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'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.
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.
I was going to say (as if that were the main objection) that the = there was apocryphal, but I had my centuries wrong: Recorde invented it in the mid-16th century.
This table on Wikipedia says the inequality symbols were first used in 1631[1]. However guillemets (« ») date to the mid sixteenth century[2] and are still used as quotation marks in many languages. Although according to the page about brackets[3], chevrons were the earliest form of brackets, however I couldn’t find a year.
Recorde is one of those intellectual heroes I only learned of a few years ago. It seems like no big deal now, but using a symbol instead of words to represent am equation was revolutionary.
> Think archival grade materials and ink, then add translations into Mandarin, Arabic, and Spanish . . .
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.
The tricky part is that it’s hard to be sure that people will keep caring about the same things for a long time to come. As you said, most of what was written in Anglo-Saxon is gone, even though some of it besides Beowulf probably had “epochal importance” to those who lived at the time. Similarly, many works that were highly esteemed in the Greco-Roman world were eventually lost. Cultures change, religions change, languages change. And they all do so unpredictably.
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.
> to make that web page pertain to something of epochal importance to millions of people
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've said nothing about what "deserves" preservation, but only what sort of things tend to be preserved over periods on the scale of centuries. And yes: My contention is that unless a substantial community of people voluntarily commit to preserving something, it likely will not survive (or will do so accidentally).
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.
It's a different side to the question that others are answering, and it's interesting to think about.
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.
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.
And the very fact it survives makes it noteworthy - if archeologists found a collection of well preserved shitposts from 2500 BC it would be valuable - even if worthless when recorded.
Create nuclear blasts that encode the information in short microbursts. Info will be available in the carbon record and in tree rings around the world .... profit?
Short story where SETI programmers turn new message hunting code on archived files and it detects a message in the human genome rather than in radio signals from the cosmos: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/sftriple/gpic.html
This feels like it might fit a series like The X-Files or The Outer Limits more than a full movie; there isn't much more to it than the twist; aside from that it's a story about some people.
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.
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.
You might like the "man from earth". It isn't exactly what you've described here, but it's a great movie. The entire thing takes place as a conversation amongst a group of friends where they extrapolate out on somebody's seemingly crazy assertion.
like in ST:TNG where it turns out there's a piece of code in the DNA of all the humanoid species that together form a message from the civilization that seeded them
> 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.
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.
We went from fotolog to Facebook to Instagram to tiktok in a decade or so. In a few years more it will be something 3d we can't completely envision, who knows in a few decades. In each iteration language changes faster, cause memes are language.
In 500 years this will be gibberish. Who knows if people will even know how to read?
We already seem to be going to hieroglyphics, except that it’s with emoji and has dialects depending on where and by whom its used. I’ve seen adults unable to understand the emoji lingo that teens used to communicate a lot of things, and this developed in the span of a decade (or lesser) with the widespread availability of emojis. I can only shudder to think of how complex and divergent things from now would seem even 50 years from now.
It might not be gibberish. But let's pretend one possible next step is computer assisted/accelerated cognition.
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.
We can understand Shakespeare with a bit of work ( mainly sound things out ) but Shakespeare himself would have had difficulty understanding his great grandfather.
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. :)
Sounds like what they did in the Netflix show Travelers, where important information about the world was encoded into DNA and kept alive within the bodies of specific travelers, called Archivists. This allowed information to be transmitted over long periods of time to the Director.
Just because religions go through major institutional changes, since they are in fact very human at their core, you have to give some credit to the fact we are still talking about Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad.
Ironically the dictionaries you mention have greatly stabilised language. Language is going to be far more stable over the next 500 years. I wouldn't worry about it in the slightest.
Is it ? The language is evolving very fast. Compare English from the 50's to what is spoken now, take into account the major dialects around the world...
There are different kinds of stability. One is whether the same language is spoken informally. Another is whether people are able understand earlier texts. I'm pretty sure texts from the 20th and 19th century are commonly read in High School, TV shows from 1960s onward are watched, etc. Having the past ever-present makes it something current informal language relates to.
Many, many people speaking English also creates an incentive for stability at the same time it creates variation.
Or picked up pretty easily. P. G. Wodehouse and Arthur Conan Doyle use some anachronistic language but it’s still 99% understandable without a dictionary.
I don't think it has evolved much at all. New words, yes, and some words fell out of favor. But you can find a book written in the 50s or a movie from the 50s and you would have no trouble understanding it. I'm fact, without context, you likely wouldn't notice it was from 70 years ago.
Are you saying it would NOT have been useful to historians/genealogists if people 500 years ago had produced perfectly preserved documentation of all of their writings in their language at that time?
You're also using 500 years of antiquated human communication technology to extrapolate what the next 500 years will be like. Shakespeare wasn't taking selfies, writing blog posts, and responding to commenters in real time back then. English/natural language evolved differently in a world that wasn't connected to the internet. There's no reason for me to believe the last 500 years of communication will be anything like the next 500.
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?
You can walk the street of Rome and read inscriptions that are 2000 years old, they will either be close enough to any latin language or you may have some notions of latin yourself. My point being that english is probably much more significant culturally today than latin ever was. The chances that it will be some sort of forgotten language are pretty slim (though I am sure it will have evolved).
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…
Yes, inscriptions like "long live the LX regiment" or whatever graffiti. (Kind of joking.)
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.)
It did in europe and northern africa. English is spoken (“airport english” that is) pretty much across the whole world. Entire industries only communicate in english. It is the international language of the elites, very much like latin was at a much smaller scale. And it has already influenced other languages that regularly use english words, and that’s only after a century of influence.
And given that something like half of the words in your post descend from latin, we might even regard english as a kind of daughter language. Of course I'm painting in overly broad strokes for the sake of conversation.
I would also add the social element - if you want your kids and grandkids to be able to read it, pass custody of the website well before you die (perhaps in a will?) and tell as many friends and family as you can. I know I would happily administer a deceased friend's website until i could no longer myself.
In where I live, there's a sweet wine made from a grape from greece, which recipe and genetics has been conserved for a few hundred years because one rich guy stated so in his will, so he gave away a building (was an hospital, now a museum), and in exchange, their heirs must recieve 2 boxes of 6 bottles of such wine each year, or otherwise the building lease is off.
Seems like the greater feat would be keeping your family size small over 650 years. Most any level of wealth will start to fade if you have to split it amongst 1,000 heirs.
That assumes language will continue to evolve the same way now as it did 1,000 years ago. Back then everyone couldn't read and people were separated. With mass media that's no longer the case.
Compare your texting to 18th century personal letters. I don't disagree, but language will still evolve significantly.
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??
There is no doubt that we are still in the incunabula of the computer age. Paper, we know, can last for five hundred years, but even once ubiquitous and well-understood media--floppy disks--are now scarce and getting scarcer. The only reliable way of writing for millennia is on stone.
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.
Agree and disagree. For one, English and other languages are evolving faster now than before, due to the speed of communication, so spoken language in 500 years (even barring something weird like brain implants) is probably going to be even more different than modern English compared to Shakespeare.
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.
Other comments have given ways to physically archive the webpage. Continually hosting it is a much trickier endeavor. Beyond just keeping the servers up, technologies will shift such that eventually html webpages, servers that talk using tcp/ip, datacenters that connect via fiber cables, etc will all be deprecated.
That said, if we have a very liberal definition of the word "website" to include any successor technologies where a device can be used to request a document, given an identifier, that looks recognizably like your webpage, this is doable. What you really need is an institution that you can trust to keep existing and to keep the necessary upkeep of your website as part of its mission.
The main institutions I can think of that have lasted for 500 years unbroken are churches and elite universities. If you were able to convince the Pope to decree that the church should keep hosting your webpage in perpetuity, that would likely work, but persuading him of that sounds very challenging. That said, universities are used to accepting gifts with sometimes eccentric strings attached. The gift will probably need to be large; but I imagine a $1B donation to Harvard under a condition that they continue to host and update the page as needed would likely work. Getting that sort of money is quite hard, but tbh probably easier than coming with a way of guaranteeing that your direct descendents keep the webpage up.
Another benefit to Universities is that they have some of the oldest, most culturally focused DNS zones. EDU is the most likely of just about any root TLD today to avoid succumbing to for-profit pressure and is one of the stablest managed TLDs, so an address on an EDU domain perhaps has the highest likelihood of not changing deep into the future (assuming properly managed by the University itself). (There's still signs that ICANN itself can be bought and redelegate EDU at which point all bets are off.)
It might not even take that big of an Endowment to get the University to do something like that. Universities are pretty good at Endowment (Annuity) math (because they have to be), University web hosting is still relatively cheap (easy access to low cost labor from "passionate" students, a DNS TLD that mostly can't just raise prices for arbitrary profit reasons) and no signs that it wouldn't be so in perpetuity. (Just keeping mind the risks of data loss of cheap labor.)
A quick search didn't find me an Annuity calculator that can calculate past 100 years (and I don't have the Excel fu to do it by hand because I'm not an accountant), but just experimenting with some numbers: let's say $25/month covers expected hosting costs and a tiny bit of funds for other web needs (maybe a pizza allowance for students) to cover that $25/month for a full century at a somewhat low expected annual growth rate of 1% you only need to start with at least $19k endowment today to cover the annuity. You probably don't want to start that small for sociopolitical reasons (to give them more reasons to abide by the terms of the annuity for the full length of it), but on the flipside you probably don't need anything at all close to a $1B dollars to do such a thing either.
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.
National libraries are institutions created for this purpose. The National (Royal) Library here in Sweden, established in 1668, started downloading and storing Swedish web sites in 1997. Compared to other solutions that might have a relatively high chance of actually being able to preserve sites for 500 years.
A titanium or tungsten box engraved with all instructions how to operate it. The power supply is an array of solar, but also a deep-geothermal. In a concrete bunker.
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.
> 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.
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."
Parsers can still handle the original HTML spec but that may change - especially as security flaws are found. Something like TeX may last somewhat longer.
As institutions go, and depending on the nature of the content, I suggest considering saving it in https://FamilySearch.org , if it fits properly in a "stories" or "photos" or such concept that can be related clearly to family history.
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 .
Ah, someone beat me to it. I was going to suggest one of the ancient universities with 800+ year traditions, on the grounds that even once the money dried up they might continue to host the website out of sheer force of habit.
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.”
By the by, if you haven't seen the Coen brothers' film "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs", which features this poem, I highly recommend stopping everything, popping some corn, and watching it as soon as feasible.
Few months back, I came across this poem in the anthology The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. There is a story that begins at 30 mins. That story stayed with me for a long time… It’s a story of how things undergo obsolescence and how it was relevant to my own life. I used know a technology which became out of date and I lost my job.
Go to a big legal firm that's been around for at least a few hundred years. With them, set up a trust with a sufficient endowment to be run indefinitely (barring total societal or economic collapse), with the mission of maintaining this specific website in accessible format (including updates and format shifts as necessary).
It will be expensive, but this general structure is already used by various organizations with one mission or another.
Yup. Setting up a trust is the best way to do this.
--
Many solutions here suggesting physical storage mechanisms which defeats the whole purpose of hosting a widely and public accessible document.
A trust would have the finances and most aligned incentives to keep the content online and in a format that is accessible.
Many other solutions involve telling your children to tell their children to ... etc. But again, you have no incentive to give a damn about the whims of someone who died 300 years ago, and it only takes one uncaring child to cut the chain short.
A trust's hefty financial incentives can keep anyones incentives aligned.
It makes sense that there's sexy technical solutions here (we're on Hacker News), but the most important thing is to
keep the incentives aligned. That's what a trust is for.
How expensive do you think this would be? It would be fun to estimate the potential costs over 500 years.
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.
I doubt any commercial/legal entity will live through the upcoming societal transformations. It is naive to believe our current political and economic systems will not change too much even in the next 20-30 years.
There are plenty of Italian and Swiss banks that are over 300 years old. They’ve survived reformations, wars including World Wars, plagues, purges, and the transition from feudal monarchies to empire and to democracy. For example, the British banking giant Barclays was founded in 1690. Here’s a partial list of other ancient banks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_banks_in_contin...
I think it’s more reasonable to assume that they’ll survive any future calamity (especially something so close as 20-30 years) than to assume that our current age is somehow special.
When worrying about surviving for hundreds of years, you need to compare with the data about how many have existed for hundreds of years and then folded anyway.
Note that the above list includes a bunch of "national banks" which were founded at the peak of "national movement" in 1800s (as "nations" started forming "national countries") — with many of them, you can't really leave a deposit and they instead regulate an economy of a country (not sure about "many", but at least National Bank of Serbia is one of those).
And Bearings Bank was founded in 1762. And made it to 1995 before imploding. Likely to survive, yes. But at least one is likely to fail over any reasonable period.
