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?
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.
Something like that might work
It is very good wine indeed. It's called Malvasia.
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvas%C3%ADa_(uva)
There's a dry and sweet version, I prefer the sweet one. https://cellerdelhospital.cat/producte/malvasia-dolca/
They do ship internationally it seems, this one is the one from the story =)
The origin city of the grape variety, which came by ship to my city at the time, was monemvasia https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monemvas%C3%ADa
Similar to those wise families that teach their kids to take care of their elders.
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.
W3C had a pretty big 30th birthday thing recently. https://www.w3.org/blog/2021/08/30-years-on-from-introducing...
<doth whence="bæc">Forsooth!</doth>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_Programming_Langua...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7639119
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4910622
§doth whence="bæc"§ Forsooth! ¶doth¶https://www.amazon.com/Hemingway-Wrote-JavaScript-Angus-Crol...
which is actually kind of amusing and creative.
This Shakespeare JavaScript is fantastic and I want to write all my comments in this style: https://imgur.com/gallery/IKlBAX0
EDIT: huh, imgur removes the word "javascript" from post titles and descriptions. Weird that they couldn't find a better way to stop javascript attacks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_Programming_Langua...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equals_sign#History
I wonder when angle braces were introduced?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_mathematical_symbols_...
let there = light # fix dark issueI think you mean anachronistic there.
Edit: ugh sorry, I realize you wrote spoken languages (which English would be in the top at, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...), not native/first language/by population. Ignore me!
( https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/252832/short-story... )
If you don't mind them being shorts, there are some good sci-fi stories on the Dust and Omeleto channels on YouTube. e.g. this "One Minute Time Machine" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBkBS4O3yvY - has just two people, a bench, and a Time MacGuffin.
Or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOwKExagzdQ - "The Tunnel Ahead", 15 minute short set in an overpopulated world.
I do feel that many include space because it's fun and can be CGI modelled, or time travel because it makes for a cheap sci-fi plot, and if you rule those out you get things like The OceanMaker ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWCGK4nneeU ) which I didn't like so much because nothing really happens. Whether there are more concepty ones with more nuanced plot, they probably didn't catch my eye to watch.
Some texts survived long time in oral form, I heard.
Forming the sources as a verse could help here.
Mostly oriented to texts, altough images can be memorized in their hex encoding, for example.
Which organized religion are you referring to here? All the big ones have changed immensely.
I don't see much stability.
Many, many people speaking English also creates an incentive for stability at the same time it creates variation.
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.
One is a 'phase' the other is cross generational.
Stuff like that can easily be looked up though, there are a number of "youth/hipster speak" dictionaires, pages like KnowYourMeme...
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?
Perhaps our developer docs will come to be seen as some kind of rare "Formal English" (I mean, it kind of is already) and the rest of communication will be in ... emoji??
for inspiration on how to preserve things for future generations we may look at religion.
The world was also a very different place, I suspect language will evolve far slower over the next 500 years due to the vast new interconnectedness that society has never experienced before. I think in 500 years, someone looking back at a website from today will find something far more intelligible than when we look back 500 years. The language will be closer and they will have a lot of detailed context to place it in.
I know this goes against the strangely attractive premise that civilisations rise and fall and we are ants running around thinking we are important in the moment and nothing we do will last... but the world really has become a more interconnected and stable place and it seems far more probable that it will remain that way. If there is an empire that could fall today and spell the end, it's communication technology.
In 500 years this will be gibberish. Who knows if people will even know how to read?
Which means your incredibly interesting autobiographical web page which will be about as deep and interesting as an emoji, and hold attention for roughly as long.
Another possible - currently more likely - next step is extinction because of climate change, so there's no guarantee that OP will even have great grandchildren.
Not...really? This is the whole reason people talk about over-important ants...
Without getting into anything more exotic like heat death of the universe (there is some contention about what this actually means for us, also measured in billions of years not 500 of op), the biggest issue is how to keep things "on".
Plentiful energy is an absolute requirement of modern culture and society, and in 500 years we have gone through at least three major different energy source changes (animal oil, coal, gas) - there are others, but they have had less general impact. Each of those sources of energy dramatically defined their respective cultures, generations, assuming we find new ones, or even worse assuming we don't and have to go back to burning wood or (if you are lucky) using solar power, society will again dramatically change as a result.
A different way to keep things "on", would be to use almost no power. Combine a powerless or restful display (e-ink), with some form of permanent storage, spend some time on the electronics to ensure they are robust (no capacitors, regulate your power to ensure resistors don't blow out), combine with a power source which requires little maintenance (wind, solar, thermal). Maybe even incorporate some RFID-esque technology, where the device is powered by attempting to read it. You would have to build out the network which could do that - I don't think today's internet can function without power hungry routers, switches, hubs.
On the software side, simple, tiny, and "visible" - not necessary "human readable", as others have pointed out language or customs may have changed in the future, but something which is inherently and simply debug-able. Simpler said than done, but think components which clearly display what they are doing over providing black box interfaces, interpreted, modular code, perhaps even a custom CPU which has a clear interface "under the hood". This will aid in people being able to adapt whatever devices besides the powerless display (which comes with your device) they want to connect, on whichever protocol they want to connect on (HTTP 2.0 is very different compared to HTTP 1.0, 3.0 may be even more foreign, or HTTP may no longer exist).
