almost certainly be preserved for
| historic significance
| __d wrote:
| We thought that about Usenet.
| andai wrote:
| Wait, we lost it?
| paulpauper wrote:
| do it with ethereum or some other blockchain in a single tx
| leodriesch wrote:
| I think Bitcoin is the safer option, since the history is
| more likely to be retained for historic reasons and it is
| smaller. Ethereum just has a lot more stuff running on it and
| the chain is much larger.
| LAMike wrote:
| Then what happens when AWS goes down?
|
| Bye bye Ethereum.
|
| There is only 2,500 ETH nodes today, most run on "cloud"
| services which cost hundreds of dollars a month, soon to be
| thousands
| paulpauper wrote:
| the blockchain will still be permanent offline and on
| repositories
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I was curious what this would cost and found a thorough
| stackexchange post [0] that puts the price at 0.032 ETH per
| KB stored on-chain. Comes out to around 12,000 USD for a
| small 100kb static site.
|
| I would guess this cost is competitive with carving binary
| data into stone, not bad for permenant storage, reading the
| data is free.
|
| [0] https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/872/what-is-
| the...
| rattlesnakedave wrote:
| Better would be an ENS name pointing to an IPFS address.
| Then just hope that IPFS sticks around.
|
| EDIT: ENS expiry would bite you. Maybe just IPFS then.
| joshfraser wrote:
| You need to make sure someone continues pinning the data
| for it to exist on the network. You need to create the
| right financial incentives for that to happen, which is
| what Filecoin is supposed to solve.
| mcculley wrote:
| Hmm. Putting 1 gigabyte in S3 for 500 years at today's most
| expensive price ($0.023 per gigabyte month) would be $138.
| Prices are certain to decrease over time. This says
| something about the cost of using the Ethereum blockchain
| for storage.
| gjs278 wrote:
| s3 might close down shop before the ethereum blockchain
| does
| foopod wrote:
| S3 and blockchain have very different use cases right?
|
| Blockchain being for small quantities of data made
| immutable, used in a p2p manner with as many copies as
| there are peers.
|
| S3 generally being purpose built for short term (relative
| to blockchain) storage and price.
| mcculley wrote:
| Yes, they have different uses cases. But one can easily
| see an arbitrage opportunity here for building an
| immortal database atop S3 (and other cloud services) for
| a lot less money. For $12,000 USD, I could store the same
| data in S3 for (at the very least) 445,217 years. (Using
| the example above.)
|
| That makes the value proposition of the Ethereum
| blockchain as a data store a lot less attractive.
| teawrecks wrote:
| This is so theoretical, I don't think it has any value.
| Meanwhile, consider the effort involved in destroying all
| data stored in S3 vs destroying the entire ETH
| blockchain. One is expensive, possibly only achievable by
| a national superpower, the other is virtually impossible
| without destroying the planet.
| mcculley wrote:
| I fully realize the theoretical advantages of
| blockchains. I can still store multiple copies in
| multiple clouds across multiple availability zones
| cheaper. The original question did not imply the
| destruction of S3.
| terafo wrote:
| Add 1 download per day for 500 years and you will get
| 21k.
| diego_sandoval wrote:
| Apparently, Ethereum is going to get rid of the proof-of-work
| chain history when it turns completely proof-of-stake.
|
| "The new chain is not going to hold information from what
| happened in the Ethereum chain before the merge" [1]
|
| [1] minute 1:31:30
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW0QZmtbjvs
| wevwevwe wrote:
| This. It's a gross abuse of bitcoins network, but bitcoin is a
| time keeping database at its core and it would not be
| impossible. That only accounts for data storage and retrieval
| though. For the end user to connect to the website, you still
| need some sort of server stack. Maybe IPFS could be used to
| overcome that part.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| You can't. No more than you can make a garden last 500 years
| without people tending to it regularly. Digital has a lot of
| great advantages, but permanence isn't one. Will DNS even be used
| in 500 years? Maybe. Will whatever hosting provider you use still
| exist. Almost definitely not. Will html and css and javascript
| still be used even? Or will they be something academics study the
| way we study latin and greek today?
|
| Books, buildings, and art survive 500 years and not much else.
| cstross wrote:
| The world wide web is only 28 years old.
|
| We've had computers for 76 years at this point.
|
| We're discussing this topic in modern English, but if you look
| back 500 years William Shakespeare wouldn't be born for another
| couple of generations: vocabulary and grammar have changed a
| _lot_ since then, and if you look back a further 500 years (to
| 1021AD) the "English" spoken in those days was a lot closer to
| Frisian than anything we'd understand.
|
| To get the big picture of what 500 years means ... the oldest
| surviving writing is roughly 5500 years old. We've had
| agriculture for roughly 11,000 years. And you're asking for a
| personal legacy to be legible and usable after surviving a span
| of time 10% as vast as the existence of writing itself?
|
| Think archival grade materials and ink, _then_ add translations
| into Mandarin, Arabic, and Spanish -- there 's a much better
| chance of it being readable if you have more than one language.
| Then maybe add a dictionary, just in case words have fallen out
| of use. Make multiple copies and distribute them around the
| world, including tectonically stable desiccated regions that are
| currently lightly- or un-inhabited and likely to remain so: the
| criteria for deep disposal nuclear waste repositories are
| applicable (minus the "deep") bit, so Yucca Flats would do, or
| the Atacama Desert or the McMurdo dry valleys in Antarctica.
| JimTheMan wrote:
| Ironically the dictionaries you mention have greatly stabilised
| language. Language is going to be far more stable over the next
| 500 years. I wouldn't worry about it in the slightest.