In 1941 when the Nazi government stripped German Jews of their citizenship, the Swiss authorities applied the law to German Jews living in Switzerland by declaring them stateless; when in February 1945 Swiss authorities blocked German Bank accounts held in Switzerland they declared that the German Jews were no longer stateless, but were once again German and blocked their Swiss bank accounts as well.
Print it out on acid-free paper with a stable, acid-free ink. Have it bound as a hardback, and seal it into a waterproof container. Entrust it to one of your children, tell them to keep it in a safe-deposit box and take it out once a year to share with their children, and to pass it on to their children with the same instructions.
If you have it electronically, the absolute best case in 500 years is that it will be a relatively easy job for software archaeologists or historians to decode, assuming it's been periodically backed up to new media for all those years. The most likely case, though, is that in 150 years, the servers it was stored on, which have not been running for 80 years, will be picked over and/or melted down for precious metal contents by a tinker who wanders between mud-hut villages repairing their ancient metal pots in exchange for dried fish.
> “What was there to say? Civilization was like a mad dash that lasted five thousand years. Progress begot more progress; countless miracles gave birth to more miracles; humankind seemed to possess the power of gods; but in the end, the real power was wielded by time. Leaving behind a mark was tougher than creating a world. At the end of civilization, all they could do was the same thing they had done in the distant past, when humanity was but a babe: Carving words into stone.”
Death's End -Liu Cixin - The third novel in the trilogy staring with The Three-Body Problem
I recall some scifi where some Diety/SuperAI left 'commandments' for humanity carved into giant monuments made of diamond. I presume that was considered the only thing that would survive deep time.
There was an interesting article online a few years back, can't find it now. It claimed that humans can't make anything that will last more that 16 million years. This includes any kind of nuclear pollution. Sure we might get lucky like Jurassic fossils, but not intentionally.
While we're on the topic of nuclear pollution, "nuclear semiotics" is an interdisciplinary field of research focused on creating a "warning message intended to deter human intrusion at nuclear waste repositories in the far future, within or above the order of magnitude of 10,000 years."
While 10K is a few orders of magnitude greater than 500, I imagine the problems may be similar... if not more extreme.
I haven't seen the article, but I don't buy it, there's no likely events that will harm Voyager 1 and 2 in that time period, for instance. They could get really unluckly and hit a star/planet, but it's not at all likely. Along a similar vein many of the satellites that we put in graveyard orbits around earth at the end of their useful life will also plausibly last that long, though there is a lot more debris for them to collide with.
We've also certainly... redistributed... many metals and other things around earth. Perhaps "large concentration of iron over what use to be new york" doesn't count, but arguably it should.
> I haven't seen the article, but I don't buy it, there's no likely events that will harm Voyager 1 and 2 in that time period, for instance.
Sure, but nothing will encounter or observe them ever again.
Things we put into heliocentric orbits are likely to be forever, too.
> Along a similar vein many of the satellites that we put in graveyard orbits around earth at the end of their useful life will also plausibly last that long, though there is a lot more debris for them to collide with.
While they won't decay from drag in a few million years, tidal forces and photon pressure become significant over time.
My favorite weird theory is the "Siluran hypothesis," which states that our industrial revolution was not the first. There are some events in sediment that look like what our industrial revolution will look like. (many millions of years ago, so yes, reptiles)
The things listed there are completely worthless though. In case of system collapse I'd want to know practical things like agriculture and simple power plants.
Isn't it actually the case that diamond isn't the strongest material? Just scratch-resistant if memory serves. Not that it's weak either, of course, but I'm curious if it's the best choice.
The claim is usually that diamond is the hardest material, which for the most part it is.
Strength is usually defined by the application and usually focuses on tensile / compressive strength. This is also why rebar is used in concrete, concrete has excellent compressive strength, but poor tensile strength.
There's lots of metrics for strength, also resistance to fatigue is often an important metric.
Diamond has excellent hardness, and compressive strength (diamond anvils), it's very poor in most other metrics of strength and evaporates above 450 degrees, so it's not good for anything hot.
I don't think it's necessary to go into all this trouble. Tablets made of the much, much cheaper clay are still accessible today—4000 years after they were created.
But it wasn't just the act of creating some clay tablets - those particular clay tablets happen to have run the probability gauntlet successfully and came out the other side - just making a clay tablet and putting it in your closet is unlikely to produce the same results. The place you put the tablet is more important than the fact that it's a clay tablet in itself.
Tbf, as someone who's never read or heard of the book, it just seemed like an interesting quote about a hypothetical future for humanity. Definitely didn't occur to me it might be a spoiler.
Uuugh, I just finished reading them and, while the first one was pretty good, the second one dragged a bit and the third was interminable! It felt like the author had a laundry list of ideas that he hadn't fit into the story yet, and with the third book was on a mission to cram in every last one. It's something like 2-3 times longer than the first one and by the end I was only reading out of determination to finish it.
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 think is basically the right idea, but a lot of the details are wrong.
For example, book archivists recommend against storing books in waterproof containers. https://www.sparefoot.com/self-storage/blog/3456-the-sparefo... "Be careful storing books in plastic containers. Because plastic containers form an air tight seal, any moisture residing inside your books will be trapped. If your books are not completely dry before placing them inside a plastic container for book storage, they may develop mold or mildew. If using plastic containers, make sure to insert silica gel packets to absorb moisture."
Instead, archivists recommend acid-free archival boxes. (Gaylord is a recommended brand.)
The other point is that you shouldn't just have one copy printed. Like any important data, you'll want to have backups.
At a minimum, if you have multiple children, giving one copy to each child is sensible; it would make sense for each person to have at least two copies, one to keep at home, and another to keep somewhere else that would hopefully remain safe.
If your document is suitable for public consumption, you could pay for a vanity press to make it available for publication, arranging to have copies stored in libraries. As of today, arranging to have your book archived in the Library of Congress is a reasonable approach to ensuring that some professional archivist will at least try to take care of your book.
(They'll also attempt to digitize your book, and archivists will attempt to care for the digital collection, but, as you noted, there's no way to be sure that any digital equipment will be working 500 years from now.)
But, if your thing is suitable for public consumption, consider another problem: will your great-grandchildren care to read what you wrote? Probably the only way to ensure that anyone will care to read your work is to be/become famous, and to write a successful work with millions of copies. (This also incidentally solves the archival problem: people care about protecting and preserving historically important documents.)
The United States government studied this question and came to the conclusion of... acid free paper. So it's now law that "permanent" documents in the US are to be stored on acid free paper:
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!
> It's hard enough to read data from a drive built 20 years ago!
Because you don't have the hardware lying around right now. It's still quite possible to read all popular formats today and most of the ones you mentioned can even connect to the same SATA bus available on basically all normal mainboards. And those are mediums which are built for ~10 years (you'll find bit rot by then, which is what is actually preventing you from reading the data). Tapes, for example, are meant for long-term storage, are still in use and can be readily read.
To add to this, books have the same problem. Have a look at the declaration of independence: The font and language is already quite different from what we use today, and that's only from ~250 years ago. Plus the paper would probably not hold up to normal handling anymore.
Acid free paper is a big improvement, but it's not gonna last 500 years. It's expected to last 200 years.
Archival acid-free paper -- paper with cotton added to it -- can last up to 1000 years, but be prepared to pay $2.50 for 1 page[1], so a 400 page book will cost you $1000 for one copy, just for the paper in the book. This type of archival paper might be useful for important contracts or deeds, or legal documents.
But then you have to worry about ink. Normal ink will break down as well in 1-200 years, so you need archival ink. This boils down the difference between pigment and dye based inks. Dye based inks are more expensive but more resistant to UV light.
In the end, light, heat, water, will destroy everything.
The way to make something last is social in nature -- building long lasting institutions and cultures that value your website and archive it. These must be able to preserve themselves, which means traditions that forcefully apply to successive generations.
It is not a technological problem, but a social problem. However liberalism is completely unequipped to solve this problem, because in order to create something that outlives you, you must bind future generations to some course of action they haven't agreed upon yet. So a liberal society cannot have long lasting institutions or traditions, it always eats itself -- there is another trending hackernews topic about Jefferson being cancelled. Well, of course Jefferson will be cancelled. So will Martin Luther King. So will everyone else. Absolutely nothing can last in a liberal society that believes moral progress is possible -- e.g. that children can be more moral than their grandparents. If you look at durable societies of the past, they all believed that the grandparents were wiser and more moral than they. That allowed them to preserve traditions and texts. The contingent that believes the opposite does not preserve texts, they burn them/cancel them/or otherwise try to erase them.
So once you stop thinking in terms of "what is the best way to do X" to "what is the best way to make sure my mechanisms of doing X will last", then you end up with completely different solutions for the same problem, because the social technologies of preservation are often the exact opposite of the social technologies of progress and improvement.
So no, your website is not going to last 500 years.
I believe you have misread that table. The prices (which depend on size) are all per package of 100 sheets. So you can reduce that $1000 to $10 as an order of magnitude estimate.
That's still rather expensive just for paper, but it might make a nice project, as a one-off, to print and bind a book to that sort of standard.
Cancelling is an online-driven social phenomenon that has existed for- a decade, maybe? Rather odd to view all of human civilizational progress through the lens of one overexposed, extremely online trend.
> Cancelling is an online-driven social phenomenon that has existed for- a decade, maybe?
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...
> This boils down the difference between pigment and dye based inks. Dye based inks are more expensive but more resistant to UV light.
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.)
I'm not sure the latter argument summarized "in liberal societies cultural values change, so no information can be preserved" makes sense. We certainly can access certain culturally preserved texts that are thousands of years old with a pretty high fidelity, even when those texts may contain positive depictions of acts that are considered morally abhorrent today (slavery, genocide, murder, rape, etc) or simply physically falsifiable worldviews.
When you are talking about millions of works, you need to approach it statistically.
That we have some works preserved does not mean that we are succeeding at preserving works in general. Nor is the fact that we have books preserved by previous generations a guarantee that the same books will be preserved by current and future generations.
So one way to think about this is that society has a big junkyard into which it throws documents. And sometimes, people do some archeological digging and reconstruct portions of some documents or bring them to light and popularize them, bringing them out of the junkyard, with a bias towards those documents that reconstruct whatever fashions are happening in that society.
That does not mean that the society as a whole is preserving documents well, even though you will always have some ancient texts available, and people are still mining the junkyard.
Moreover once we move to information stored online in the present climate of account deletion and deplatforming, we are again reconstructing the ingredients for a dark ages as mass deletion of online data is a lot easier than burning individual books. Many of the manuscripts we have were literally pulled out of ancient trashheaps or were written over by other texts. That's a lot less likely to happen with modern technologies.
You weren't originally making a statistical point, you said:
>Absolutely nothing can last in a liberal society that believes moral progress is possible
Which is clearly not true.
In any case, toward the more general claim that this post is making, which I will summarize as "Authoritarian societies are statistically better at preserving works in general" this is also demonstrably not true in the wide statistical sense. They are just as likely (if not more) to deliberately discard works that disagree with the general ethos of that society. Heresy is not really a big deal in a liberal society, but it will get some books burned and practitioners slaughtered (reducing social transmission of ideas) in a autocratic theocracy, for example.
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.
The thing is, occasionally those predictions have been right and society reverts to a state less advanced than it was for hundreds or thousands of years. A lot of the technology from Ancient Rome, building techniques, steam engine technology, etc. were lost for thousands of years. It’s totally conceivable to me that 500 years from now scientists have access to a wealth of electronic media, but haven’t invented the computer and thus can’t read it.
They're starting to break the code on it, but there are concrete docks that Rome built 2000 years ago that still exist today - we have trouble building salt resistant concrete docks that last ~100 years.
Apparently it has to do with using a certain type of volcanic ash in the concrete...
We've known for a good while how Roman concrete works. The reason that nobody uses it is that the economic incentives aren't there. Roman concrete is more annoying to work with and takes way, way longer to usefully solidify than cheap modern concrete. Yes, it will last longer, but almost nobody these days cares about paying through the nose for a building that will last more than 100 years when you could just force future generations to pay to rebuild it when it collapses.
It's a test of intergenerational commitment, because you are asking the generation that bears the cost of construction to build something that benefits many future generations. But the future generations, even though they enjoy all those beautiful old buildings provided to them by their ancestors, are tempted to go cheap for the building they need to build themselves.
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.
> we have trouble building salt resistant concrete docks that last ~100 years
Because of failures in technology/ability, or lack of incentive/motivation? It isn't obvious to me that anyone cares to build long-lasting structures..
I really wish the Romans had invented apocalyptic fiction, in the modern sense. Would've been interesting to read what their anxieties were in non-poetic, scrutable terms.
I was very young at the time, but I was absolutely convinced that the world would end at 2020. It didn’t, and that deeply ingrained in me a very substantial amount of skepticism from doomsdaysayers. The only doomsday I believe in now for absolute certainty is the heat death of the universe, but no one reading this will be around for that.