As for people caring about it, well, I don't think the technology for this really exists today, so I imagine such a device would be historically significant, if nothing else. You could also store famous works of literature, or prove maths concepts, or build up a religion around the device. Bibles have lasted (at least as long as Christianity has been dominant) for about the past two millennia, Gilgamesh is ~3-4k years old, thanks to Archimedes, Geometry predates the new testament, arguably if the library of Alexandria had survived, we might have had works on chemistry, literature predating all of those (Greek Fire is the famous example here, but there is of course the whole legend of Egypt, surrounding not just the pyramids but the 'powers' of the Egyptian Priests - likely scientists of their time much like the Catholic tradition).
Which is all to say, the internet as an architecture is ephemeral and short-lived. The work on a distributed internet is a step in the "right direction", but most if not all implementations are doomed to failure by both over-complexity and a requirement that somebody pay an electric bill. Certain parts of the internet network, such as TCP/IP, or the insight to wrap messages multiple times (electrical, local, network, service, application), are not just salvageable but unlikely to change significantly, since they are properties somewhat inherent to communications networks (need for addressing, need to couple disparate systems, need for different applications/services to communicate somewhat independently), but more complex networking concepts in active usage, things like network topologies, routing tables, algorithms, anything resulting in a requirement for active power, is not compatible with long term archival and retrieval.
Perhaps in the end, the question is akin to asking "how can I keep a flame burning for 500 years" - the answer is realistically you probably can't. Campfires serve a different purpose than sign posts, you can create a yellow sculpture to capture the sun and heat an area consistently for hundreds of years, but it won't be a campfire. It also won't be a sign post, more of a monument. Still pretty cool. :)
Now the real question is whether that website will have more significance than a XVI century grocery list, and be really worth preserving to your descendants…
Given the extent of the Roman Empire, I think Latin achieved some pretty significant cultural status. Afaik, Catholic mass stopped being in latin in the 1960's. That's ~3rd century to 20th century. So in use roughly 3x as long as English? (Not a specialist.)
I think this is actually wrong. It certainly doesn't hurt to write on fired clay tablets, or to "store" your papyrus documents in an extremely low-humidity environment. That might enable accidental preservation. But at the of the day (or at the end of the millennium), things survive because lots of people care about them.
You mention Anglo Saxon. That's an interesting example, because the entire corpus of Anglo Saxon literature is easily anthologized in a single volume, and there is exactly one extant copy of what most scholars regard as the most important thing written in the language (Beowulf). But the truth is this: Most of it is gone, because people stopped caring about what was written in it.
But psalters? Bibles? Church histories? It's an embarrassment of riches. Why? Because people cared very deeply about those things.
And translation helps, but again, it's not quite enough. The instructions for my dehumidifier are in eight different languages. Where did I put that again?
To come at it from another angle: Finding a paper copy of a 1955 Seattle phonebook is extremely difficult. But why? It was written on paper, there were thousands and thousands of copies printed, none of them have actually disintegrated into dust, and yet . . .
So: My advice would be to make that web page pertain to something of epochal importance to millions of people. They'll do the rest.
which is a hard task. and irrelevant to the OP's question.
There are many things that people would want to preserve, but is of no importance to the grand scheme of humanity. You're basically saying that unless your works is of such importance that millions of people generations to come would voluntarily preserve it, the works do not deserve preservation.
I'm not quite following why this is not relevant to the OP's question. I suppose I'm saying that it's not just a hard task, but an almost impossible one. Lots of people (2000 years ago, say) thought that what they were writing was of world-historical significance; today, we barely know their names. Others dashed off dictated letters to small, fragile communities of early followers and just happened to have created among the most well preserved texts of all time.
All I'm really saying here is that among the titanic forces determining which is which, the type of ink used seems not to be a matter of much importance.
Sure, you have the biggest chance of having something preserved if enough people care about it. This is a case where, as you rightly point out, technology matters not.
But we can still discuss technologies of preservation, especially in the light of non-physical creations like works presented on a digital machine.
What does last? Making something a tradition can help smooth over logic. Making it part of a long running organisation would help (organisations can exist for multiple centuries).
Perhaps an organisation dedicated to preserving messages through the ages, and encourage - say - a Christmas message? More people involved mean more care.
The hardest part isn’t writing something that millions of people find critically important—it’s ensuring that society will continue to find the same things important for centuries. A temporal value-alignment problem.
However, there are examples of languages and documents that have been preserved, e.g. a Latin bible. Because of its status as a holy document and the vast power of the Catholic church, its tradition of teaching Latin, not just to read the bible, but conduct business and masses, the Latin in which the bible was written was very well preserved.
The progression of language has been affected by mass media, which has a standardizing influence. Written language will be affected by translation technologies that are at the moment unimaginable. Once complicated problems, e.g. the Chinese typewriter--have been resolved, and ordinary Chinese typing, which used to be limiting to typesetting speeds can now outpace the fastest QWERTY speedster by 2x or 3x or more. Language will not be the problem in the future that it was in the past.