| Lordarminius wrote:
| Is it ? The language is evolving very fast. Compare English
| from the 50's to what is spoken now, take into account the
| major dialects around the world...
|
| I don't see much stability.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| There are different kinds of stability. One is whether the
| same language is spoken informally. Another is whether
| people are able understand earlier texts. I'm pretty sure
| texts from the 20th and 19th century are commonly read in
| High School, TV shows from 1960s onward are watched, etc.
| Having the past ever-present makes it something current
| informal language relates to.
|
| Many, many people speaking English also creates an
| incentive for stability at the same time it creates
| variation.
| JimTheMan wrote:
| I have a book from the 1700s on my bedside table I can
| read just fine...
|
| My lived experience is I can read texts from hundreds of
| years ago just fine. Old mate is struggling with 50s tv.
|
| The only tip is to use stable language. IE don't use the
| term dab or vibe or whatever the latest fad niche speak
| is.
|
| I think whoever is interested in a 500 year old website
| is going to be ok.
| ralmidani wrote:
| Great comment! I'm curious, why did you choose Arabic,
| Mandarin, and Spanish?
| jdsalaro wrote:
| They are the most widely spoken languages world wide after
| English.
| capableweb wrote:
| English comes after Mandarin and Spanish according to most
| sources, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language
| s_by_number_of...
|
| Edit: ugh sorry, I realize you wrote spoken languages
| (which English would be in the top at, see https://en.wikip
| edia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...), not
| native/first language/by population. Ignore me!
| longivitate wrote:
| Yes.
|
| 500 years is but a drop in the ocean of the future. We have
| lost a fair amount of the past and find even little fragments
| from long ago to be incredibly illuminating. e.g. the Rosetta
| Stone, or the dead sea scrolls. What would we know now if the
| library of Alexandria didn't burn?
| mattl wrote:
| Where are you getting 28 years old from?
| matthias509 wrote:
| Mosaic release date maybe?
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)
| mattl wrote:
| Maybe.
|
| W3C had a pretty big 30th birthday thing recently.
| https://www.w3.org/blog/2021/08/30-years-on-from-
| introducing...
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| brutusborn wrote:
| I would also add the social element - if you want your kids and
| grandkids to be able to read it, pass custody of the website
| well before you die (perhaps in a will?) and tell as many
| friends and family as you can. I know I would happily
| administer a deceased friend's website until i could no longer
| myself.
| SynasterBeiter wrote:
| But who will administer the site after you pass? It's much
| harder to justify the administering effort, when you never
| even knew the original guy.
| tragictrash wrote:
| Start a cult of data protectors, maybe your kids?
| endymi0n wrote:
| Adding money might help. We have a small scale investment
| in our cap table from a German family who have kept their
| money together for 650 years...
| agustif wrote:
| In where I live, there's a sweet wine made from a grape
| from greece, which recipe and genetics has been conserved
| for a few hundred years because one rich guy stated so in
| his will, so he gave away a building (was an hospital, now
| a museum), and in exchange, their heirs must recieve 2
| boxes of 6 bottles of such wine each year, or otherwise the
| building lease is off.
|
| Something like that might work
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Create nuclear blasts that encode the information in short
| microbursts. Info will be available in the carbon record and in
| tree rings around the world .... profit?
| zarmin wrote:
| Maybe a better question is, what would HTML have looked like in
| the time of Shakespeare? <doth
| whence="baec">Forsooth!</doth>
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Haha, reminds me of "If Hemingway Wrote JavaScript"
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Hemingway-Wrote-JavaScript-Angus-
| Crol...
|
| which is actually kind of amusing and creative.
| JadeNB wrote:
| I was going to say (as if that were the main objection) that
| the = there was apocryphal, but I had my centuries wrong:
| Recorde invented it in the mid-16th century.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equals_sign#History
|
| I wonder when angle braces were introduced?
| KingFelix wrote:
| brilliant!
| _jstreet wrote:
| TIL: There's a "Shakespeare" esoteric programming language.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_Programming_Langua.
| ..
| runarberg wrote:
| I'd like to think HTML would have used different notation for
| syntax e.g. the section sign for open tags and pilcrow for
| closing: SSdoth whence="baec"SS Forsooth!
| PdothP
| [deleted]
| avodonosov wrote:
| Maybe also start a traditoin in your family to have many
| children and to memorise the website up to a single character,
| like a sacred text.
|
| Some texts survived long time in oral form, I heard.
|
| Forming the sources as a verse could help here.
|
| Mostly oriented to texts, altough photo and images can be
| memorized in their hex encoding, for example.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Sounds like what they did in the Netflix show Travelers,
| where important information about the world was encoded into
| DNA and kept alive within the bodies of specific travelers,
| called Archivists. This allowed information to be transmitted
| over long periods of time to the Director.
| lovecg wrote:
| You're onto something here. Organized religions are some of
| the very few institutions that survived for thousands of
| years with little change.
| danans wrote:
| > Organized religions are some of the very few institutions
| that survived for thousands of years with little change.
|
| Which organized religion are you referring to here? All the
| big ones have changed immensely.
| teawrecks wrote:
| Are you saying it would NOT have been useful to
| historians/genealogists if people 500 years ago had produced
| perfectly preserved documentation of all of their writings in
| their language at that time?
|
| You're also using 500 years of antiquated human communication
| technology to extrapolate what the next 500 years will be like.
| Shakespeare wasn't taking selfies, writing blog posts, and
| responding to commenters in real time back then.
| English/natural language evolved differently in a world that
| wasn't connected to the internet. There's no reason for me to
| believe the last 500 years of communication will be anything
| like the next 500.