Haha! Yes, you are correct, I meant 2000. To be fair, had someone predicted the end of the world in 2020 that would have seemed extremely accurate in retrospect.
There was quite a lot of doomsday talk during the Cold War, and there has been periodic environmental doomsday predictions since the 60s, starting with overpopulation and chemicals like DDT. Interspersed with that was AI and nanotech apocalyptic concerns. Climate change is the latest. The idea that civilization will manage to avoid the worst case scenarios and find its way through is not as exciting. You probably won't sell as many books or public appearances that way. And it doesn't make for the best Black Mirror episodes. Although there are a couple exceptions.
This is a little bit like the bird who avoids the cat for 3 days in a row using that as evidence that cats can't eat birds. Be careful extrapolating possible futures only by sampling past events. That's why we have physics, because we are notoriously bad at doing that with just our intuition.
Climate change is a pretty simple proposal with pretty simple and direct evidence. Carbon traps light, which means more heat is trapped within the atmosphere. We can measure the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. That atmosphere will obey physics. More heat will be trapped.
> 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.
I see no reason to suspect there's much overlap there, and in any case this misrepresents both arguments. Climate change doesn't need to render the planet uninhabitable to all life in order to devastate human civilization; if we are forced to abandon the coasts, it will be the biggest refugee crisis in human history by orders of magnitude, and hundreds of millions will die in the resulting chaos and scramble for resources. Meanwhile, Mars is a barren tomb world, and, at best, living in a colony there will be a physically and psychologically exhausting prospect, and has no chance at exhibiting any real self-sufficiency for hundreds of years at best, let alone anything resembling civilization.
Nobody thinks we can't survive 2 degrees of heat. After all typical climate fluctuations of more than 100 degrees are common in human experience. What you're describing is a strawman argument.
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.
> There was quite a lot of doomsday talk during the Cold War,
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.
Which is why some people have taken to using the term crumble rather than collapse, crumbling happens at different rates in different places and can sometimes, at least temporarily, be fixed.
The Voyager Golden Record is an attempt to do this. It's a record that contains sounds and images to portray life on earth [1].
This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours - President Jimmy Carter
a song i composed is being sent to the moon on an SD card or flash drive of some sort, i was told. Realistically if there is some faster-than-light mechanism, any interested alien or human could just "fast forward" and "rewind" through time to listen/watch our broadcasts from the appropriate distance from the original location.
Barring that, I'm guessing the equivalent of stone tablets, or the golden record are the best bet. I wouldn't place any bets on anything that requires magnetism or electricity to survive in open space for long enough to matter. Like, platter bit-flips due to radiation from outer space are a thing, and current leakage would eventually render something like SSDs unreadable.
So hard copy for earth, radio and hard copy for the universe?
Yes, the idiocracy scenario does appear more and more relevant when you go out and look around and realize that 99.9% of civilization treats tech just as black box appliances....
> 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.
That's such a good book. I first read it after reading Wikipedia's "Terminal Event Management Policy" (a humorous page) which noted:
> 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.
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.
I’d alternatively recommend microfilm. It’s specifically engineered to last ~500 years and has much higher storage density than paper and ink. The technology needed to read it is fairly low tech and trivial and the format is quite durable.
I think it's a historically significant dataset. We've seen other datasets be preserved, such as GitHub arctic vault.
I agree that it's tenuous. I would give it 20% odds of hitting the 500 year mark at best. And I don't think all of the data will survive.
But if archive.org ever becomes unsustainable to run, the existing data will likely be preserved. Lots of companies will be incentivized to continue hosting the data, as it's excellent PR if nothing else. They don't need to continue gathering the data, just host it.
Hosting is only going to become cheaper as t -> infinity, and given the massive amount of compute I've seen Google wield, it's hard to imagine that an operation like archive.org can't find some way to be preserved.
All that said, the biggest threat is sudden data loss. This only works as long as the data doesn't get lost. Has archive.org posted their operations policies anywhere? It would be interesting reading.
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.
It's less about the "getting it done" aspect. It's more about are they going to be around in 50/100/500 years. Will the tech be around that long? Will they keep up with the conversion of old tech into new tech? In my opinion, any kind of digital archive is just not a sound way to go about it. Analog all the way for long term archival.
Mm, you're right, but Geocities might be less interesting to historians than an archive of all internet history.
Also, as someone who has trained a few large GPT models, I think ML has a chance of preserving a lot of this data. Training datasets are only growing larger and larger, and although those aren't updated (yet), there's no reason to think they won't last for a long time.
I imagine that in 500 years, imagenet2012 might still be around as a historical curiosity, at least somewhere.
Well, everyone was hyped on perl at the turn of the millennium. Yet not many people write it anymore. I keep waiting for the re-surge, but it just doesn't look like it is going to happen.
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).
I think the chance of future generations having the motivation to continue preserving OP's specific website would be quite low but there would be a much greater motivation to maintain a large organised archive.
I see no technical reason for why we can't create some e-reader that will keep your library much safer for much longer than paper. I see no reason why we can't make some that last for a millennium, if the power supply and storage aren't included and it's kept off in some dry place, out of the Sun's light and never overheat.
But well, there is no demand for tech that will last for a millennium. In fact, people are pushing for degradable tech that won't stay as waste after it stops being useful instead.
Electronics aren't that sturdy. Hard drives demagnetize, solid-state storage decays, and there's always the chance that a stray cosmic ray will fry something. Even if we could construct something that sturdy: After a millennium, how would anyone know how to operate it? Would we include an instruction manual? Printed on what sort of paper?
Microengravings on metal plates [1] will be more durable than electronics could ever be, and easier to read as well. No power source necessary — just a lens.
Program once memory is quite resistant, and of course, plain old ROM is a rock, literally. Transistors do not deteriorate unless you use them, just like resistors and a lot of the available capacitors.
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.
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.
Yes, but then you would both incentive people into placing your device under sunlight and need some of the shortlived kind of capacitors.
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.
But 21st-century ROM isn't human-readable without a 21-st century computer. Would that survive a millenium? It's not enough to have a storage medium that lasts 1000 years; the entire tech stack has to.
A more accessible approach than the High-Density Rosetta might be the M-DISC.[0] It's essentially a DVD/Blu-Ray which materials engineered to last significantly longer than standard ones. I attended a chemistry lecture by Prof. Matthew Linford (BYU) and from the gist of his description,[1] the materials that they were using have a good shot at lasting 500 to 1000 years if properly stored.
That assumes we'll have DVD drives 1000 years from now. The thing I like about HD-Rosetta is that it doesn't depend on any special technology to be readable. Magnification is the sort of technology that will always exist in any sufficiently-advanced society, while the specifics of DVD encoding could easily be lost to time.
Can he figure out how to build a charger for that e-reader from scratch? Wall sockets are going to be different in a millenium, if they even exist at all. With no manual, they could easily fry it with too much voltage before they actually get it working.
The weak link is the children - would you take out and read your great-grandfather's book every year? Now take it further yet and eventually it gets boring and not done anymore.
It's really interesting how Jewish culture has done something like that for thousands (I'm not an expert), with the annual passover family conversation.
Edit: and/or other traditional Jewish yearly family events.
I've considered using mylar paper-tape as a long term digital storage medium.
I thought about either standard sized paper tape, or six foot wide reels of mylar (in any length) which can be punched at a pretty high bit density, and read back optically.
With instructions printed on the outside (and on the first dozen layers), much like the voyager record, explaining how to play it back, and construct a playback device, and how the encoding works.
I think we will clean that stuff up. You have to be pretty sure that humanity is going to suffer societal collapse for hundreds of years in order to put something in an orbit that people will want clear.
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
Probably unpopular answer: you could store your messages to the future in the op_return field of a series of small bitcoin transactions. I wouldn't recommend making this the only egg in your basket but I think there is a non-zero probability the blockchain history will be preserved even if the currency isn't used any longer, kind of like how you can still go see Song dynasty paper currency from 1,000 years ago.
It should be a balance between readability, findability and integrity.
I would not bet on the btc blockchain for it. Its relativly complex to use, its very niche, it is already 360gb big and there might be a time were it either disappears or gets optimized and your information will be gone.
There's no technical barrier to truncating a blockchain. Just create a new genesis block and have it initialize every account balance to the balance it held at the end of the previous block chain. You could discard all the junk data as simply as that.
"No technical barrier" means nothing with respect to Bitcoin. You have to convince a large majority of Bitcoin users / miners / exchanges / services to switch to your new genesis block or other protocol modifications, otherwise your fork will die off, or at least not "be Bitcoin" as the rest of the world sees it (e.x. Bitcoin Cash, etc)
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 blockchain data will never be "optimized" or "disappear"
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.
>The blockchain data will never be "optimized" or "disappear"
This is a really bold assumption - you do understand that core dev is still ongoing, yes?
You do understand that "infinite data on a disk" doesn't exist, yes? And as the chain goes on longer, more space is going to be needed, and centralization of the miners will continue to increase, yes?
Please take the time to learn how Bitcoin works before pontificating
If growth continues linearly it will be less than 20tb. It is possible to fit that much data on a single physical drive even now, let alone in 500 years. 360gb is just not that much.
At some point improvements in computing will mean that the "crypto" in current cryptocurrencies will no longer be secure, and therefore all current currencies of this type will have to be abandonded for something else - quantum-something.
Eh, you just need a different "crypto" that's quantum safe. Yes if someone today had a computer that could crack private keys, all current crypto would be dead immediately. If crypto has some advanced warning (enough time to implement a new quantum safe private key scheme, update node software, and allow users to move funds to quantum safe addresses), then it's not existential.
Is there any standard for this, and a website (or websites) that publishes the data on the web?
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.
I was curious what this would cost and found a thorough stackexchange post [0] that puts the price at 0.032 ETH per KB stored on-chain. Comes out to around 12,000 USD for a small 100kb static site.
I would guess this cost is competitive with carving binary data into stone, not bad for permenant storage, reading the data is free.
Hmm. Putting 1 gigabyte in S3 for 500 years at today's most expensive price ($0.023 per gigabyte month) would be $138. Prices are certain to decrease over time. This says something about the cost of using the Ethereum blockchain for storage.
Would S3 exist in 500 years? Bezos would be long gone. Our tech would be long gone. I'd think about the only thing we could do the same is walk and open our mouth's.
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!
Yes, they have different uses cases. But one can easily see an arbitrage opportunity here for building an immortal database atop S3 (and other cloud services) for a lot less money. For $12,000 USD, I could store the same data in S3 for (at the very least) 445,217 years. (Using the example above.)
That makes the value proposition of the Ethereum blockchain as a data store a lot less attractive.
This is so theoretical, I don't think it has any value. Meanwhile, consider the effort involved in destroying all data stored in S3 vs destroying the entire ETH blockchain. One is expensive, possibly only achievable by a national superpower, the other is virtually impossible without destroying the planet.
I fully realize the theoretical advantages of blockchains. I can still store multiple copies in multiple clouds across multiple availability zones cheaper. The original question did not imply the destruction of S3.
You need to make sure someone continues pinning the data for it to exist on the network. You need to create the right financial incentives for that to happen, which is what Filecoin is supposed to solve.
I think Bitcoin is the safer option, since the history is more likely to be retained for historic reasons and it is smaller. Ethereum just has a lot more stuff running on it and the chain is much larger.
This. It's a gross abuse of bitcoins network, but bitcoin is a time keeping database at its core and it would not be impossible. That only accounts for data storage and retrieval though. For the end user to connect to the website, you still need some sort of server stack. Maybe IPFS could be used to overcome that part.
If page is static - engrave it in a titanium plate, possibly as a QR code of sorts and pass it through generations.
Include instructions for reader to publish it to whatever media analog of today's web page.
So basically stay away from technology, get information encoded into lowest and most resilient physical material and rely on future generation to publish and/or update it's content.
Reminds me of the Rosetta Disk that some folks in the futurist community came up with 15 years ago:
The Rosetta Disk is the physical companion of the Rosetta Digital Language Archive, and a prototype of one facet of The Long Now Foundation's 10,000-Year Library. The Rosetta Disk is intended to be a durable archive of human languages, as well as an aesthetic object that suggests a journey of the imagination across culture and history. We have attempted to create a unique physical artifact which evokes the great diversity of human experience as well as the incredible variety of symbolic systems we have constructed to understand and communicate that experience.
The Disk surface shown here, meant to be a guide to the contents, is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in eight major world languages: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.” The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk, as well as implying the directions for using it—‘get a magnifier and there is more.’
On the reverse side of the disk from the globe graphic are over 13,000 microetched pages of language documentation. Since each page is a physical rather than digital image, there is no platform or format dependency. Reading the Disk requires only optical magnification. Each page is .019 inches, or half a millimeter, across. This is about equal in width to 5 human hairs, and can be read with a 650X microscope (individual pages are clearly visible with 100X magnification).