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.
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.
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.
Doable for some, even easy for some, but for the vast majority of people.... very hard.
I'm assuming this plan kicks off at death, so your trust wouldn't need to spend much to maintain itself.
x=~120
These are going to work long after other elements of technology change. The newest tech are going to change more often than the foundation.
Let's not restrict this to "successor technologies." If we look to prior art, the traditional solution has been to deposit a copy of a work in a library. In that light, OP sounds like they're looking for the concept of a "family chronicle."
It is sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is almost 200 years old as an organization, which plans to last for a very long time; financially conservative (strong savings and effectively no debt), tech savvy, have strong traditions of decisions by consensus (or unanimity of leaders), and owns among other things a climate-controlled vault inside a granite mountain that has contained large amounts of microfilmed genealogical records (now digitized -- yay!). As family-oriented (ie, for preserving multigenerational culture among other things) as they come. One goal is to learn Adam's/everyone's family tree, as far as possible, and keep it forever. There are of ~ 17 million members (I am one), and for many reasons it seems likely to stick around a long time (I gather that Tolstoy also thought so, when he visited, when it was much smaller :) . (They also own Brigham Young University aka BYU, and holds a twice-yearly conference whose contents are translated to like >90 languages, I think several dozen languages live during it, and heard or read by people in some 220 countries, if my rough memory serves.)
I guess the site could have some size limit on what can be added from one person's account, or attached to one particular ancestor, or something, but the web site with all features is free, and I don't know why that would ever change. I used to work there (among many) on some back-end stuff.
(Edits to the above for clarity, working there, and the Tolstoy & BYU mentions.)
Edit: I'm curious: what is the general nature of the content you would like to save for 500 years? Sounds intriguing. Would it be useful to others also? Another idea would be to put it in wikipedia and/or archive.org, if it really doesn't fit in familysearch.org .
The guts of the box carry a multi array of small, cheap computes's and a very large array of SSDs. Encased in material to protect from damaging scenarios.
The instructions on the outside of the box are diagrams, and text written in all current languages on earth.
A copy of Wikipedia/whatever archive is included. As well as your personal autobiography.
It figures out the healthiest way to stay dormant when not in use. And the healthiest way to use a subset of the hardware in the box to ensure a 500+ lifespan.
Cover plate for interfaces to be removed/opened to use.
If you give a university 1B for a 500 year commitment, that means you're paying the university $5,000 a day to keep that service up.
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.”
>can somebody give me some context? I'm lost. is this referencing the bible? or an anime?
Not sure if masterful troll or not...
Social media in a nutshell.
It will be expensive, but this general structure is already used by various organizations with one mission or another.
Lots of kinds of companies have survived major world transformations.
> In January 2006, after falling on difficult times, it became a subsidiary of the Takamatsu Construction Group.
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.
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).
Or even better, diversify, and use multiple different plans, not just lawyers.
--
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.
I would never run this kind of website on free hosting (e.g. GitHub pages.) I think it's dangerous to assume that this business model will continue to exist for the next 500 years. It would be much safer to pay the ~$0.02/mo to store and serve your files from an AWS S3 bucket. A $5/mo DigitalOcean VPS would be safer, but probably overkill. I really like the idea of paying $0.24 per year to cover the exact costs of electricity, storage, servers, and bandwidth. These costs might continue to decrease over time, but they can never be 0 (e.g. Landauer's principle [1].)
I don't know how to estimate the cost of a domain name over the next 500 years. It's definitely not going to stay $10 / year forever. Maybe registrars will start charging higher prices or taxes based on the market value of your domain. Or some company will really want to take over your domain. Like Nissan [2] for example.
Ethereum name service (ENS) [3] could be interesting. Pricing [4]:
* 5+ character .eth names: $5 in ETH per year * 4 character .eth names: $160 in ETH per year * 3 character .eth names $640 in ETH per year
The world seems to have decided that names are worth roughly $10/year, for a single planet with a population of 7.9 billion humans. We'll probably be a multi-planet species at some point during the next 500 years. It's hard to imagine what the universe will look like 5,000 or 50,000 years from now. Imagine there's trillions of sentient beings living throughout the universe, and a "universal internet" (even if information still takes many years to propagate throughout the universe.) Maybe names will become far more expensive.
I think the safest option would be to choose a random string of letters and numbers: 2g39pz6jygjd.com + 2g39pz6jygjd.eth. It would still point to a page that includes your name and all of your content, so you'd still be indexed by search engines. And it's very unlikely that someone will start a company called "2g39pz6jygjd" and try to file a trademark.
This kind of random name would probably continue to be worth around $10/year, or perhaps up to $100 / year. It might continue to cost around $0.20 per year to host your static website on AWS S3 (or similar). Bandwidth would be interesting to think about.