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| Store the pages on two SD cards with software RAID in a Raspberry
| Pi with passive cooling and a small LCD display. Submerge the
| entire thing in clear epoxy, sans the power and USB cords,
| keyboard/mouse. Create a laminated set of instructions that
| describes your language, how to use a keyboard and mouse, and how
| to build a power generator to output the electrical signal needed
| to power the device. Put all that in a water-and-air-tight
| Pelican case with silica gel balls & a zinc anode. Bury it in a
| stone mausoleum in a cemetery that has the bodies of dead rich
| people.
| ellis0n wrote:
| 500 years is too long for modern tech. You will definitely need
| many copies of different types of storage, down to atomic-level
| records such as DNA. GitHub's Arctic Code or Amazon vault looks
| like the first Godzilla computers, but you're asking for a
| "500-years PC".
|
| Perhaps there will be a technology that allows you to write site
| files in the DNA directly of your children and run a micro-DNA
| web server in the body, and your grandchildren can surf on your
| Internet data in the brain.
| lzybkr wrote:
| Microsoft Research has been working on DNA storage:
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/dna-storage...
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| This DNA writing idea is premised on the concept that most of
| our DNA is "junk", which is an increasingly unlikely idea. Most
| of it does not code for proteins, that's true. We are slowly
| uncovering more and more functions for the rest.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| Who said anything about modifying our existing genome?
| Perhaps in the future we'll be able to add extra biologically
| inert genetic material solely for the purpose of permanently
| storing information, passed from generation to generation.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| GP said :
|
| > Perhaps there will be a technology that allows you to
| write site files in the DNA directly of your children
| zhte415 wrote:
| It doesn't need to be human DNA, indeed the part chosen may
| not 'make' it 500 years. While I have no desire to do this,
| choosing a variety of other life seems more viable, and more
| easily rediscovered if necessary.
| ellis0n wrote:
| What is the alternative to DNA?
|
| - Matter (paper, stones and eggs)
|
| - Electromagnetic (light and drives)
|
| - Quantum (a time-travel machine is must read the html code
| from the time-space by a Twitter-2500 hashtag
| #webarchive_2021_file_date)
|
| - Promises of others (peoples, companies that can and can
| recreate the space) . ?
| eldavido wrote:
| I've thought about this. Keep it completely static, no back-end
| server required, minimal front-end javascript, mostly plain HTML.
|
| The key, as many others have said, is to make it easy to
| copy/archive (on computers, archive.org, etc). A simple set of
| linked pages (with graphics in widely-used formats, eg JPEG/PNG)
| is your best bet.
|
| What the stone tablets crowd here misses is that a lot of
| cultural production today that's very important--major artworks,
| political speeches, movies, court records--is electronic. This
| means that by necessity, unless you think that entire corpus will
| get discarded, future societies are going to develop archival
| systems capable of indexing and decoding all this information.
|
| Also - storage capacity has grown a lot, and that's a trend I'm
| betting will continue. Today, entire libraries' worth of books
| and magazines can be mass-duplicated and carried around on disk
| drives or USB sticks. What does this trend look like in 500
| years?
|
| I also think using open systems and formats has a better chance
| of survival than proprietary ones, if only because there are more
| reference implementations for how to convert bits into something
| people can understand/experience. There's a lot of important
| stuff written in .doc (MS Word) but my money's on HTML or ASCII,
| or even PDF if you want long-term survival.
| genewitch wrote:
| > minimal front-end javascript
|
| uhhh, how about no javascript. and no CSS. and ideally, no HTML
| other than <html>, <head>, <body>; for posterity's sake.
|
| also, for posterity, raw or bitmapped files with a header of
| width x height and just raw pixel values is going to survive
| way longer than whatever gif,png,jpeg format you might pick.
| actaeon169 wrote:
| Have your team announce that is a purely temporary solution and
| will be replaced in an upcoming sprint.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Turn the website into historical curiosity.
|
| For example:
|
| Encode the text in QR codes. Use laser to etch the QR codes into
| thin and light metal plates. Wait until access to space becomes
| cheaper, then pay $ so that someone places those plates on the
| surface of the Moon.
|
| Every 30, 50, 100 years some space tourist discovers those
| plates, reads them and posts them into internet as a curiosity.
| Their content is probably in Wikipedia, Wikimedia and web
| archives too.
| nathanganser wrote:
| Take a look at https://siasky.net
|
| It's a blockchain (Sia) and they focus on data storing.
| IceWreck wrote:
| There are hundreds of 2 bit hacks like this floating around.
| They'd be lucky to last 10 years, let alone five hundred.
| timwis wrote:
| NES cartridge
| mthoms wrote:
| Launch an (autonomous?) ROV to the moon. Draw your message into
| the sand using the tracks of the ROV. Make the message large
| enough to be seen from Earth with a high powered telescope.
| Consider using pictograms, so language won't be an issue.
|
| Bonus points: Pay for the mission by agreeing to embed messages
| from advertisers as well.
| goldenkey wrote:
| I'm surprised no one is saying this: Write a worm/virus that
| continues to propagate the data.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| The only way to make something last 500yr is to make it important
| enough that other people preserve it.
| philihp wrote:
| I fully expect my blog on GitHub Pages to outlive me.
|
| They're stored in the Arctic Code Vault, as well as more replicas
| than you can imagine, because git, so I could imagine there's
| very little risk of data corruption, and because of the amount of
| knowledge stored in this standard format of static HTML, there's
| strong incentive for people to preserve it and keep hosting it if
| Microsoft becomes evil again and decides its not profitable.