The Github arctic code vault appears to have created TAR archives and turned them into a sequence of QR codes on a kind of film. And then thrown them in a hole under 250 meters of permafrost in Svalbard.
I noticed that Virgil got the arctic code vault badge, and thought it was funny, but I never checked what the conditions or criteria were. So I looked.
> The snapshot consists of the HEAD of the default branch of each repository, minus any binaries larger than 100KB in size. (Repos with 250+ stars retained their binaries.) Each was packaged as a single TAR file.
Virgil bootstraps from compiler binaries checked into the repo--there is literally no other way to get a PL off the ground without a compiler or interpreter binary in some language another computer understands--so I guess the archive has a completely useless source-only copy. That is, unless future historians want to write a new interpreter in order to run the source that's checked in :D
What's potentially amusing is how GitHub might handle code revisions if they were possibly stored on a WORM medium. Several past companies[1] have attempted to engineer storage that might outlast us all and even Elon Musk snuck in one such repository[2] when he launched his Tesla Roadster into space.
"5D optical data storage (sometimes known as Superman memory crystal) is a nanostructured glass for permanently recording digital data using a femtosecond laser writing process. ...
GitHub, a subsidiary of Microsoft, plans to use this technology to archive all public Git repositories. Microsoft refers to this technology as Project Silica with a claimed lifetime of over 10,000 years."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage
It's about the density of information, quality of preservation (eg. checksumming) and simplicity to decode.
Sure, QR codes are unlikely to be useful in 500 years, but if they have the above properties, they are just as good as anything else. If civilization endures, I am sure they'll be decodable in 5 centuries (whether they are preserved is altogether another matter).
There was a post here on hacker news of a service that would convert a static page and contain the entire page in a URL. That, in turn, could be converted to a QR code. I didn’t notice if it relied on something like bit.ly to store data, but it didn’t seem like it.
Unfortunately, I can’t find it again at the moment.
It encodes data in the # fragment of the url itself, but for decoding the data in the fragment it relies on the js loaded from the server also the domain must be resolved.
Host the content/pages on the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/
There's a pretty good chance their collection (and possibly the organization themselves) will be around in 500 yrs. 1 EB in 100 yrs will be trivial to host (probably the price of a loaf of bread), and your content will be accessible by anyone with a copy of that archive.
This requires the assumption that storage will continue to exponentially (or at the very least, linearly) decrease in cost. It also requires a certain amount of good luck. I would hope the IA has a reasonable amount of data resilience, but you never know.
I would bet my life savings on the fact that storage per normalized price will grow exponentially (with some tau) after 500 years. Supply/demand with gradually developing technology is one of most guaranteed forces in humanity, and people will demand cheaper data storage as long as we demand information.
This might be off tangent. Create something similar to the Internet Archive, but for profit. Of course the key to success is remaining profitable for 500 years.
Really boring answer: Make provisions for it in your will, which likely will mean creating some sort of charitable foundation with the mission of doing this. If the personal page is useful and/or hosts some creative work keeping that alive can be the entire goal of it, otherwise the foundation might have to do some actual charity and the preservation of the page would be a quirk in the statutes.
"small" things like this I assume end up really expensive in wills.
Making a page of text available to the public for 500 years might involve 25 people (each person being responsible for 20 years), and each of them has to be paid enough to care. To ensure each is paid enough, there needs to be a fund to pay them, and that itself needs to be managed by someone, who will also want paying for their troubles.
Also consider that in 25 generations it's pretty likely there'll be a major war, civilization collapse, change of monetary system, etc. To make such a scheme resistant to such things, you're probably going to need multiple people involved in every generation, all geographically separated, and all will need paying.
Even if you set aside $1M of your estate to this, I don't give it more than a 50/50 chance of survival.
I think it's harder than you might think. The New York Stock Exchange was founded in 1792 (229 years ago), there's a lot of things that can wrong over the course of 500 years to mean funding for your project would disappear. Wars, civil unrest, large environmental events etc. are all pretty much guaranteed over a 500 year time span.
According to this page https://finance.zacks.com/first-company-offered-new-york-sto... the first five stocks listed included the Bank of New York which still exists as BNY Mellon. It doesn't indicate what the other four stocks were, but presumably they no longer exist (The NYSE page on Wikipedia lists other traded securities as shares in The First Bank of the United States (defunct in 1821) and the Bank of North America (which became a private institution (it was previously the de facto central bank of the nascent U.S.) in 1785 before merging with Commercial Trust Company in 1923. Its successor institutions were eventually acquired by Wells Fargo so presumably if you'd bought shares in 1785 and held on to them for the next 236 years you'd now be holding shares in Wells Fargo). As far as I can tell all other trading was in government bonds.
How do you know what the internet will look like in 500 years? Sites from 20 years ago are broken, you can expect that unless you’re using plain text and html that standards will change in 500 years and people will not be able to access your site.
Then there’s issues with domains. You’d have to setup a trust and again assume we will still be using domains in 500 years. If you use something like S3 then you’ll have to ensure they’re around for 500 years.
Shakespeare and the KJV are both closer to 400 years old. Shakespeare wanted to be accessible, though modern readers still need annotations to understand some of the words and most of the references. The KJV was intentionally somewhat archaic. There's a big difference in how accessible KJV is vs Shakespeare
But otherwise yeah, the Norman Conquest did a number on the language
Shakespeare wrote in what is referred to as "Early Modern English". It is no secret that his writings were a big influence in the evolution of the language itself. If you look at some of his contemporaries from the same period, however, their language will be very different and much harder to understand.
My specialty in undergrad was 15th and 16th century poetry. His contemporaries' writing (and writings from the early 15th c.) was no harder to read than Shakespeare.¹ The biggest challenge would be the irregularities of spelling—before the printing press and for at least a century afterwards, English spelling was inconsistent and flexible (and frequently was left up to the compositor for printed materials which led to different spellings for a word in the same document to make line breaks work better).
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1. A notable exception would be Edmund Spenser who wrote in a style that was archaic even to his contemporaries.
It’s still intelligible, though. One thousand years is about the accepted timeframe for a language to be no longer mutually intelligible for speakers at either end of that period.
Of course, it’s entirely possible the rate of change within a language is not static over millennia.
...but the world wasn't a global village back then. A thousand years on, the world may look more similar than diverse, and less divergent / more convergent than it did over a similar time frame in the past?
It very well might. The extraordinary ways we’re able to preserve knowledge might slow the rate of change, or perhaps increasing interconnectedness between different cultures will accelerate the rate of change.
It took much less than 1,000 years for various pidgins and creoles to develop, and there are several of such languages that native speakers of the language's parent languages would have difficulty understanding.
a large portion of English, in general, is changes in spelling from prior words, usually traceable to proto-indo-european, which is a catchall group of languages that etymologists are unable to find reliable sources for. It's generally extrapolated backward, and decent extrapolations are used to bootstrap understanding of words that don't quite "fit" with english, and may, in fact, come from other areas of the planet.
There are also scads of words that had a contemporary meaning that changed "overnight", morphing into entirely new meanings, which then brokered entirely new words with different definitions. My current favorite word to use an example of this is "filibuster" - the act of obstructing legislation by talking. The word, as so many in english, came from bastardizing the dutch word for "freebooter" or pirate, through a circuitous route of the French adding an S, and the American English removing an S. If you dig a bit more, you find that the "booty" part of freebooter (which means 'loves plunder' from the original dutch) came from a french word first recorded in the 1300s, "butin", which probably came from some mid-german word meaning "haul from plundering". There's also an implication that for a while in the 1500s-1800s freebooter was also the name of a private entity that engaged in exchanging goods - a "free trader", with the negative connotations falling in and out of style.
So, if you can parse Shakespeare or Chaucer at all, it's because of the mechanism of how English, and other languages derived from the same roots "evolve". Saxon and old High German, as well as Icelandic all play a huge role in the way we speak and write today, to name a few.
Not sure if you intentionally missunderstood, but the point was, that you probably would be able to make some sense of 1000 year old english, but that is about the border.
It depends on the culture of course. There are old cultures with the same references like a bible, that might cover longer timeframes of understanding.
Ah, my apologies. I could be clearer. It was curious for that comment to refer to _mutual intelligibility_ for people on either side of a 1000 year period.
It's a lot easier to ask whether contemporary humans can understand 1000 year old language, than to ask whether humans 1000 years ago can understand contemporary language.
"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.
This is interesting because your go to was an existing, but non-English language, rather than a completely different language that is an amalgamation of other, existing languages, gone through several generations of memes, in-jokes, meaning reversals, etc, to the point of being unintelligible from the former.
Sites which were carefully designed are not broken, and I think that is a good starting point when designing with longevity in mind.
Five hundred years is a long time, but I think it's reasonable to try to design a site that could last, for example, 25 years, because you can already write something which COULD HAVE worked for the PREVIOUS 25 years by testing with older browsers.
You'll want to restrict yourself to a subset of HTML which is supported by all of them, perhaps with some progressive enhancement.
Indeed. As I commented separately I think the only practical solution is to use a simple medium (USB stick) and simple, standard file formats, then to copy from medium to medium, and to convert obsolete formats as time passes.
This requires descendants to keep at it over time, and it not really a "web site", but IMHO is the only way to keep the date accessible and useable over time.
Broken but not illegible. I feel like you're arguing that because the world may forget how to read some data 500 from now, storing the data is worthless. But that's just not true. Archeologists find meaning in writings they've never seen before all the time.
Even plain text is no guarantee. This assumes that future people will read/understand/use latin characters. ASCII could very well be replaced in the medium-term future
Sure, but that is backwards compatible / a superset of ASCII.
What I meant to say, is that it's totally possible that, in the coming few centuries, even basic ASCII won't be readily understood. As in the character mapping in modern systems will break down, i.e., int 97 is no longer 'a', but some glyph from a language not yet conceived.
We take for granted backwards comparability. Just because ASCII has been readable for the past 60 or so years, doesn't mean it will continue to be for the next 60.
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.
Look at what has lasted 500 years, and use those media. Websites are not among them.
1) stone
2) books if printed on the right kind of paper
3) metal if it's not something subject to rust
Even if it is possible to make a website that lasts 500 years, I expect we haven't figured out how yet. I'm sure it took people a while to figure out how to make long-lasting tombstones; early North American ones were often made out of sandstone or wood, and are illegible or completely gone now. You may be one of the very first people to give thought to how to make a website that will last that long; what are the odds you will get it right on the very first attempt?
It doesn't have to be fair. Things come and go. To host information for X years, statistically the things most likely to last are those that already existed for at least that amount of time.
Or you can take your chances, which, again statistically speaking, is not good if we're talking about websites lasting 500 years.
Earth is a terrible place to store things for hundreds of years. I bet you could draw your website into Moon dust and come back hundreds of years later and it would still be there right next to your footprints.
I recently saw headstones with photos on them. Now I’m thinking about writing a bunch of stuff and encoding it in a QR code on a headstone. The QR code is likely to be replaced with something else, but maybe if it says “QR Code” under it they could snap a picture and figure it out.
Based on fairly common nerd interest in old tech (see: retro gaming, for one thing), I'm pretty sure QR codes will remain a curiosity for the foreseeable future, as they certainly solve a certain use-case/problem
An alien civilization of giant lizard men that once roamed the earth whose dietary habits were superior and everyone should emulate (by buying and reading my book - "The Paleo-Plastic Diet for modern man").
500 years is too long for modern tech. You will definitely need many copies of different types of storage, down to atomic-level records such as DNA. GitHub's Arctic Code or Amazon vault looks like the first Godzilla computers, but you're asking for a "500-years PC".
Perhaps there will be a technology that allows you to write site files in the DNA directly of your children and run a micro-DNA web server in the body, and your grandchildren can surf on your Internet data in the brain.
This DNA writing idea is premised on the concept that most of our DNA is "junk", which is an increasingly unlikely idea. Most of it does not code for proteins, that's true. We are slowly uncovering more and more functions for the rest.
Who said anything about modifying our existing genome? Perhaps in the future we’ll be able to add extra biologically inert genetic material solely for the purpose of permanently storing information, passed from generation to generation.
It doesn't need to be human DNA, indeed the part chosen may not 'make' it 500 years. While I have no desire to do this, choosing a variety of other life seems more viable, and more easily rediscovered if necessary.
Hosting isn't so much the issue. You need to create something worth keeping around for 500 years. If you succeed, people will make sure it's available somehow.
The thing is there can't be more than one internet, ever. The moment someone invents a new internet, someone will create a gateway to the old internet, and the internet will live on.
“The thing is there can't be more than one phone system, ever. The moment someone invents a new phone system, someone will create a gateway to the old phone system, and the phone system will live on.”
Thus far, this is true. The global phone system has persisted for almost 100 years, evolving via numerous “gateways” to older iterations of system (e.g. land lines -> cell phones, copper wires -> microwave links -> fiber optic lines, in-band signaling -> out-of-band signaling, individual lines -> multiplexing, etc.)