Let's say you're trying to keep a blog running forever. Probably a good idea to keep it very simple and use a very basic CSS them, so each page could be around 20 kb. Serving your page to 50,000 visitors would require 1 GB of bandwidth. But let's prepare for a worst case scenario: Everyone on earth visits your website once a day for a month.
7,900,000,000 * 29.53 days (average number of days in a month) * 20 kB = 57709.5 TB. (That's actually way more than I expected! I find it really hard to understand just how many people there are in the world.)
I used this AWS calculator [6]:
* 0.25 GB monthly storage
* 7,900,000,000 * 29.53 days = 233,287,000,000 requests (let's say we serve a single HTML page that includes inline CSS.)
* 57709.5 TB transfered
S3 Standard cost (monthly): $134,680.98 USD. Or $1,616,171.76 per year.
That was just an exercise to figure out the maximum possible cost of hosting a simple web page. It was a fun tangent but we can ignore all of that.
Let's just say it could cost up to $100 per year. Assuming an extremely safe withdrawal rate of 0.5%, you'll need to ask your trust to invest $20,000 (100 / 0.005) in a mix of ETFs, bonds, cryptocurrencies, gold, etc. That should guarantee that you can continue paying for web hosting through the next 1,000 recessions, nuclear wars, ice ages, etc.
[1] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Landauer%27s_principle
[4] https://docs.ens.domains/frequently-asked-questions
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.
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.
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.
At nuclear waste sites, even the feds have come up with a few ways of saying "Don't enter. It is bad" with different languages, pictorial signs, and such.
It is really tough to figure out what the next few hundred years looks like. And to be a bit political, I don't think anyone saw the invasion of the capitol building in January.
It isn't easy to predict the future. With the original poster in mind, I think the best bet would to be with archive.org.
Maybe archive.org should provide this service. It could be a way to generate revenue - say "here is a thousand bucks, keep it for eternity."
I'm not sure I would want my thoughts to last that long though.
(And I'm still not sure that it would survive for more than a few hundred years.) Maybe the right thing to do is do something so great for society that they want to write books on you (eg: George Washington).
Rarely do the people that seek this actually achieve this. --quoth the raven
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.
Software's intangibility will be its downfall when our modern society eventually collapses.
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
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?
M-x purify-water is gonna save a lot of people one day.
I hope your predictions bring similar joy to future readers in the decades, centuries, and millenia to come.
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.
The actual concern is 2 degrees of average heat change and how that will change the web of systems that we rely on for current human civilization. Break enough subsystems in there and the human experience becomes dramatically different.
Unfortunately, all the existential risks from the Cold War are still around, plus we have new ones we didn't know about or didn't take seriously back then.
Collapse is not a singular event at a fixed point in time like the start of a war would be, it's a process.
I am assuming you are thinking of 2000, though, and only mistyped 2020 because... well, that one was weird, but only a year ago.
Such a shame!
Apparently it has to do with using a certain type of volcanic ash in the concrete...
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..
So as people become disconnected from the great chain of being that connects your ancestors to you and you to your descendants, they start to build ugly, disposable buildings.
Perhaps one approach might be to provide lower interest rates to buildings based on the expected life and maintenance cost. So a building that is expected to last 500 years would have a much lower annual interest burden than a building expected to last 70 years. That would require some type of government guarantee for the 500 year bond.
Death's End -Liu Cixin - The third novel in the trilogy staring with The Three-Body Problem
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.
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.
like trees falling silently in desolate forests?
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...
Trying to grasp a time span of one million years feels impossible, in the context of development of culture and technology.
It seems quite unlikely to me that we are the first such development on this rock.
"You shall not meddle with the lightcone of the recursive time-travelling super-intelligence you created?"
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.
There were also a lot of odd assumptions/conclusions about how people would behave but I put that down to a different cultural mindset (and in this sense it was pretty interesting), however some of the recurring social themes stretched credibility a bit. Also for a book that's generally held up as being hard sci-fi, the actual science aspect had some glaring flaws in pivotal events which really strained belief. (Well, either that or my understanding of astrophysics is way off...)
I remember, now, but it wouldn’t be a spoiler for me.
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.)
Edit: and/or other traditional Jewish yearly family events.
Create a social ritual to read it so it can stay pliable. Vellum lasts forever
somewhat reminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz
> In the longer term, archivists are encouraged to pool the resources of the encyclopedia for the common good. A suggested model of collaboration is based on the Leibowitz-Canticle report of the 1960s, which suggests pooling of archives in a centralized location, which might serve as a hub for reconstruction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Terminal_Event_Manag...
After reading that I quickly found a copy in the library to enjoy. Not many sci-fi books from 1959 have remained as relevant and fresh 6 decades later.
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.
on a practically non-declining 2000km high orbit where USSR Uranium nuclear reactors are parked.
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.
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!
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
Ignoring the tone of the parent comment, i don't believe that this subcomment is necessarily correct either.
Sure, "cancelling" is a modern term, but i'm pretty sure that exile to any degree and censorship of the exiled people (or worse) have been prevalent throughout the history of humanity, be it reporting them to the communist spies for non-communist rhetoric, claiming that they're guilty of blasphemy against the church or declaring them a witch.