| Moreover, if you PGP-sign your git commits with a 4096-but RSA
| key, you can be fairly sure nobody will edit your commits
| (perhaps for at least for the first 200 years). I believe the key
| here is lumping your data in with other high-value data.
| entangledqubit wrote:
| Encode the personal page into a best-selling novel that becomes a
| classic across the world. The rest of civilization will deal with
| the redundant storage for you.
|
| If it's small enough, encode it into a catchy children's song or
| rhyme.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Get it printed on a physical monument made of metal/stone, put it
| on property you own, and engage a lawyer to set up the will and
| property covenants to require its ongoing existence and
| maintenance.
|
| Our guesses about what the web looks like ten years in advance
| are likely to be wrong, let alone 500.
| orangepurple wrote:
| Engrave a QR code into stone
| robotsteve2 wrote:
| You'd have to also include plain English instructions on how
| to read the QR code, since the QR code format probably won't
| be around in the future either.
|
| As for reading the instructions: they could probably still
| interpret modern English, similar to how professionals today
| can still interpret English from 500 years ago (with some
| effort).
| robbedpeter wrote:
| If you could build a computer that held and displayed the data,
| you might be able to preserve it - a tablet or handheld device
| that gets handed down through generations and only activated one
| a decade or so?
|
| Beyond preservation, though, that's an interesting engineering
| puzzle - could you fashion a computer intended to operate for 500
| years, without replacement parts?
|
| It'd need serious shielding, components that wouldn't degrade,
| some sort of capacitor based rechargeable power system, connector
| interfaces designed to be easily modded, and so on.
|
| I imagine such a legacy computer would be durable beyond even
| advanced military or nasa tech allows for.
|
| https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/the-100-year-computer
| jamesdf wrote:
| > "What was there to say? Civilization was like a mad dash that
| lasted five thousand years. Progress begot more progress;
| countless miracles gave birth to more miracles; humankind seemed
| to possess the power of gods; but in the end, the real power was
| wielded by time. Leaving behind a mark was tougher than creating
| a world. At the end of civilization, all they could do was the
| same thing they had done in the distant past, when humanity was
| but a babe: Carving words into stone."
|
| Death's End -Liu Cixin - The third novel in the trilogy staring
| with The Three-Body Problem
| chubot wrote:
| As others have said -- if the goal is to communicate with your
| descendants 500 years from now, I wouldn't use the web!
|
| And I wouldn't use CD-ROMs or Bitcoin
|
| I would use something that's proven to last 500 years, which is
| basically "paper". This is just "the Lindy effect"
| d4mi3n wrote:
| I've toyed with the idea of putting money into a trust and having
| the executors of the trust use the money to maintain stuff like
| this.
|
| It's more of an institutional solution than a technical one, but
| I'm personally more comfortable with an institution lasting 500
| years than an unmaintained piece of hardware or software.
|
| It's the same strategy used by museums--they take a grant from
| somewhere (from government, public, or private entities) and use
| that money to retain expertise and resources required to preserve
| stuff like the Mona Lisa or a dinosaur skeletons for future
| generations.
| elliekelly wrote:
| For the trust route it might be worth looking into a corporate
| trustee vs a natural person. It's much less likely (though not
| impossible) for it to fall through the cracks at a bank's trust
| department than at Doe & Doe Law Firm.
| erikcw wrote:
| IANAL but I believe "the rule against perpetuities" is one of
| the sticking points in using something like a trust as an
| institutional solution to this problem.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Yes, I think perpetual trusts are illegal. Whether 500 years
| counts as perpetual, I don't know.
| jppope wrote:
| Low Tech magazine has a solar powered website... that would cover
| the hosting - https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/09/how-to-
| build-a-lowte...
|
| After that all you need to do is figure out how to have the
| domain name registered annually. Not going to lie ... thats a
| pretty tough problem. You might be able to become a domain name
| registrar and have a trust administer any fees to ICANN... but
| that is still fraught with problems.
|
| happy hunting!
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| probably write it as a virus that jumps from webserver to
| webserver, doing nothing malicious but adding your HTML to a pre-
| determined route
|
| it will have to be a strong AI virus so it can keep rewriting
| itself as new software updates come along so you're risking a
| skynet situation - oh! reminds me of the cowboy bebop episode
| where a hacked satellite entertains itself by drawing geoglyphs
| in the desert-definitely do that.
| mullen wrote:
| Encode the knowledge into the DNA/RNA of a highly contagious
| and non-deadly human virus and release it into the population.
| Hopefully, mutations won't overwrite your information.
| Kheyas wrote:
| Any system that outlives the author has intrinsic value that
| others recognize. So make a page that others want to keep alive.
| whalesalad wrote:
| blockchain, ipfs, it needs to live inside something _else_ that
| other people care about enough to maintain and keep alive
| neiman wrote:
| I don't know the answer but I'll share a short real story.
|
| We made (me and others) the ENS+IPFS website almonit.eth in 2019.
| You can access it with a web3 browser or a gateway
| (almonit.eth.limo).
|
| For a long while I was pinning it in IPFS with my server, but in
| March this year the project stopped so I killed my daemon.
|
| However(!) -- since the website is so popular, it actually still
| now, 7 months later, though there is no one pinning it really. It
| just lives on the fumes of its popularity.
|
| I honestly wonder how long it will continue.
| universe42 wrote:
| It is unlikely that humanity will exist for more than 500 years.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| I expect that humans will still be around in 500 years, or
| 1000, but I highly doubt that they will be members of a
| literate, highly-technological civilization.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Look at what has lasted 500 years, and use those media. Websites
| are not among them.