Yet despite the same phone system evolving and persisting for almost a century, dial-in BBSes, Minitel [0], and other outdated technologies that use phone lines are completely dead. Just because a communications medium may persist for a long time doesn't mean protocols utilizing the medium will.
The claim was not about the medium, but about the content ("a 500 year old seeded-torrent"). Phone system has never stored any data (other than the mapping between phone numbers and addresses or, lately, people), and was usually upgraded in a backwards-compatible way.
I think that's the important nuance: humans have always had a keen interest in keeping records of history. We are at an early age of electronic computers, but we've already got things like archive.org — that's likely to persist in some shape or form, just like we are actively trying to persist books and movies from different eras.
Other than natural or civilizational catastrophes, I only see the risk in the amount of data needing storage surpassing any one's entity ability to archive it, but I am sure "humans" would deal with that in due time too.
Edit: I do not necessarily believe the torrent claim, but wanted to clarify why I see a point in it.
This would be true if we only make incremental changes to communications over the next 500 years. I highly suspect we’ll see revolutionary changes that are fundamentally incompatible.
Assuming we can always hook up another gateway to the next “internet” is like someone 500 years ago assuming that they could send a message via horse to the internet.
The internet can be highly regulated or the new one can be highly centralized and controlled.
The old internet could disappear as long as the economical incentives are enough to transition to a new centralized form of internet.
We are far from it, thanks, but don’t neglect that Facebook made a ton of websites become useless (to their owner at least) and disappear. Also, networks operators have made low cost plans limited to some of the internet. This is far from enough to kill the internet but a more restricted network is totally amongst the possibilities. And I’m not even talking about state control like in China.
That's a variation on the Ship of Odysseus. Years pass, nternets come and go, gateways open and close. Does "the Internet" still exist? (Rhetorical question.)
Some (small) amount of content from those BBS systems has been archived elsewhere, but the BBS servers themselves are long dead and cannot be connected to.
By analogy, the contents of a few torrents might be archived somewhere 500 years from now, but nobody will be seeding the torrents themselves.
I'm emptying out a storage bin with 25+ year old stuff that begs to differ. Storing things has a cost, actually storing things so they last, far more so.
But they won’t need to delete anything. Imagine the storage and data science in 500 years. Probably the whole internet of 2021 will fit into a 2521 usb stick
My 600 GB of Photos begs to differ (I've worn out camera shutters!), you can't find anything without a long search. If you can't find it, you don't own it... so yes, in theory it's there, but nobody will access it, ever... so does it really exist any more?
It's back to the same meta that everyone else says... you have to make something that people want to have around in 500 years as a first step, or you're just pushing against very poor odds.
Print it in a book, on good archival quality ink and paper. Make a couple of copies stored in various locations in case of natural disaster.
Look the English language is a lot different today than it was in 1621 and with the pace that technology changes I strongly doubt that anything web related will be able to run. (Assuming that civilization will still be standing, they still have a way to power technology)
So, that pretty much leaves ink and paper. That's your best bet, and even then that isn't a sure thing.
I would probably create some type of small self-contained unit, that's battery powered, and can recharge itself via solar panels. I'd have this device periodically try to fetch data from the internet.
Once the internet goes down it goes down, and you'd have the local cached copy.
I'd also have this mystical device print out the entire website in paper form every year or so, and then it would automatically shove the book version of it in a miniature Warehouse.
I don't think electronics are going to function any way similar to they do now in 200 years. But books, particularly picture books will always be readable. We already have examples of this, hieroglyphics are thousands of years old but can still be read and interpreted by modern people even without knowledge of the language they were written in.
How do you keep the battery from degrading after a few decades? Are there specific battery types that are long-term (hundreds of years?). Such as capacitors?
And the solar panels themselves would need maintenance, even if it is simply cleaning.
Where/how is the book being printed? Locally? What's powering the printer? How do you ensure that the materials (paper, ink, lubricant, etc.) last all those years? What about binding/collating those pages?
Or is the printing occurring once (since the site is static)?
Ideally the printer would only run a few times, I imagine when the internet finally goes down there's no reason to keep printing new copies of the book.
I wish there was more discussion of pure tech solutions like this. If you could build a small satellite that broadcasts a radio signal with your website’s content, and stick it in space, maybe it would last. The question is does the tech exist yet ti keep something like that running, and if not can we get there any time soon!
I'd replace the battery with a hand-cranked (or pedal-powered) electric motor to generate electricity, but I am not sure if magnets or brushes can survive 500 years.
Hm. I think your best bet is to make it easy for archive.org to archive.
archive.org will work on making your legacy technology work, as they are doing for flash, for example. Or they will find projects to make that work. That has a higher probability to work, opposed to finding a silver bullet now.
Though, the silver bullet there would be to minimize technological complexity. Make a simple static site with hugo, for example. That's easy to archive entirely.
Regarding archive.org, it’s worth to note that you can submit an URL for archival through their site. Here: http://web.archive.org/save
Another thing to note is that in the past they would retroactively apply robots.txt, such that if a previously archived URL was matched by a disallow directive in a later crawl of robots.txt, the page would be removed from public view. Fortunately they began reconsidering this behavior in 2017 though, and started not applying later robots.txt for some domains. Not sure about the current status of that though. Here’s a a blog post they wrote about it, from 2017: http://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sear...
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.
Nobody can say whether browsers, IP networking, DNS, HTTP will exist in 500 years from now, so aiming for very long-term "hosting" isn't feasible, with browsers the most complex and fragile part. Your best bet to preserve digital text and other data would be to use standards specifically designed for preservation/reuse that made it during that time when we still had multilateral standards development, and that have stood the test of time, such as SGML and XML. Or use plain text/markdown/other Wiki syntax and render to the viewer app of the day and century, the idea being that capturing your text at the intentional authoring stage would be free of delivery concerns and artifacts as best as it can (possible with SGML out of the box). And/or, author/render to a conservative HTML subset without JS and progressive/optional CSS. Or, print it out on acid-free paper with mineral colors.
I work for a university that is over 800 years old, with a library and press (book and journal publishing) that are about 500 years old. The institutions have changed a lot over the centuries, especially the last 200 years.
Probably the best way to get people to preserve your work that long is to make it really outstanding, so future generations will want to preserve it even though technology and institutional governance keep changing.
I've thought about this. Keep it completely static, no back-end server required, minimal front-end javascript, mostly plain HTML.
The key, as many others have said, is to make it easy to copy/archive (on computers, archive.org, etc). A simple set of linked pages (with graphics in widely-used formats, eg JPEG/PNG) is your best bet.
What the stone tablets crowd here misses is that a lot of cultural production today that's very important--major artworks, political speeches, movies, court records--is electronic. This means that by necessity, unless you think that entire corpus will get discarded, future societies are going to develop archival systems capable of indexing and decoding all this information.
Also - storage capacity has grown a lot, and that's a trend I'm betting will continue. Today, entire libraries' worth of books and magazines can be mass-duplicated and carried around on disk drives or USB sticks. What does this trend look like in 500 years?
I also think using open systems and formats has a better chance of survival than proprietary ones, if only because there are more reference implementations for how to convert bits into something people can understand/experience. There's a lot of important stuff written in .doc (MS Word) but my money's on HTML or ASCII, or even PDF if you want long-term survival.
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.
Probably the only way that has a chance of success is some kind of trust fund that will accumulate funds to keep the website in operation, including converting it several times to whatever's in fashion in 100, 200... 500 years.
Or, as some other post has already said, become so famous that people will record everything you've said. Although the first option only requires becoming moderately rich, which may be easier.
Etch it onto a metal disk like this[1] inside a capsule that can survive reentry, pay to have it shot into space with a slowly decaying orbit. Then perhaps arrange to have the reentry hit a pond near your ancestral home in about 500 years time.
That's got to be ~impossible by today's engineering. Hitting a specific place or even decaying at a specific time in 500 years is just never going to happen.
It'd have to be an active process, which means you need a machine that's still running in 500 years. Even then I bet it's still a hard problem. IIRC NASA aims for like, an ocean and they're happy if they hit the right one.
Yes the last bit was just a little joke - orbital decay is subject to too much uncertainty.
Although I guess if you had propulsion you could deorbit in a specific place at a specific time. SpaceX and icbms deorbit precisely so we have the technology nowadays to do so. Maybe an ion drive could last that long?
I don't know the answer but I'll share a short real story.
We made (me and others) the ENS+IPFS website almonit.eth in 2019. You can access it with a web3 browser or a gateway (almonit.eth.limo).
For a long while I was pinning it in IPFS with my server, but in March this year the project stopped so I killed my daemon.
However(!) -- since the website is so popular, it actually still now, 7 months later, though there is no one pinning it really. It just lives on the fumes of its popularity.
Write a book and distribute it in high enough numbers. Things that seem too big to ever fall today might not exists in even 10 years, let alone 500, that's valid for every tech companies and even tech paradigms, you'd need people to actively migrate your site every XX years
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
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.
Yeah of course, the og medium probably won't last 500 years, but if it's good enough to matter people will put them in safe spaces or reproduce them. Good quality modern books kept in ok storage conditions should last hundreds of years. I have a couple ~100 years old books and they look as new besides slight yellowing.
Prints are different since they're much more exposed and fragile than books
Anything that is on display is going to fade more quickly because of light than something that is kept closed.
When I was a kid in the 1980s I collected many mass market paperbacks (expected to be ephemeral) from as far back in the 1960s, even in the early 2000s I thought these held up pretty well, but circa 2020 I think many of them are getting pretty bad. (Contrast that to trade paperbacks that are sometimes "acid-free" but that frequently break in the first minutes of use because of incorrect and inconsistent construction.)
My house is humid and not a great place to store books, but I went looking in an academic library that follows "good" practices and found that mass market paperbacks from the 1980s and earlier were in bad shape too.
Archive the site into a file, get the strongest radio transmitter you can find, point it at the closest black hole and then just start beaming bits for long as you like.
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’)
Here's a half serious answer: do not design it as a static object that can withstand the erosion. Design it as a dynamic process that can change itself and adapt to the environment.
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.
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.
20x overspec'd solar panel. No battery. Broadcast a wifi hotspot at minimum radio power. Keep the components cold just above freezing and never allow them to freeze. You can accomplish this by using geothermal engineering to your benefit and burying the device with an appropriate heat exchanger so the planet can regulate the server temperature. Add in high availability and failover by using multiple buried devices connected over ethernet shielded with corrosion and abrasion resistant material at the lowest power and speed settings, then using raft algorithm and heartbeat. Seal everything with heaps of epoxy resin. Cut cable insulation off near where the cable enters the epoxy cube and reseal exposed wire with epoxy. This way water cannot wick into the main epoxy cube.
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...
10-year-old solar panels are already deteriorating, and producing diminished output.
All these technological (digital) solutions are pissing in the wind; digital technology has lasted just 50 years so far, and people will discard it in an instant when something better comes along.
But think of all the websites! Yeah, OK. They're nearly all going to be gone in a decade or two.
Conserving bits has already proved to be difficult. How would you set about conserving an 8" floppy disk you found in your Dad's belongings when he died? Yeah, I know, you could probably source an antique 8" floppy drive. But 8" floppies only went obsolete in about 1985.
Internet archive? So you want to rely on a website to preserve your website? You have to be quite young, to be susceptible to the notion that the web will last.
As people up-thread have suggested, if you want your writings conserved, write something that the people of the future will spend effort to conserve. And forget about your descendants 500 years in the future; you have no reason to think your bloodline will survive. Wars have become progressively more destructive. And there's a slim chance that if your descendants do survive, they will know you're their ancestor anyway. I know about my ancestors back to 4 generations, beyond that I only know their names (and without supporting documentation).
People have spoken of using gravestones. Good luck with that. Gravestones as young as 50 years are being knocked down by councils because they are dangerous. And graveyards are full; they are being re-used, old monments removed and replaced with new ones. And have you ever tried to get detail off even a 200-year-old monument? Instead, since you're in the churchyard, go inside and read the parish register.
I don't know if the decay is linear or exponential with a long tail, but I assume solar panels don't fail outright unless they experience a short circuit or extreme temperature swings. Instead their output progressively declines. I bet a very large solar panel in the shade will last a very long time.
Get it printed on a physical monument made of metal/stone, put it on property you own, and engage a lawyer to set up the will and property covenants to require its ongoing existence and maintenance.
Our guesses about what the web looks like ten years in advance are likely to be wrong, let alone 500.
You'd have to also include plain English instructions on how to read the QR code, since the QR code format probably won't be around in the future either.
As for reading the instructions: they could probably still interpret modern English, similar to how professionals today can still interpret English from 500 years ago (with some effort).
As someone who just basically teleported to 2021 from 2013, I can tell you that 99% of my bookmarks are now dead. So, even in 8 years most web sites haven't managed to survive.