Thus, regardless of where any of us stand in regards to the political or ideological climate, viewing preserving information for a long time as a social problem definitely has some merit to it. For example, just look at this from almost a century ago: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/stalin-photo-manipulation-1...
I think it might be the other way around: pigment-based inks are opaque particles bonded to the paper, and so even if their colour changes/fades they're likely to still be legible. Whereas dye-based inks, when they fade, can completely disappear. (One advantage of dye-based inks is that they have a larger gamut.)
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.
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
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.
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.
Same way they know now. Humans will still be humans. If my 3 year old son can figure out how my e-reader works from nothing, so can future humans.
On how to operate it, it's an e-reader, you turn it on there's the manual there. There is the really difficult part of telling people "put 12V DC here, ground on the outside", but it's trivial compared to the problem of people understanding the books inside.
A diode bridge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diode_bridge) can easily take care of polarity inversions. Voltage is a harder problem.
Since we're going through flights of fancy in these threads, another option would be to add a built-in solar panel to your hypothetical e-reader. Expose it to enough light (and you can probably assume the lighting won't be much brighter than a tropical midday sun) and it turns on.
It should still be possible to make a solar powered e-reader long-lived, but a replaceable power supply is a good idea even if your device has to last for a couple of years.
[0] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
[1] : https://purl.pt/24107/1/iPres2013_PDF/Permanent%20Digital%20...
"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?"
I lost a lot of email.
They had sent a couple of warnings, which I had cleverly filtered into a special folder. And missed.
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...
EDIT: ENS expiry would bite you. Maybe just IPFS then.
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.
That makes the value proposition of the Ethereum blockchain as a data store a lot less attractive.
And who knows what the unexpected looks like...Wars, political shifts, etc. Hell, until 2019, I thought toilet paper was unlimited. Once again, toilet paper is starting to look like the currency of the new-world.
:) That's a joke BTW. But is it? I don't want to go back to using squirrels as toilet paper!
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
"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
A webpage is discoverable
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.
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
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
The Layer 2 technology, like the Lightning Network will fix the "infinite data on disk" problem.
> centralization of the miners will continue to increase
Ask yourself: why do miners use energy to run the Bitcoin software?
You can get paid to learn about Bitcoin with the Satoshi Passport app on iOS.
But really it's not even necessary, nodes can and do prune op_return, spent, and otherwise unspendable transaction outputs.
The point though is someone is likely to always hold onto a complete history of the Bitcoin blockchain, even if most users don't.
The former may or may not happen depending on how widely it is used, certainly not everyone will have the full blockchain on their devices due to storage requirements. The latter is a social issue not a technical one.
> Please take the time to learn how Bitcoin works before pontificating
One can definitely make an argument that Bitcoin will lose its social relevance in 100 years. Or 500 years. Or 1000 years. Do you see where i'm going with this?
Most of the OSes currently in use might not be relevant in a century. Most of HDDs or SSDs in use currently won't be around in a century, unless they're a part of an abstracted and clustered storage pool, which would take constant effort to maintain. Even short of the technical concerns, there is still need for social relevance - if and when it eventually ceases to be relevant, no one will care much about maintaining copies of the full blockchain, except for maybe in some museum archive.
Using a globally distributed store like that is a good idea, but it's definitely not foolproof. One of the better ways, perhaps, but maybe there are even better ones, that you or a foundation in your name controls, with properly sourced funding and preservation of data being its sole and primary concern.
There are obvious problems with blindly republishing arbitrary data from a public blockchain, of course.
Depending on how long you're willing to wait, you might be able to publish with as little as $0.00061 per byte: https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/
For reference, the text of the HN homepage (excluding HTML tags) is about 4KB so ~$2 if you're willing to wait, or up to ~$200 if you're in a hurry. I'm not sure if op_return transactions are typically priced the same as standard transactions though.
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.
> 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
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InPhase_Technologies
[2] https://medium.com/arch-mission-foundation/arch-mission-foun...
Unfortunately, I can’t find it again at the moment.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Basics_of_...
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://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/ignite-project...
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).
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...
same also for upload to wikimedia
Most non profit internet orgs will ofte sell out for the right price unless set up properly. What makes this different?
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.
Is this not already the mission of the Internet Archive? Except instead of just your page, they preserve all pages that they crawl.
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.
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.
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.
500 year old English is nothing like English today
Now if we go back a thousand years…
But otherwise yeah, the Norman Conquest did a number on the language
⸻⸻⸻
1. A notable exception would be Edmund Spenser who wrote in a style that was archaic even to his contemporaries.
Of course, it’s entirely possible the rate of change within a language is not static over millennia.
If it's not, I would love to know more about this.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, they’re long gone so it doesn’t really matter.
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.
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.
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?
Or you can take your chances, which, again statistically speaking, is not good if we're talking about websites lasting 500 years.
Somewhere a crackpot conspiracy theorist group will be trying to claim that the QR Codes contain messages from this long-lost civilisation…
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.
> Perhaps there will be a technology that allows you to write site files in the DNA directly of your children
- 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) . ?
—someone in 1985, probably
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.