|
| 1) stone 2) books if printed on the right kind of paper 3) metal
| if it's not something subject to rust
|
| Even if it is possible to make a website that lasts 500 years, I
| expect we haven't figured out how yet. I'm sure it took people a
| while to figure out how to make long-lasting tombstones; early
| North American ones were often made out of sandstone or wood, and
| are illegible or completely gone now. You may be one of the very
| first people to give thought to how to make a website that will
| last that long; what are the odds you will get it right on the
| very first attempt?
| codazoda wrote:
| I recently saw headstones with photos on them. Now I'm thinking
| about writing a bunch of stuff and encoding it in a QR code on
| a headstone. The QR code is likely to be replaced with
| something else, but maybe if it says "QR Code" under it they
| could snap a picture and figure it out.
| bergie wrote:
| I can see future archaeologists classifying QR Codes as an
| "ornamental technique popular in early Plastic Age cultures".
|
| Somewhere a crackpot conspiracy theorist group will be trying
| to claim that the QR Codes contain messages from this long-
| lost civilisation...
| pmarreck wrote:
| Based on fairly common nerd interest in old tech (see:
| retro gaming, for one thing), I'm pretty sure QR codes will
| remain a curiosity for the foreseeable future, as they
| certainly solve a certain use-case/problem
| thruway516 wrote:
| An alien civilization of giant lizard men that once roamed
| the earth whose dietary habits were superior and everyone
| should emulate (by buying and reading my book - "The Paleo-
| Plastic Diet for modern man").
| oceanplexian wrote:
| Earth is a terrible place to store things for hundreds of
| years. I bet you could draw your website into Moon dust and
| come back hundreds of years later and it would still be there
| right next to your footprints.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Interesting point, although a random asteroid might be
| better, because less likely to be trod upon in the next 500
| years.
| junon wrote:
| This isn't a fair premise. Websites have not existed for 500
| years and were not possible until roughly around the time of
| their inception.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Sorry, that was the point I was trying to make, perhaps I
| should have made it more explicitly.
| hnfong wrote:
| It doesn't have to be fair. Things come and go. To host
| information for X years, statistically the things most likely
| to last are those that already existed for at least that
| amount of time.
|
| Or you can take your chances, which, again statistically
| speaking, is not good if we're talking about websites lasting
| 500 years.
| playpause wrote:
| No, the point is you can't use the fact that websites are
| _currently_ under 500 years old as evidence that they won't
| ever be 500 years old.
| [deleted]
| philipswood wrote:
| True, but what percentage of electronic records from the 70s
| are still readable?
| erbdex wrote:
| Series of stone tablets + a visual grammar, language that can be
| deciphered from scrach with new eyes.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Are you asking for a free fantasy way to do this, or serious?
|
| For the former, get your thoughts into the constitution of a
| country or found a religion whose adherents have to memorize your
| stuff.
|
| For the latter, it's pretty hard. I think the problem is that
| tech changes. I guess the question is really whether it's the
| content, or whether it's the delivery mechanism with the content
| that needs to be preserved. Content itself can be transformed.
| Current web standards will probably change over time and it will
| be similar to trying to time travel to a thousand years ago and
| chat with the locals: language changes too.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| That's a really tricky thought exercise. Legal trusts in most
| countries have time limits. Businesses come and go all the time.
| I think you are describing the same dilemma that companies
| offering freezing/preservation of your body or head upon
| death/near-death are dealing with. That is probably the business
| model I would study to find out what countries have the legal
| structure to support their requirements and thus your
| requirements. Even then they and their clients are accepting some
| risk. I suspect you will have to invest some capitol in this if
| you don't want your future generations to carry on this project
| on your behalf.
|
| If your time requirements were shorter I would suggest a legal
| trust and set requirements for trustees to ensure the domain and
| site are preserved. I would also add instructions in the site
| itself to have family members preserve the site or even create
| new domains or methods of presentation. Each generation of family
| member could then create their own trust and repeat the process
| through inheritance. Your lineage could essentially leap-frog the
| system and compensate for businesses going bankrupt or
| technologies changing assuming they value the site and wish to
| add to it. I think your future generations would appreciate the
| ability to update the site. "Keys change, technologies are
| updated..." _-- The Davinci Code_
| xixixao wrote:
| I was gonna suggest, instead of relying on your
| descendants/lawyers, "simply" avoid physical aging and death
| yourself, then you can continue to maintain the website.
|
| Good starter resource: https://www.amazon.com/Abolition-Aging-
| forthcoming-extension...
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I've been following the various teams working on halting or
| reversing aging. They are making great progress but sadly are
| not producing anything that can be commercially acquired yet.
| There are human trials on some of the methods being used on
| specific organs but nothing being tested on the entire body
| yet as far as I know. If you know of intravenous clinical
| trials resetting the epigenetic methylation body-wide, I
| would like to know. I believe they are still trying to find
| the balance that does not lead to tumors.
| felipeqq2 wrote:
| We definitely won't have websites in 500 years
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| Don't count on websites, count on real things. I know books,
| buildings, places, art, monuments, ornaments have all lasted
| hundreds of years
| mahoro wrote:
| Buy a piece of art that is timeless, embed your html on its back.
| Not sure if it meets your presentation goals but it has good
| chances to survive.
| riffic wrote:
| not possible with the way things are currently being run.
|
| go bury a time capsule instead.
| arnonejoe wrote:
| you could host 100% on blockchain.
|
| host the domain on unstoppable domains
| (https://unstoppabledomains.com/)
|
| store the images and single page site on IPFS https://ipfs.io/
|
| https://docs.ipfs.io/how-to/websites-on-ipfs/single-page-web...