I've toyed with the idea of putting money into a trust and having the executors of the trust use the money to maintain stuff like this.
It's more of an institutional solution than a technical one, but I'm personally more comfortable with an institution lasting 500 years than an unmaintained piece of hardware or software.
It's the same strategy used by museums--they take a grant from somewhere (from government, public, or private entities) and use that money to retain expertise and resources required to preserve stuff like the Mona Lisa or a dinosaur skeletons for future generations.
IANAL but I believe "the rule against perpetuities" is one of the sticking points in using something like a trust as an institutional solution to this problem.
For the trust route it might be worth looking into a corporate trustee vs a natural person. It’s much less likely (though not impossible) for it to fall through the cracks at a bank’s trust department than at Doe & Doe Law Firm.
There are several comments here that involve other people doing things over the generations. Printing stuff, reminiscing or reflecting on anniversaries, taking legal and fiscal responsibility, etc etc.
Has anyone here been on the other end of the equation? By which I mean, has anyone here been born into a family with a similar ongoing situation?
The most effective way might be to create a work of art or science or whatever that is of such significance that others are motivated to archive and disseminate or for you. So... a trite answer might be... inspire others to memor(ial)ise you. Good luck with that :)
PS. I initially intended to mention the Rosetta project and I'm glad to see that here. Philosophers, economists, psychologists and many others have written plenty about issues with archiving, definitely worth looking into.
PPS. I'm also very pleased to see a reference to Ozymandias. I was thinking about the Buddhist philosophy that, simply, _suffering exists_. It would be worth examining your motivations. Not that I disagree with them; quite the opposite.
As we saw with Inspiration 4, SpaceX is willing to take commissions, thus:
This might not be the cheapest way, however, if you can engineer a satellite to last 500 years [1], you could then have SpaceX put it up in orbit for over 500 years[2]. Have this satellite broadcast your website
via radio [3]. Then setup a trust with a consortium of lawyers to maintain a ground station network that hosts the website on earth's internet.
This way even if the earth lawyers/society fail you, you are still hosting the website technically, just not on earth's internet.
[1] Does anyone know if this is reasonably possible?
Single sat wouldn't be able to broadcast 24/7 because batteries will fail after some time and sun won't be available all the time. Because sat won't be powered on all the time it will collide with something eventually even if there is fuel left(I believe that you can't hold fuel for ion drives for that long because gases leak). One sat is definitely not going to work, dozen might have a chance. But I think they all will be hacked in less than a century.
> 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.
Somewhat pricey, but buy a rover and have it sent to the moon. Program it to lay tracks in form of a QR code that contains the URL that encodes the whole website.
2nd hand rovers are somewhat hard to come by. But you wouldn't need all the fancy scientific equipment. Maybe a prototype of the bare rover is available somewhere.
Kudos if you pull that off and have the Moon QR URL website say : "never gonna give you up...".
Isn't there an 'arrogance' in the premise when we ask these sorts of questions? Not a personal criticism; just an aside from the technical question for a moment.
It's the assumption that we've decided something we created should have permanence.
Similar to billionaires deciding they would like to live forever and trying to make it happen.
There's a beauty to the world, which is we get a short time to contribute, and then we give up our space/resources to make room for someone else. Our ancestors decide whether and what to carry forward.
No, there is not, because the question is asked in the conditional tense: notice that it starts with the words "Say you wanted ...".
It's invalid to criticize a conditional statement for the nature of its premise. A conditional statement is not a statement about the desirability or otherwise of the premise; it's a statement about the link between the premise and the conclusion (sorry, I don't really know formal logic/linguistics and those probably aren't the right terms but I do know that what I'm saying is correct.)
For the same reason, every programmer that has ever answered a "how do I" question on stackoverflow by saying "you shouldn't" is not answering the question, since the question is a shorthand for "conditional on the fact that I want to do this, what is the best way?".
There might be arrogance. It depends on what the person has in mind. If it’s someone making a time capsule purely with the hope that someone in the future might find it interesting and delightful, then no, I don’t think arrogance comes into that at all. If it’s an ancient king trying to preserve his face and memory by minting and burying coins, then maybe you could describe that ‘arrogant’, but so what, it’s still great for the people in the future who discover it and get a window into a different time.
Even trivial ephemeral records from a long time ago are incredibly useful to historians for what they give away about the time - tools, politics, morality; all are encoded inadvertently in the simplest text on any subject.
The Rosetta Stone for example is an incredibly boring text about taxes on religious organisations, but it proved to be rather useful.
Thought experiment: imagine it is 1985 and you asked the equivalent question. Something along the lines of: how would I preserve an electronic game/message/piece of media for posterity?
What would the answer be?
Make sure you copy your floppy on to a tape on the commodore 64?
Make sure that you post the message to at least 4 different bulletin boards?
The tech is evolving so fast that a website, or today's hardware, or forms of media will be unrecognizable 50 years from now.
Perhaps the first question is, what will be the equivalent of a website in 500 years?
Funny you should ask that. Because in 1986, the hilarious answer the BBC came up with was 2 Videodiscs, which were obsolete almost as soon as they were introduced:
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.
You can't. No more than you can make a garden last 500 years without people tending to it regularly. Digital has a lot of great advantages, but permanence isn't one. Will DNS even be used in 500 years? Maybe. Will whatever hosting provider you use still exist. Almost definitely not. Will html and css and javascript still be used even? Or will they be something academics study the way we study latin and greek today?
Books, buildings, and art survive 500 years and not much else.
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.
The Long Now Foundation has spent a lot of time thinking about this. They have designed and implemented clocks built to last 10,000 years. I doubt anyone else has spent as much time and effort solving this problem, so I’d suggest something similar: https://longnow.org/clock/
If you want it live-hosted for 500 years, you need people to host it. Some company. I don't know anyone that will even take your money and lie to you about that.
Your best shot is a simple set of files on a few redundant medium. If you want to get fancy, put a browser on there that will run (presumably emulated) with no network dependencies. Hopefully with a 64 bit time_t.
Create lots of copies. We know some papers/parchments can last 100s of years and are easy to store, so be sure to put some of your copies on paper. Anything current tech is just a guess as to what the future will bother to read and keep storing. (Metal plates, for example, would probably last but are a pain to move and store and are likely valuable melted down and reused)
After that, try to get your copies into institutions you think will survive for hundreds of years. So far, at least from a US/Europe-centric view, that seems to be universities and some churches. Even that's no guarantee - the Vatican library has been sacked a couple of times and had its contents hauled off, so who knows what was lost in those moves. You might try to bet on public libraries, though their track record is shorter.
Only partially joking: start a church that's dedicated to preservation of records.
But really, I think the key is lots of copies, spread as widely as you can.
I think about this a lot, and I prioritize site longevity and compatibility in my framework. To this end, I leverage the Lindy Effect, writing HTML which works with the last 25 years of browsers, starting with Mosaic and Netscape. You want to use only the most basic, least common denominator HTML markup, to improve its chances of not becoming "deprecated".
If you use JS and CSS, it must have abundant feature-checks, and ideally be optional. Your pages should certainly be usable without JS. You probably want to go with static HTML or only the most basic, again, lowest common denominator server-side dependencies, such as SSI.
You must make your site easily indexable, crawlable, and spiderable, so that it can be easily propagated to the Internet Archive and other archiving systems. Many sites I made in the past are long gone at their original URLs but remain accessible via Wayback Machine.
Cut the data into the surface of a chunk of highly reflective and stable metal. Lob that into a high orbit. It will blink out your data from on high with nothing more than the incident light of the sun to anyone with a basic telescope, or even their naked eyes if it's big enough.
Obviously the details would be rather complicated. How is the data encoded? Morse code? Maybe ok for 500 years assuming the language it decodes to stays around. You could treat it like the messages we send to deep space and make it only pictograms. But that might take some effort if you are trying to bemoan the complexity of k8s for generations to come. That brings up the question of what are you trying to say? Do you already have something you think is worth saying across deep time? A person could spend their life solving that problem before they even get to the engineering challenges...
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.
This type of question is asked semi-frequently and the answers tend to be around physical preservation.
So here's a thought. Why not build a "Computational Knowledge Bootloader" that contained enough information to build a sequence of computational devices of increasing complexity starting with the absolute basics of math and language.
If we had that, then all of these types of questions of digital preservation could be answered with something like "Go to the website and upload your information into a Tier 20 CKB device. Enter your shipping address and payment information. A collection of etched titanium plates will arrive in 3-4 weeks. Put them in a safe."
500 years later, decoding might look like finding or building up to a Tier 20 CKB device and scanning the plates. If the instructions were standardized, there should be lots of lower tier devices scattered around.
Microfiche is stable for 500 years, you can store the webpage as-rendered and the source code. And you can use a 2D matrix “barcode” with simple error correction to represent digital data more compactly in the microfiche. Colors are generally less stable in microfiche than black and white.
Also, try 1000 year institutions like the Vatican or something.
Get it archived on Archive.org
If you’re worried about translation, then provide another translation of it in technical and Old Mandarin, ancient Arabic, high Latin, koine Greek, Sanskrit, Hausa (Nigerian), and Shakespearean/King James English.
There’s going to be Catholics, Orthodox, random Protestant Christians, Muslims, Confucians, and Hindus in 500 years (plus a lot of Nigerians), and there will be millions of people able to read and understand some of those ancient languages and committed to preserving them.
If you could build a computer that held and displayed the data, you might be able to preserve it - a tablet or handheld device that gets handed down through generations and only activated one a decade or so?
Beyond preservation, though, that's an interesting engineering puzzle - could you fashion a computer intended to operate for 500 years, without replacement parts?
It'd need serious shielding, components that wouldn't degrade, some sort of capacitor based rechargeable power system, connector interfaces designed to be easily modded, and so on.
I imagine such a legacy computer would be durable beyond even advanced military or nasa tech allows for.
Ignoring all the issues with decoding any message after 500 years... Semiconductor based devices will stop working by then due to diffusion. Maybe a large conductive structure that creates EM backscatter/interference that encodes your website? Or perhaps something that attracts lightning strikes and uses them to emit a burst of information.
Also, if your website really does last and remains decodeable that long, and if it is an exceptional occurrence, then it could also become a target for destruction if the winds of culture shift in some way.
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.
If you want to store information for the next billions of years, carve it in a super-material and store it secretly in the Kaapval Craton, so that even when all current continents are gone and a new super continent is formed it has a high chance of survival (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaapvaal_Craton)
Then again, if people did not find your message in all those billions of years it was so well hidden that they will probably not find it also in a couple of billions of years, but at least it remains
People have been doing this for a while now; in their tombstones. I live next to a cemetery, sometimes I go there and read some. Most are written by grieving families - a couple phrases and that's it. The ones written by their occupants are invariably the most interesting ones.
You could even make it a bit of a puzzle: "There is a secret message in your great grandparent's tomb, but only visible during the Summer Solstice, on sunset". It would require some math and some careful placement, and durable materials. It could be a nice activity for your offspring.
What information would be worth preserving for 500 years that will not be discoverable in 500 years?
Any personal information, i can assume, will be like from a stranger to your grandchildren. Honest question.
Priests at Haridwar, India maintain handwritten Bahi Khata (Genealogy register) which has record spanning around 2000 years and they are able to search it in about 5-7 minutes so its pretty robust.
I can appreciate this desire. Printing my website is basically out of the question at this point. I rely upon people thinking it worthwhile to keep a copy, and I make it fairly easy for people to do so. I distribute on a number of networks, I offer a number of snapshot archives (e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/*/philosopher.life), and I make it easy to download a complete copy of the entire site (https://philosopher.life/#Readme), as it's just a single html file. I do ask family and friends to see it as a book they will keep in their libraries, and I keep it very small, almost pure text (I don't want it to be any further a burden than it already is). Some store it on a thumbdrive or even keep it as an e-mail attachment. And, that it is nearly pure text is something that I think is exceptionally useful for this problem, as even if there aren't browsers that will be able to render it (that would be sad), there may be tools that can at least read the source (and, in a way, the site is meant to be somewhat readable from source, though it requires some motivation). I also enjoy the knowledge that there are random copies out there sitting on hard drives. I think it's gonna take some luck too.
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.
If your kids think it is something their kids will want to see, your kids will preserve it (or copy it) and pass it on.
I have old pictures from my great grandparents. I have them on my phone as jpegs. They took no steps to preserve the actual film for 120 years or otherwise figure out how their great grandchildren would see it.
In short, if it’s worth preserving, it will be preserved (or copied to whatever medium is currently in use) by your successive generations. If it’s not worth preserving, it will be tossed and ignored regardless of steps you take.
Who is going to pay for your domain name? I was in jail and luckily had someone pay for one of my domains, but all the others I owned got recycled because I couldn't get to the Internet to pay for them.