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.
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.
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.
By analogy, the contents of a few torrents might be archived somewhere 500 years from now, but nobody will be seeding the torrents themselves.
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
Even historians curate and don't keep everything.
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.
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.
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.
And the solar panels themselves would need maintenance, even if it is simply cleaning.
Or is the printing occurring once (since the site is static)?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
The collection of the Metropolitan Museum has an API
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 15ᵗʰ 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.
Prints are different since they're much more exposed and fragile than books
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.
It says "ca. 1435–1491" - the 15th C.
Sounds interesting! Mind sharing links to some of your favourites?
Some of those RF photons will arrive just outside the event horizon and be bent ~180° to a trajectory that will intercept the earth’s path about the same amount of time in the future.
By then we will have solar-system sized radio receivers that can pick it up (or, to satisfy the doomophiles, ‘land on a dead planet’)
Establish some kind of religion or cult or fraternity. Give them your personal webpage as a sacred document that can be passed down with some secret ritual. Develop a community of the admirers.
One example: a shrine in Japan kept the records of ice ridge forming in a certain lake (which they considered sacred). The tradition started around 15c and still continues today. It's one of the oldest climate record at a specific location.
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.
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...
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.
Our guesses about what the web looks like ten years in advance are likely to be wrong, let alone 500.
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).
It's a graveyard!
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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...".
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.
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.
The Rosetta Stone for example is an incredibly boring text about taxes on religious organisations, but it proved to be rather useful.
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?".
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?
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.
Books, buildings, and art survive 500 years and not much else.
Look up Nicolas Flamel, his house is now the oldest in Paris, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Nicolas_Flamel
Create an artifact, surround it with mystery, and in 500 years it will be either an artifact exposed in the museum, or a relic people will be looking for even in generations.
Some people like to pretend that the philosopher's stone isn't real, but if you visit the catacombs with a radio-isotope detector and locate his remains, you will be convinced it is.
Presumably it was a hot to the touch radioactive meteorite passed down through generations that had been wrapped in lead. When he melted the lead, the transmuted gold fell at the bottom. It was a technology that wouldn't be discovered until Becquerel 500 years later.
Inside this meteorite, which until it was shielded properly, whose path you could back-trace via following the traces of radioactivity, it was discovered by x-ray imagery that it contained a perfect metallic disk with engraved features in its core. The rest is classified, but if you can store your website in a box there, you can rest assured that it will be preserved too.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Links: 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_genealogy_registers_at_H... 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcSyvvreJKs
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.
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.
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#...
Or just pay someone to do it in your name, like a small foundation.
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
Good starter resource: https://www.amazon.com/Abolition-Aging-forthcoming-extension...
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.
* Launch a satellite into space powered by a fission reactor with excessive capacity. Plan the trajectory so that in 500 years it crashes back to Earth with an inscribed quartz tablet.
* Commit a terrible crime like JFK assassination or Unibomber and make it your manifesto.
* Genetically modify your children (as an embryo) to contain the relevant information in non-coding regions of their DNA.
* Sneak into a fissile waste containment center and put a marble etching in there.
* Get a building named after you at Oxford or some other long lived college.
* Create it as a very well hidden easter egg in the linux codebase.
* Just create a family heirloom with the relevant info inside. Pass it down.
* Many varieties of trees live long times with the longest currently living trees more than 4,000 years old. Plant them or inscribe cleverly.
Sure, we can play Dungeon (1975) today with relative ease. Most won't. But what about all the other games that probably survived but nobody knows about, because they weren't historically significant enough?
This probably goes for any cultural articact music, writing, paintings.
It becomes lost, if not physically, then in the giant volume of knowledge that exists in the world, but nobody knows about.
A poem, in an ASCII file, on an obsolete file system, in some disk image with an operating system for an architecture not produces in a hundred years, that could be emulated by an emulator for another architecture no produces in a hundred years, now residing on some medium, on some machine, somewhere, all will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Because if it's the later, the website seems to be a terrible solution to me for a lot of reasons. Figure out what kind of paper lasts the longest and print your stuff on that for posterity.
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/
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.
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.
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?
In short, blockchains don't die. They may become zombies, but they never die. Tokens and profit keep them alive; without, they just go dormant.
Therefore, I would suggest a blockchain called Arweave that delivers the permanence for your website:
"Arweave is a new type of storage that backs data with sustainable and perpetual endowments, allowing users and developers to truly store data forever – for the very first time.
As a collectively owned hard drive that never forgets, Arweave allows us to remember and preserve valuable information, apps, and history indefinitely. By preserving history, it prevents others from rewriting it."
And Akord offers the product for your children and grandchildren:
Sure, if one has money enough to sponsor a trust, then that'll work. But for those with more modest means, storing it on a blockchain is a solid(!) alternative.
The biggest factor here is the choice of the blockchain. One can go with special purpose ones like you suggest, they take care of the details of storing the data, but those blockchains risk losing momentum.
But it would be quite cheap (compared to setting up a trust) to use Bitcoin for this too. Bitcoin isn't meant for this, but there are ways of encoding the website's data and have it be part of the Bitcoin blockchain, spread out over multiple transactions.