| kingcharles wrote:
| As someone who just basically teleported to 2021 from 2013, I can
| tell you that 99% of my bookmarks are now dead. So, even in 8
| years most web sites haven't managed to survive.
| trenchgun wrote:
| Care to elaborate on the teleportation mechanism?
| 542458 wrote:
| Per other comments, county jail waiting for a trial.
| pmarreck wrote:
| I recently went through my 2013 Bitcoin-related bookmarks.
|
| It's a graveyard!
| kbsspl wrote:
| Is this an attempt to have neon colored geocities page forever ?
| earthboundkid wrote:
| The only reliable backup mechanism is starting a successful cult
| whose main tenet is that your data is valuable communication from
| God, so that they continually duplicate it. Anything else will go
| bust in a hundred years at most.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| Engrave you website on a rock and establish a religion around it
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| Build a cube around the rock and instruct people to circle it
| during pilgrimage to the holy rock, which takes place once a
| year. Your descendants may fall out over which follows the real
| instructions and may start their own sects, each with slightly
| different rules.
|
| Coming to think if it, it would be the ultimate troll if you
| can pull it off. Imagine a prank that goes on for centuries and
| gaining so much momentum that people start killing each other
| over it.
| pishpash wrote:
| Everything succumbs to entropic loss. May as well accept the fact
| and let things die with you the natural way.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I would probably create some type of small self-contained unit,
| that's battery powered, and can recharge itself via solar panels.
| I'd have this device periodically try to fetch data from the
| internet.
|
| Once the internet goes down it goes down, and you'd have the
| local cached copy.
|
| I'd also have this mystical device print out the entire website
| in paper form every year or so, and then it would automatically
| shove the book version of it in a miniature Warehouse.
|
| I don't think electronics are going to function any way similar
| to they do now in 200 years. But books, particularly picture
| books will always be readable. We already have examples of this,
| hieroglyphics are thousands of years old but can still be read
| and interpreted by modern people even without knowledge of the
| language they were written in.
| necovek wrote:
| I'd replace the battery with a hand-cranked (or pedal-powered)
| electric motor to generate electricity, but I am not sure if
| magnets or brushes can survive 500 years.
| dhritzkiv wrote:
| How do you keep the battery from degrading after a few decades?
| Are there specific battery types that are long-term (hundreds
| of years?). Such as capacitors?
|
| And the solar panels themselves would need maintenance, even if
| it is simply cleaning.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| That's why we print the book copies of the book. Once people
| stop caring to fix the machine, eventually they can still
| find the books.
| dhritzkiv wrote:
| Where/how is the book being printed? Locally? What's
| powering the printer? How do you ensure that the materials
| (paper, ink, lubricant, etc.) last all those years? What
| about binding/collating those pages?
|
| Or is the printing occurring once (since the site is
| static)?
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Ideally the printer would only run a few times, I imagine
| when the internet finally goes down there's no reason to
| keep printing new copies of the book.
| DOsinga wrote:
| This question always reminds me of the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project - preserving
| the Domesday Book digitally by way of a laserdisc. The technology
| used became obsolete almost immediately and the actual book, now
| 935 years old is still fine.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Write a book and distribute it in high enough numbers. Things
| that seem too big to ever fall today might not exists in even 10
| years, let alone 500, that's valid for every tech companies and
| even tech paradigms, you'd need people to actively migrate your
| site every XX years
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Paper doesn't have a great record over a 500 year timescale.
|
| The collection of the Metropolitan Museum has an API
|
| https://metmuseum.github.io/
|
| and I went fishing a few months ago for images to print onto
| 8''x8'' squares and it's clear that older objects pick up
| damage over time. There are all kinds of beautiful objects from
| ancient Egypt but they are not made of paper. A print from the
| 15k century looks like
|
| https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/367024
|
| It's frequently said that oil paintings hold up well over time
| such as
|
| https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/816514
|
| but paintings like that get a lot of attention in the form of
| cleaning and retouching.
|
| Many of my favorite images come from paintings that are about
| 100 years old, such as the Futurists. These are old enough to
| have scans in the public domain but young enough that they
| haven't picked up the damage you see in older art that hasn't
| been heavily retouched.
| yesenadam wrote:
| > A print from the 13k century looks like
|
| It says "ca. 1435-1491" - the 15th C.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Corrected
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > Many of my favorite images come from paintings that are
| about 100 years old, such as the Futurists.
|
| Sounds interesting! Mind sharing links to some of your
| favourites?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalia_Goncharova
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suprematism
| lm28469 wrote:
| Yeah of course, the og medium probably won't last 500 years,
| but if it's good enough to matter people will put them in
| safe spaces or reproduce them. Good quality modern books kept
| in ok storage conditions should last hundreds of years. I
| have a couple ~100 years old books and they look as new
| besides slight yellowing.
|
| Prints are different since they're much more exposed and
| fragile than books
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Anything that is on display is going to fade more quickly
| because of light than something that is kept closed.
|
| When I was a kid in the 1980s I collected many mass market
| paperbacks (expected to be ephemeral) from as far back in
| the 1960s, even in the early 2000s I thought these held up
| pretty well, but circa 2020 I think many of them are
| getting pretty bad. (Contrast that to trade paperbacks that
| are sometimes "acid-free" but that frequently break in the
| first minutes of use because of incorrect and inconsistent
| construction.)
|
| My house is humid and not a great place to store books, but
| I went looking in an academic library that follows "good"
| practices and found that mass market paperbacks from the
| 1980s and earlier were in bad shape too.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Compress to zip file. Get raw code, upload to major blockchains.