How many years in advance can you pay? What does ICANN support? 10 years?
Would it be possible to automate payments for something like that? Just a few linked accounts that have money in them, that couldn't/wouldn't be seized for one reason or another?
Or just pay someone to do it in your name, like a small foundation.
That's a really tricky thought exercise. Legal trusts in most countries have time limits. Businesses come and go all the time. I think you are describing the same dilemma that companies offering freezing/preservation of your body or head upon death/near-death are dealing with. That is probably the business model I would study to find out what countries have the legal structure to support their requirements and thus your requirements. Even then they and their clients are accepting some risk. I suspect you will have to invest some capitol in this if you don't want your future generations to carry on this project on your behalf.
If your time requirements were shorter I would suggest a legal trust and set requirements for trustees to ensure the domain and site are preserved. I would also add instructions in the site itself to have family members preserve the site or even create new domains or methods of presentation. Each generation of family member could then create their own trust and repeat the process through inheritance. Your lineage could essentially leap-frog the system and compensate for businesses going bankrupt or technologies changing assuming they value the site and wish to add to it. I think your future generations would appreciate the ability to update the site. "Keys change, technologies are updated..." -- The Davinci Code
I was gonna suggest, instead of relying on your descendants/lawyers, “simply” avoid physical aging and death yourself, then you can continue to maintain the website.
I've been following the various teams working on halting or reversing aging. They are making great progress but sadly are not producing anything that can be commercially acquired yet. There are human trials on some of the methods being used on specific organs but nothing being tested on the entire body yet as far as I know. If you know of intravenous clinical trials resetting the epigenetic methylation body-wide, I would like to know. I believe they are still trying to find the balance that does not lead to tumors.
I used to wonder about questions like this, but somewhere along the line they've become unimportant. I'm not sure why that is, or whether that's a good thing, but my best guess is that I've grown less delusional about how much others care about me.
It's an interesting thought experiment to ask how important such a page about your father or grandfather would be to you. It seems much less important to me than my own page. So it will be for others.
* 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.
I think we can look to the way we archive any other information, which tends to be libraries and archives. So in the first instance, make sure the Internet Archive has a copy. If you want to be even more sure, find a friendly library of record (British Library, Bodleian, Library of Congress, that kind of thing) and see if they archive digital documents and give them a copy. Perhaps with a financial contribution guaranteeing retention?
I think this question has a much deeper implication. What is going to happen to digital data, period? Think of all the letters between famous geniuses in Physics. Today all of that is locked up in emails on server, password (and possibly 2FA) protected. Will all of this be lost to encryption, even if the "wayback" machine of the exebyte internet manages to waste all that energy on SSDs to save it all????
Such an interesting thing to think about.
The implications of (relative to a human life) long periods of time are overwhelming.
At some point, even if somehow the information is intact, who will read it, and why? The barrier to entry scales with time, add technology and it probably scales at a geometric rate, for anything which is not held in such high cultural esteem that it is constantly maintained and updated.
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.
Gotta put my product manager hat on - is the problem you are trying to solve "how do I keep a site up 500 years" or "how do I keep my writing and pictures around for my descendents to see in 500 years."
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.
I have thought of this; thought not unto 500 years but more like -- so my kids can just keep to somewhere to read. My thought process was to start with as much simplification as possible -- plain text. While you are still able to maintain that, perhaps write in something like Markdown -- plain text enough with the formatting enough to separate the sections/content.
Use a tool to convert those to HTML, which can be hosted anywhere or be just drag-n-drop in future once you are no longer maintaining/updating it.
My bet is that plain-text will survive any digital changes, so will HTML.
Just make sure there is someone to take to the next step after you. But it really fizzles out after that, well, individually we are not important enough to be of much trouble to anyone for this.
I started my journey recently and is, I would like to believe, just the beginning and I tried writing it down for my personal website which is 20+ years old and surviving -- https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/
I still think that baked clay tablets have the best bit retention rate of any media humans have invented. Doesn't take much skill to make or use them, either.
But for 500 years you're probably fine with acid-free paper, archival quality ink, and simple environmental control for storage (e.g., a well-designed box). Might want a nitrogen atmosphere, but it's probably not that critical.
Have the website engraved on stainless steel plates. There are many affordable online services out there that would do that for you.
If your descendants store the plates in a dry attic, they could last 500 years just fine.
But… did anybody ever find something on their attic that was there for 500 years. That is very rare. I would assume that your great-grandchildren will throw them away because they need the space.
Your options are “durable copies” and “lots of copies”. Some out-of-the-box ideas for these:
For durable copies, use clay tablets, or (better, I think) write it in large print (kilometers per letter, preferably) on the surface of the moon.
For lots of copies, put it in every block-chain you can find or write it (say in Morse or in ascii bits) on or in small durable objects that have little inherent value (you don’t want your writing to be recycled for its resource value) such a as glass beads, produce billions of them, and distribute them over the surface of the world.
Launching a pioneer-class probe with the text on it every year or so also may help, in the (not highly likely, IMO) case there’s almost total collapse of society where we have to leave earth and then invent much faster space travel than we have now (so that we can catch up with old, slow probes)
I think your biggest challenge will be to make your progeny interested in reading what you wrote, though. Why do you think they would want to read your page, and not watch videos of adorable robotic kittens?
Given the adoption and direction crypto is going with decentralization, we can imagine some new/future incarnation of the technology to exist, possibly on new mediums.
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."
Surprisingly, this is actually a much more practical solution than what many other people here are proposing.
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.
The point about the URI changing is interesting. One could imagine the current URL stored in metadata and then "virtual" DNS lookups could be done over time/across chains well into the future.
Set up a trust with Berenberg Bank (Joh. Berenberg, Gossler & Co. KG). The bank was founded in 1590, and has been in continuous operation since then without a change of control. "We advise wealthy private investors and families, often across generations." They have 18 locations, so they're not too big and not too small.
I think to keep it hosted will require tending to the bitrot. We don’t know how the web and computers will change but we do know they will change.
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.
I fully expect my blog on GitHub Pages to outlive me.
They're stored in the Arctic Code Vault, as well as more replicas than you can imagine, because git, so I could imagine there's very little risk of data corruption, and because of the amount of knowledge stored in this standard format of static HTML, there's strong incentive for people to preserve it and keep hosting it if Microsoft becomes evil again and decides its not profitable. Moreover, if you PGP-sign your git commits with a 4096-but RSA key, you can be fairly sure nobody will edit your commits (perhaps for at least for the first 200 years). I believe the key here is lumping your data in with other high-value data.
Create some kind of annuity/trust that pays a large legal firm to translate and publish your personal page every decade or so.
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.’
(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.
wrt (2), I remember reading (watching? maybe it was a YouTube video), that the answer to long-term storage is optical media. There was even a brand of discs that advertised itself as being a 300-year data storage medium.
The engineer in me wants to make some sort of metal etched disk medium to store data on and bury it somewhere with a marker on top. Preferably with instructions on how to retrieve the data.
That may be the answer for the durability of the medium but, I think, it is a red herring for the scenario described here and loses sight of crucial aspects:
(1) The data must be easily retrievable. Any custom solution will be too expensive to produce then read, and so will be any solution that does not evolve over time. It's already not simple to read a 40 year old obsolete medium...
(2) Once the data have been retrieved they must also be easily interpreted. I have no idea how easily it will be to interpret a 500 year old data format. For instance, anything can display a JPEG file today, but what about in 500, let alone 100 years? JPEG did not exist only 30 years ago, MP4 was released 20 years ago this year. This is a blip compared to 500 years.
So if the aim is archaeological and the intended recipients are a bunch of future PhDs in well-funded universities then maybe. But if they aim is to have the data readily available for an average person then both the medium and the data format must evolve over time and the most standard medium is probably the best choice for each technological generation. Even the instructions and the language they are written in must evolve over time.
You do need to hope that your descendants will keep at it over time.
You might be better off with some kind of ceramic, to ensure that the storage medium isn't more valuable as a recycled material than for its information content. Ancient Sumerians had the right idea.
Store it on the Bitcoin blockchain in the OP_RETURN field [1][2]. Note that this is considered an abuse of the system and discouraged, but of all the systems available now, Bitcoin is most likely to still be around in some form in 500 years IMO.
500 years is not children of your grand children. If people still have children at 30, your "children of your grandchildren" would be born only 90 years after you, and even if they live to 90, that's only 180 years.
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!
I recently bought space at forever.com to keep my late relatives photos and documents. It's about $150 for 10 GB. They promise to keep the site up for at least 100 years, paying for storage from the interest on those $150.
Clay tablet writing was invented before 9000 BC and lasted until nearly the common era.
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...
Are you asking for a free fantasy way to do this, or serious?
For the former, get your thoughts into the constitution of a country or found a religion whose adherents have to memorize your stuff.
For the latter, it's pretty hard. I think the problem is that tech changes. I guess the question is really whether it's the content, or whether it's the delivery mechanism with the content that needs to be preserved. Content itself can be transformed. Current web standards will probably change over time and it will be similar to trying to time travel to a thousand years ago and chat with the locals: language changes too.
Download your website, engrave it on a quartz crystal[0], and hope your progeny have something to read the data from. If you want something that will last ~30 years, then tape and tape drives are a good way to go.
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.
Store the pages on two SD cards with software RAID in a Raspberry Pi with passive cooling and a small LCD display. Submerge the entire thing in clear epoxy, sans the power and USB cords, keyboard/mouse. Create a laminated set of instructions that describes your language, how to use a keyboard and mouse, and how to build a power generator to output the electrical signal needed to power the device. Put all that in a water-and-air-tight Pelican case with silica gel balls & a zinc anode. Bury it in a stone mausoleum in a cemetery that has the bodies of dead rich people.
Some of the best preserved literature is religious text. Give humans incentive (evidently faith is a strong contender here) to remember something to the T and it could easily survive all those 500 years and more.
> “What was there to say? Civilization was like a mad dash that lasted five thousand years. Progress begot more progress; countless miracles gave birth to more miracles; humankind seemed to possess the power of gods; but in the end, the real power was wielded by time. Leaving behind a mark was tougher than creating a world. At the end of civilization, all they could do was the same thing they had done in the distant past, when humanity was but a babe: Carving words into stone.”
Death's End -Liu Cixin - The third novel in the trilogy staring with The Three-Body Problem
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.
The best way is just to think about the website right now in your head. In the future we'll probably have technology that can scan the wave patterns emitted from our brains 500 years ago and restore your thoughts including the website that now you just thought of.
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.
Who knows what the next 500 years will bring in terms of communication. I know some artists have experimented with aircraft grade aluminum and titanium as a medium for long-lived artwork.
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?
I can imagine a monument in a very stable location that very securely stored an incorruptible, no-maintenance, solid-state 2-hour presentation about their lives ... that could without any contact (by magnetic field for example) be 'read' and played on a special player.
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!)
It is so funny to see people treat Ethereum and Bitcoin differently from the internet itself. If we think internet won't survive 500 years, so wouldn't Blockchain which lives on top of it.
What do you mean by "host a personal page"? If the goal is simply to pass on information to your descendents, there are many better ways to do it than setting up a web page on the internet.
If that is a strict requirement, then trying to come up with a single technological solution today that will work forever is the wrong approach and is guaranteed to fail at some point. What you want to do is set up some company/trust/other organization which will keep the site up to date with technological (and other) changes.
If you want it to stand the test of time, use other methods that have provably stood the test of time, like a book. You know that will work. You do not know anything currently digital will work. If this is important to you, I wouldn't mess around with "high tech" solutions. It's a complete gamble and relies on too many different components to work, whereas a book you just have to know how to read. The world can be in another dark age and it will still work. At least while there is light out.
A year ago, GitHub attempted to preserve a snapshot of all public repositories in permafrost in Svalbard [0]. It's hard to say whether the data stored in a public repository on GitHub is going to remain accessible. Still, as far as preservation goes, personal pages stored on GitHub at the time of taking the snapshot might be saved for many generations ahead.
Figure out a way to stop humanity from imploding for 500 years and realize that we're, effectively, like thirty years into using this internet technology thing. So it's quite likely we'll see some really serious infrastructure changes before we get to 500 years out.
My more serious advice is to instead look at the best options for long term persistent data storage and assume that people in 500 years will need to load your site using specialized technology like folks going to the library to view VHSes.
The internet isn’t a static thing. It’s constantly evolving across multiple dimensions including tech, legal, costs, security, censorship and so on. The real challenge is creating a sustainable legal entity that is an organization that will live for over 500 years and provide solutions to to these problems the entire time to ensure service continuity. While it’s tempting to have a technical conversation, in 70 years everything you now know will be irrelevant, as will you.
Build a cube around the rock and instruct people to circle it during pilgrimage to the holy rock, which takes place once a year. Your descendants may fall out over which follows the real instructions and may start their own sects, each with slightly different rules.