The issue there is that the algorithm to deconstruct the data, as simple as it might be, would need to be separately communicated.
A slightly more riskier choice technically superior choice would be to do this on Ethereum, since the exact program for reconstructing the website from the data in the blockchain can also be deployed as a smart contract on the blockchain. So all the great grand children would need to be aware of is the address of the contract, and that it is on the Ethereum main net.
That said, one risk is -- while the specific blockchain might remain, who knows what it'll be called 500 years down the line. So the problem would be, while the website "exists", it's URI might change.
Interesting questions.
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.
So a succession of people (or, later, robots) need to be incentivised and resourced to maintain it.
A foundation is one idea. But I quite like a viral clause in your will. So, to inherit, your heir needs to (a) maintain your digital legacy and (b) put an equivalent clause in their will, and so on. Maybe it depends on the value of the inheritance but it might be a way to secure a few generations.
Then you could also stipulate that they should do anything they can to use the resources of their time to further secure the digital legacy. You could also make the responsibility always joint and several across all children / heirs.
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.
Below is a poem written in English 500 years ago (Speke, Parrot by John Skelton). The 'web' is less than 30 years old and any I think it's fair to assume that HTML and browsers won't exist in anything like the current form and English will have transmogrified into something unintelligible from current day English.
A cage curyously carven, with sylver pyn,
Properly paynted, to be my covertowre;
A myrrour of glasse, that I may toote therin;
These maidens ful mekely with many a divers flowre
Freshly they dresse, and make swete my bowre,
With, ‘Speke, Parrot, I pray you,’ full curtesly they say; ‘Parrot is a goodly byrd, a prety popagey.’
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 :)
(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.
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.
(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.
[1] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/39347/how-to-sto...
[2] http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photo...
Doing the same math, the 90 year old that sees your web page 500 years from now would have to be born 410 years from now, and at 30 years per generation, that's 13+ generations. At that point, this descendant is related to you as much as a you are to a random stranger from your city.
Look around and see what lasts 500 years: tombstones, statues, family heirlooms.
Your best bet might be to create a ritual, and have your children practice it as part of a religious ceremony!
Papyrus was invented before 3000 BC and similarly lasted thousands of years.
Pulp paper was invented around 200 CE in China and spread west around 750 CE.
While printing pre-dates Gutenberg, he revolutionised it by inventing moveable-type in 1439 CE.
Hot metal typesetting, typically used for newspapers, was invented in 1884 CE and lasted until the 1950s to 1980s.
Xerography was invented in 1938 has already started to become less commonly used, even in business settings.
Digital printing become popular in the 1980s to early 90s and is still used but also dropping in popularity.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989.
HTML 2 was 1995.
HTML 3 was 1997.
HTML 4 was late 1997.
XHTML 1.1 was 2001.
HTML 5 was 2008 onwards.
All of the above are technologies used to record and disseminate human knowledge, and form part of the same technological evolution. I type text right now in much the same way as a linotype operator would. I send this out to interested parties in the same way a letter written with quill might be copied several times and mailed to a group a hundred or more years ago.
There were periods of time a hundred generations long where nothing fundamentally changed about how this occurred! You could write things on clay or papyrus, and that was about it.
Notice anything about those periods of time? They're getting shorter and shorter. They went from thousands of years to hundreds, then mere decades and now individual years.
The WWW is nearly unrecognisable compared to its first iteration and has been around for less than most humans' lifetimes. It wasn't just invented after I was born, it was invented at a time that I was already on my third computer!
It is a beyond hopeless task to attempt to predict what the next 500 years will bring. Thanks to this exponential pace of change, I doubt anyone can predict much past the next 5 years with any certainty...
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.
When it comes to web hosting, archive.org maybe? Who knows if they'll exist in 500 years. But in terms of publically accessible webpages from generations past, they seem reliable to me.
[0] https://gizmodo.com/optical-data-storage-squeezes-360tb-on-t...
You won't have certainty that any plan you setup will work and you'll be dead when you can evaluate the success of the operation.
Death's End -Liu Cixin - The third novel in the trilogy staring with The Three-Body Problem
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!
My point I guess is that given the rate of change in the future anything could be possible, therefore, you shouldn't accept plausible sounding arguments or complex fictional stories about Antarctica as an answer, but instead the simplest possible answer about a future when anything could be possible.
If I had to do something digital today, it would probably involve prepaying Amazon Glacier https://aws.amazon.com/s3/glacier/ and faster s3 for as long as possible, then whatever long term plans I could muster for continuation- a foundation or trust of some sort?
If my great-grandparents had such monuments - low-cost, no-maintenance, high longevity monuments - I'd certainly want to 'see them in action', once or twice.
If the monuments looked like worthless rocks, they might go unnoticed for a long time. (Maybe there are some already out there!)
The oldest UK charity seems 1400+ year old.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/voluntary/page/0,7896,61...
Could be expensive.
Or, create a generation skipping trustworthy similar bylaws. That requires the you put in enough money to make administration worthwhile.