|
| Upload static site to archive.is
|
| Put thumb drive in time capsule in hidden location , also printed
| source code
| bagels wrote:
| I love the hubris of this. It's going to have to be something
| profound to have anyone, including your progeny, care about it in
| 50, let alone 500 years after you are gone.
| bell-cot wrote:
| This. I'm old enough to have seen how little the great-
| grandchildren care about things (heirlooms, family photos, you
| name it) that were profoundly important to their great-
| grandparents.
| vasco wrote:
| All of the internet hasn't been up for even 50 years, it's
| definitely interesting to consider. I think the likeliest way
| would be to leave an investment fund with % widthraw rate that
| would allow paying a developer every few years for some
| maintenance or needed migrations as well as enough to pay for the
| administration of all of this.
|
| Otherwise you depend on friends or family to continue to do that
| for free across a few generations, which is a lot to trust.
| spiderice wrote:
| What motivation does your developer employee have to go hire
| another developer to continue once he is gone? Seems likely
| that he'd just go his whole life taking your money and keeping
| the website up, then let everything go down once he
| retires/dies.
| [deleted]
| anonu wrote:
| create a wikipedia page for yourself... ?
| h0p3 wrote:
| I can appreciate this desire. Printing my website is basically
| out of the question at this point. I rely upon people thinking it
| worthwhile to keep a copy, and I make it fairly easy for people
| to do so. I distribute on a number of networks, I offer a number
| of snapshot archives (e.g.
| https://web.archive.org/web/*/philosopher.life), and I make it
| easy to download a complete copy of the entire site
| (https://philosopher.life/#Readme), as it's just a single html
| file. I do ask family and friends to see it as a book they will
| keep in their libraries, and I keep it very small, almost pure
| text (I don't want it to be any further a burden than it already
| is). Some store it on a thumbdrive or even keep it as an e-mail
| attachment. And, that it is nearly pure text is something that I
| think is exceptionally useful for this problem, as even if there
| aren't browsers that will be able to render it (that would be
| sad), there may be tools that can at least read the source (and,
| in a way, the site is meant to be somewhat readable from source,
| though it requires some motivation). I also enjoy the knowledge
| that there are random copies out there sitting on hard drives. I
| think it's gonna take some luck too.
| virologist wrote:
| inscribe it on a marble and bury it.
| virologist wrote:
| I said this because the semi conductor tech we have today will
| be extinct and invaluable 500 years from now. if you do it
| electronically.
| pmarreck wrote:
| A QR code encoding an image of the page with some simple
| compression algorithm.
|
| A second page with the QR code parser and decompression code
| shown as LISP code.
|
| Perhaps also a LISP interpreter written in LISP to show how it
| works.
| yayr wrote:
| You could publish the site on IPFS. Then you could device a
| solidity contract that awards ETH to someone hosting / pinning
| it. There are multiple ways to organise the latter. The easiest
| could be to provide your heirs the means to change the hosting
| provider reward address of that contract, in case he discontinues
| to deliver.
| paxys wrote:
| What do you mean by "host a personal page"? If the goal is simply
| to pass on information to your descendents, there are many better
| ways to do it than setting up a web page on the internet.
|
| If that is a strict requirement, then trying to come up with a
| single technological solution today that will work forever is the
| wrong approach and is guaranteed to fail at some point. What you
| want to do is set up some company/trust/other organization which
| will keep the site up to date with technological (and other)
| changes.
| codegeek wrote:
| Become really famous (or infamous) so you don't have to host
| anything. Others will do it for you. Think about all the people
| you know who existed 500+ years ago. Did we just happen to find a
| book/stone where they wrote their story ? It was more about what
| they did that created history. So, create history and you will be
| hosted for ever. Think of names like Julius Caeser etc.
| a9h74j wrote:
| Or, at least _attribute_ your work to someone famous, to
| increase the odds for attention and recopying?
|
| "Anything really important is also worth doing anonymously."
| arthur_sav wrote:
| Encode it into your DNA and make sure to spread your seed far and
| wide.
|
| If we haven't destroyed ourselves until then, you should be able
| to go to your local DNA reading store and view the contents.
| [deleted]
| kfprt wrote:
| Set it in concrete. Most of the films from the 20's burned up and
| the software track record is terrible.
| LurkingPenguin wrote:
| I think I saw some sort of upsell on GoDaddy for 500 year hosting
| the other day.
| Fomite wrote:
| Endow a university to start an archival server project.
| crooked-v wrote:
| Go to a big legal firm that's been around for at least a few
| hundred years. With them, set up a trust with a sufficient
| endowment to be run indefinitely (barring total societal or
| economic collapse), with the mission of maintaining this specific
| website in accessible format (including updates and format shifts
| as necessary).
|
| It will be expensive, but this general structure is already used
| by various organizations with one mission or another.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| I know of one that was over a hundred years old, and was gone
| in a few months.
|
| One of the grandsons took most of the money, and it folded.
| acid__ wrote:
| Yup. Setting up a trust is the best way to do this.
|
| --
|
| Many solutions here suggesting physical storage mechanisms
| which defeats the whole purpose of _hosting_ a widely and
| public accessible document.
|
| A trust would have the finances and most aligned incentives to
| keep the content online and in a format that is accessible.
|
| Many other solutions involve telling your children to tell
| their children to ... etc. But again, you have no incentive to
| give a damn about the whims of someone who died 300 years ago,
| and it only takes one uncaring child to cut the chain short.
|
| A trust's hefty financial incentives can keep anyones
| incentives aligned.
|
| It makes sense that there's sexy technical solutions here
| (we're on Hacker News), but the most important thing is to keep
| the incentives aligned. That's what a trust is for.