But I feel the question is “will there still be grandchildren in 300 years”. It’s not a given.
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.
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.
Spoiler: set up a trust.
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.
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.
Otherwise you depend on friends or family to continue to do that for free across a few generations, which is a lot to trust.
Consider this article https://noor.imx.sh/2015/12/22/arabic-beyond-the-numerals-sy...
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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
My grandpa had an old record player that included a "16 2/3 rpm" speed setting (33 1/3 divided by 2) which was apparently used for 2-hour spoken word performances (think audiobooks, comedy shows...)
Any recent format for storing video, audio, and even text is lkely to be undecipherable in a matter of decades.
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.
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.
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?
I'd be (posthumously) surprised if HTML was still a thing in even 100 years.
[0] https://gizmodo.com/norway-gets-a-second-doomsday-vault-that...
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?
I got it on https://unstoppabledomains.com which claims I don't ever have to pay another fee again for it to stay alive forever.
you would need to install plugin or use browser that supports IPFS out of the box: Brave and Opera
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.
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.
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.
We live in a chaotic system — each action echos through the rest of time (and quite possibly is a deterministic echo of the past).
Good luck!
Why? Reading text printed in stone last long and has worked numerous times in past history. Examples Roman engravings, viking stones etc.
Flint stone tech
I guess that isn't a direct answer to "How can we host a website?" but it's at least n=1.
Bonus points: Pay for the mission by agreeing to embed messages from advertisers as well.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
"Lots of copies keeps stuff safe".
https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/lots-of-copies-keep-...
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"
Probably overkill and way early on, but the idea of a decentralized Internet would be key here.
If it's small enough, encode it into a catchy children's song or rhyme.
The Seldon Plan:
1. Start a foundation.
2. Locate it at the outer rimes of the civilised galaxy.
3. Implement a technocratic cult governed by a dynasty of priests.
4. Engage in psychohistorical research for envisioning future risks.
Even on paper, people may not be able to read the written words due to the drift of languages.
Even that long is quite ambitious as a goal but at least the suggestions might be somewhat actionable.
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.
Alan Kay describes this is methode in [1] a Starship Conference talk about communication with aliens and in [2]the Cuniform paper.
The virtual machine solution is a solution to more general problems: how to use any software on any type of computing device at any time (even after most hardware and software knowledge has disappeared) and when even creator and user of software not share a language (as with intelligent aliens). They allow software to run bit-identical on any other software or hardware.
Smalltalk virtual machines are still running software sinds 1972(!) [4] and have been ported to the most diverse hardware and operating systems of any software I know of, even in javascript web browsers [3].
My websites are an existence proof. In 1987 I founded the first internet provider (as far as I know) and built some of the first websites in 1993. These websites have now been online for 28 years (actually longer but not in HTML format but Hypercard).
All my websites are written in Smalltalk (a programming language and operating system in a virtual machine image) and since 2007 in the Seaside continuation framework inside Squeak. All that I need to do is have a small simple virtual machine program running and responding to TCP/IP packets. The virtual machine executes whatever is in the image file, in this case a Squeak Smalltalk image and several Seaside websites).
Jecel Mattos de Assumpçao Jr. and Merik Voswinkel have been inventing and producing manycore microprocessors to execute most (universal) virtual machines like Smalltalk or QEMU under the brand names Morphle and SiliconSqueak since 2007. Contact us at morphle at ziggo dot nl for more info about our universal parallel reconfigurable software defined virtual machine microprocessors.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wW89RHf4D4
[2] http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2015004_cuneiform.pdf
[3] https://computerhistory.org/blog/introducing-the-smalltalk-z...
If we haven't destroyed ourselves until then, you should be able to go to your local DNA reading store and view the contents.
I can't seem to find it. All that comes up in search is something called M-Disc
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-...
I don't know if that is even possible. But that is my plan.
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.
Edit: Perhaps, of course, JavaScript :P
Even 20 is forever never mind 500
If you've said something valuable, then the means of preserving it will take care of themselves.
There is no permanence on the web, everything thats there takes constant maintenance to keep in place.
Upload static site to archive.is
Put thumb drive in time capsule in hidden location , also printed source code
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.
Then you can keep it up yourself.
Two reasons come to mind: Either they like it a lot or they get paid to do it.
Work from there.
This topic will persevere.
Then fund an annuity and have the proceeds funds the charitable trust.
Though, who knows what will be around in 500 years. In theory, some blockchains will be, if only as museum pieces.
2. Store your static website on arweave.org for a one time fee.
Eventually the future species / AI will find a way to recreate the entire past history and see everything we did.
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+
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.
For example, Marcus Aurelius thought survived for 2000 years. Your or mine website/blog/book I am not sure if it will.
I think it could be relevant here.
maybe host an html file on an ethereum smart contract with a very, very large trustfund that people can donate to?
i'd guess the ethereum blockchain will survive 500 years. Or a subsequent fork of it will.
"Anything really important is also worth doing anonymously."
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...
Or very, very, very good.
You might be remembered for that.
It's a blockchain (Sia) and they focus on data storing.
go bury a time capsule instead.