| novaRom wrote:
| I doubt any commercial/legal entity will live through the
| upcoming societal transformations. It is naive to believe our
| current political and economic systems will not change too much
| even in the next 20-30 years.
| t-writescode wrote:
| Nintendo is over 100. There are breweries with *thousand*
| year leases to the British Monarchy.
|
| Lots of kinds of companies have survived major world
| transformations.
| laurent123456 wrote:
| Looks like many of the oldest companies in the word are
| indeed Japanese. Kongo Gumi, a construction firm, dates
| back from 578.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
| SoylentOrange wrote:
| There are plenty of Italian and Swiss banks that are over 300
| years old. They've survived reformations, wars including
| World Wars, plagues, purges, and the transition from feudal
| monarchies to empire and to democracy. For example, the
| British banking giant Barclays was founded in 1690. Here's a
| partial list of other ancient banks: https://en.wikipedia.org
| /wiki/List_of_oldest_banks_in_contin...
|
| I think it's more reasonable to assume that they'll survive
| any future calamity (especially something so close as 20-30
| years) than to assume that our current age is somehow
| special.
| satellite2 wrote:
| But I doubt Barclays is currently upholding contracts
| signed 200 years ago.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Benjamin Franklin's endowments to the cities of Boston
| and Philadelphia are still being maintained as trusts to
| this day.
| novaRom wrote:
| In 1941 when the Nazi government stripped German Jews of
| their citizenship, the Swiss authorities applied the law to
| German Jews living in Switzerland by declaring them
| stateless; when in February 1945 Swiss authorities blocked
| German Bank accounts held in Switzerland they declared that
| the German Jews were no longer stateless, but were once
| again German and blocked their Swiss bank accounts as well.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergier_commission
| necovek wrote:
| When worrying about surviving for hundreds of years, you
| need to compare with the data about how many have existed
| for hundreds of years and then folded anyway.
|
| Note that the above list includes a bunch of "national
| banks" which were founded at the peak of "national
| movement" in 1800s (as "nations" started forming "national
| countries") -- with many of them, you can't really leave a
| deposit and they instead regulate an economy of a country
| (not sure about "many", but at least National Bank of
| Serbia is one of those).
| kgin wrote:
| Can you tell us more about what transformations are on the
| calendar?
| robocat wrote:
| You couldn't trust one firm. Many firms in many countries?
|
| Or even better, diversify, and use multiple different plans,
| not just lawyers.
| WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote:
| Was going to say this. Great answer
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I think about this a lot, and I prioritize site longevity and
| compatibility in my framework. To this end, I leverage the Lindy
| Effect, writing HTML which works with the last 25 years of
| browsers, starting with Mosaic and Netscape. You want to use only
| the most basic, least common denominator HTML markup, to improve
| its chances of not becoming "deprecated".
|
| If you use JS and CSS, it must have abundant feature-checks, and
| ideally be optional. Your pages should certainly be usable
| without JS. You probably want to go with static HTML or only the
| most basic, again, lowest common denominator server-side
| dependencies, such as SSI.
|
| You must make your site easily indexable, crawlable, and
| spiderable, so that it can be easily propagated to the Internet
| Archive and other archiving systems. Many sites I made in the
| past are long gone at their original URLs but remain accessible
| via Wayback Machine.
|
| That's all I can think of for now.
| aardvark179 wrote:
| This isn't a technological answer, but set up a trust fund for
| the purpose. None of us know what web hosting or its equivalent
| will be in 109 years, let alone 500, so the only real solution is
| to ensure there will be somebody around whose job will be to sort
| that out.
| akkartik wrote:
| I used to wonder about questions like this, but somewhere along
| the line they've become unimportant. I'm not sure why that is, or
| whether that's a good thing, but my best guess is that I've grown
| less delusional about how much others care about me.
|
| It's an interesting thought experiment to ask how important such
| a page about your father or grandfather would be to you. It seems
| much less important to me than my own page. So it will be for
| others.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Is there anything current day that is potentially stable for 500
| years ?
| iamgopal wrote:
| Is your next idea is Of starting organisation with core goal is
| of preservation of such text ?
| austinjp wrote:
| There are several comments here that involve other people doing
| things over the generations. Printing stuff, reminiscing or
| reflecting on anniversaries, taking legal and fiscal
| responsibility, etc etc.
|
| Has anyone here been on the other end of the equation? By which I
| mean, has anyone here been born into a family with a similar
| ongoing situation?
|
| The most effective way might be to create a work of art or
| science or whatever that is of such significance that others are
| motivated to archive and disseminate or for you. So... a trite
| answer might be... inspire others to memor(ial)ise you. Good luck
| with that :)
|
| PS. I initially intended to mention the Rosetta project and I'm
| glad to see that here. Philosophers, economists, psychologists
| and many others have written plenty about issues with archiving,
| definitely worth looking into.
|
| PPS. I'm also very pleased to see a reference to Ozymandias. I
| was thinking about the Buddhist philosophy that, simply,
| _suffering exists_. It would be worth examining your motivations.
| Not that I disagree with them; quite the opposite.
| aronpye wrote:
| Transmit it into space, maybe some distant alien civilization
| will receive it.
| kingcharles wrote:
| Who is going to pay for your domain name? I was in jail and
| luckily had someone pay for one of my domains, but all the others
| I owned got recycled because I couldn't get to the Internet to
| pay for them.
|
| How many years in advance can you pay? What does ICANN support?
| 10 years?
|
| "maximum remaining unexpired term shall not exceed ten years"
| https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/faqs-84-2012-02-25-en#...
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