Coming to think if it, it would be the ultimate troll if you can pull it off. Imagine a prank that goes on for centuries and gaining so much momentum that people start killing each other over it.
I've thought about a project like this. Although, in my fantasies it was a way to store wealth and provide incentives for revitalization while I am in cryogenic stasis waiting to be thawed out and revived.
Basically, I would write a few modules - Content, secrets, funder, tester, advertiser, executor, and get them running in some cloud deployment.
Content is whatever website you want to host. That part wasn't in my fantasies. Secrets module implements an API to share and store secret information provided the caller has the right keys. Funder is responsible for interfacing with financial accounts and making prudent, low risk, financial decisions. In our time, this would be like using a Robinhood/Webull/whatever account to buy blue chip companies with a long history of steady share prices and dividends. The tester module confirms that all other modules faithfully reproduce their intended purpose and providing functional models with contact information for the executor. The executor is responsible for starting the other modules and providing them with the credentials they need to access the secrets module and get the other credentials they will need to function. Finally, the advertiser module is responsible for hiring freelancers to build copies of the other modules.
The system should aim to reproduce itself every five years or so and to kill itself off, by transferring funds to surviving children, when it starts experiencing operational problems, it begins to amass too much wealth, or it's been around for too long.
When new systems, standards, financial patterns, whatever arise, the future developers of the day will implement the new modules to interact with those new systems. If freelance developers get replaced by automated AI systems, then hire those instead, etc. Ideally, nothing would change too radically in between generations.
The system should aim to have a growing number of descendants, all investing their funds in whatever the most stable opportunities of the day are. The reason to try to have a growing number of descendants is that some will die by bad or fraudulent reproduction. Others might lose all of their money due to unlucky investment outcomes. Still others might get disabled or shut down. However, so long as the system maintains a positive expected survival rate, and it reproduces, I think the population of systems will increase.
There are companies that are researching the use of encoding information in DNA strands, as it holds both lots of information, and degrades relatively slowly over time...
Yes, "rent" a "lifetime VPS" at zap hosting, they only do so for gaming servers so rent a Minecraft one (make sure it's Spigot) and put on this plugin. https://www.spigotmc.org/resources/web-bridge.39843/
Now restart the server, throw the website files in the plugin and restart it again.
Easy.
All of the internet hasn't been up for even 50 years, it's definitely interesting to consider. I think the likeliest way would be to leave an investment fund with % widthraw rate that would allow paying a developer every few years for some maintenance or needed migrations as well as enough to pay for the administration of all of this.
Otherwise you depend on friends or family to continue to do that for free across a few generations, which is a lot to trust.
What motivation does your developer employee have to go hire another developer to continue once he is gone? Seems likely that he'd just go his whole life taking your money and keeping the website up, then let everything go down once he retires/dies.
Unequivocally you can consider writing in Arabic. It is almost guaranteed that people will still be able to read Arabic. This is how the build up of the Arabic language heritage continues todate. All is still readable.
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.
Just host your website as plain markdown or HTML on GitHub. They will be around for a long time and if not, the internet archive will still have a copy of your site.
My bet is that you only chance is making it a family history site. And by that I mean that each generation of your future family must contribute their story and at the same time update the site to a modern solution.
The base layer could be text files and image, even though jpeg might not exists in 200 year some other format does.
But you must leave it up to you grandchildren to update the solution to modern formats. Maybe set some inheritance up to support this.
Or use a free family history site (https://familysearch.org ) maintained by a church/religion with a track record, size/growth, and that has realistic expectation to be around for the long haul. Details in my longer comment in this discussion. :)
I actually love this idea. A digital version of the family bible. Which had the alternate purpose of stewarding the family lineage through generations. Sans the religious bit.
Are they going to have the technology to access the web site? We are about to lose access to many recordings because either we don't have the readers (physical media) or we lost the software to run the codecs and maybe the hardware to run them.
Anyway, make many copies, leave money to run the site, maybe link the availability of the site to the validity of the goods you're passing to your heirs.
And print something, maybe engrave it on stone :-)
Create a virulent sect whose main tenet is to keep the religious scripture (your personal writings) available to as many people as possible.
If you do it right the organisation will self-adjust, recruit new members, gather a tithe from them and keep propagating your writings for thousands of years or more.
There were these folks living in what we now call the middle-east ~3k years ago. Their memetic footprint is still reverberating strong to this day.
For a truly lasting legacy, I vote for vinyl. Plastic lasts forever, and the format is easy to reverse-engineer.
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.
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.
probably write it as a virus that jumps from webserver to webserver, doing nothing malicious but adding your HTML to a pre-determined route
it will have to be a strong AI virus so it can keep rewriting itself as new software updates come along so you’re risking a skynet situation - oh! reminds me of the cowboy bebop episode where a hacked satellite entertains itself by drawing geoglyphs in the desert-definitely do that.
Encode the knowledge into the DNA/RNA of a highly contagious and non-deadly human virus and release it into the population. Hopefully, mutations won't overwrite your information.
Maybe the best bet is a hardened virtual machine. No one knows what the future holds centuries forward, but if humanity survives, I'm sure they will know how to emulate ancient hardware, or convert it to other type of containment.
Half a millennium is eons in computing, it has to have stewardship of some sort if it's going to last that long. AIs could become capable of this task in the near future, who knows?
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?
DNA data storage for only data preservation maybe works, but if you want to actively broadcast your content; you can put a compact satellite in geosynchronous orbit with some of the rideshare missions. With redundant avionics and little overkill solar power (or proper RTG if you can afford) it would broadcast your data very long time. But which communication protocol to chose is still mystery.
Make a front payment for 10 of the oldest businesses each to store a copy of your website for 500 years. They have been around more than a thousand years, likely at least some of them will be around for 500 more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
This question always reminds me of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project - preserving the Domesday Book digitally by way of a laserdisc. The technology used became obsolete almost immediately and the actual book, now 935 years old is still fine.
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.
I get my personal sites scraped and saved by the British Library's UK Web Archive[1]. There's no guarantee that my poems will still be viewable in the year 2521, but they're my best bet for immortality.
In a cave on the far side of the moon. Or, encode the information to be preserved in the DNA of various types of creatures on earth who between them various different number of individuals, lifespan (some very short, some very long) ubiquity across the planet, vulnerability to ecological change. Cockroaches, long living trees, plankton, mosquitoes and dare I say it, humans.
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.
Ask Piql to archive it, they are the company behind the Arctic World Archive.
If the website must be available on the internet than you are mistaken, the planet is becoming inhabitable and fast. This is a scientific fact. A civilization as unsustainable as ours don't get to be around for 500 years. The next one however should learn from our mistakes, so archiving is a worthwhile effort.
Perhaps look at it another way: each of your actions and thoughts influences people today, who influence people tomorrow, and so on — your legacy lives on within the state space of humanity (same as you are a vessel for the legacy of those before you).
We live in a chaotic system — each action echos through the rest of time (and quite possibly is a deterministic echo of the past).
Write something extraordinary. Don't worry about the frame, what's your content? Write something so god-damn extraordinary people want to preserve it indefinitely, and will do the hard work for you. You've gotta write something absolutely biblical, fundamentally groundbreaking, revolutionary to the hearts and souls of all humanity.
There is a non-technology solution. Start a religion and declare your blog a sacred text. As long as you have followers, the text will be kept safe and translated into whatever communication mediums or languages are available in the future. Of course, making sure the religion sticks around is a bit of a "rest of the owl" exercise.
I have also wondered about this a lot. If you think at a parallel - what are the websites around today that I can imagine also surviving 500 years? - the best I can come up with would be to host on an open platform with a well-established indexer; so ultimately hosting on GitHub Pages with regular caching by Archive.org's Wayback Machine
3d Print the website in stone. Ie by water cutting, laser etching or sintering. Dig said stone under ground for future archegolist to dig up. Alternative put stone in a place it wont get disturbed/destroyed.
Why? Reading text printed in stone last long and has worked numerous times in past history. Examples Roman engravings, viking stones etc.
You could publish the site on IPFS. Then you could device a solidity contract that awards ETH to someone hosting / pinning it. There are multiple ways to organise the latter. The easiest could be to provide your heirs the means to change the hosting provider reward address of that contract, in case he discontinues to deliver.
Launch an (autonomous?) ROV to the moon. Draw your message into the sand using the tracks of the ROV. Make the message large enough to be seen from Earth with a high powered telescope. Consider using pictograms, so language won't be an issue.
Bonus points: Pay for the mission by agreeing to embed messages from advertisers as well.
Arweave is something that is being used in the Blockchain space for permanent storage. I believe the upfront cost you pay initially covers storage for the first 200 years.
https://arwiki.wiki/#/en/main
1. create a trust with a very reputable law firm, that lays out the terms of the service level agreement for the website.
2. Fund the trust in perpetuity with a large enough amount so that the interest is safely more than the cost to run it, including the trust admin fees.
My out-of-the-ass ballpark, you could probably do it for less than $100k.
500? Make it past the heat death of the universe to send a signal to the god (or /dev/null if you prefer). Joking aside, why would you want this? As soon as your conscience is gone, it won't matter to you anyway. Which is, "perspectively" speaking, the only thing which matters.
Don’t! Write it down on archival paper and present it in an interesting way. The web won’t exist in its current form in 50 years.
As far as I know, my great grandfather’s representation on earth today beyond descendants is a portion of a journal with some writing and a couple of drawings.
It doesn't really matter too much how you store it, as what it is: make something people want to remember and they'll figure out how to preserve it. If it's not worth holding onto, eventually someone's going to determine that it's no longer worth keeping.
Since there are many variations of "then don't use a website!" Answers here, I'll restate the puzzle.
Say you had to host the information as a set of static HTML documents and you wanted them to remain accessible for as long as possible; what strategy would give you the best odds?
Seems like there are no good ways for individuals to keep digital records that long. Even if you found a storage medium that could last, the machine that reads and serves up that content would need replacing.
The Internet Archive would be the easiest way, but a boring answer. You're trusting another organization to maintain your data, but it's about as certain as any other option to be available in the future.
You could trust Cloudflare or AWS to keep an storage bucket alive, but then you've got to continue paying for it, and there will almost certainly be some changes in the next 500 years that would require a human touch. Who knows if AWS will still be around, or if its new parent company, Yahoo-Facebook-Intel, will drop contracts if you don't log on daily to 'Oculus Space'. My point is, The Internet Archive might be your best bet if you rely on another organization to keep the site up.
If you did it yourself, you'd need
- a stable file format (SIRF?)
- multiple backups and copies, even on the same disk
- very stable, simple computer to serve the content
- maybe like, a Raspberry Pi-like system submerged and sealed in mineral oil?
- static IP address to host from
- this might be the dealbreaker for a DIY solution. You'd need to rely on other services
- A local network that can be connected to...even after 500 years of changes to networking protocols.
Even with a DIY approach, you'd be relying on a trust of some sort that could handle replacing parts as needed. You could invent an analog titanium read-only storage disk with your data encoded on it, but even if you have bullet-proof hardware, you still need to allow people to connect to your server...and that is the least predictable part of the problem.
If enough people are interested in preserving content like this, a block-chain storage solution could work. You'd be relying on the system still being active in 500 years, so you'd need multiple generations of people all using the same blockchain to preserve their data. Kinda like a decentralized Internet Archive.
Etch all the dependent technologies in stone so that somebody could replicate it.
Starting maybe from the transistor, if you're insistent on the full experience of loading the website from a browser with HTTP on TCP/IP networking.
Otherwise you can just etch the HTML in stone with a brief explanation of what the tags mean (eg. part of the HTML spec). Generally popular languages can survive 500+ years, so one can safely presume that some people 500+ years later can understand our English if they put in some effort.
.. I don't know why anyone would presume the web in any form would exist in 500 years. It would be fortunate if humanity as we know it still exists in 500 years. We are so capable of wiping out ourselves with various techs (whether intentionally or otherwise) that the odds are not really that great.
Fantastic question. If our technology we have now is not able to guarantee that whatever is published today is available in 500 years, we must draw the conclusion that it is inferior of what we had 500 years ago that allowed writers to be read 500 years after their deaths.
This isn’t a technological answer, but set up a trust fund for the purpose. None of us know what web hosting or its equivalent will be in 109 years, let alone 500, so the only real solution is to ensure there will be somebody around whose job will be to sort that out.
The best example I know of so far about a website outliving its author is cycling resource sheldonbrown.com - inline with what so far has been said here, it just needs to be an astounding enough resource for generation after to take over and maintain.
Make a lot of dollars and pay a handsome salary conditional entirely on the website fulfilling an availability SLA, and then some company will ensure this vapid task for you manually. There is certainly no way to automate this today.
What can you do that will give someone living 500 years from now a reason to care about your existence? If there is a reason they will find a way. If there is none even a website that may still survive will hardly have any visitors.
The only reliable backup mechanism is starting a successful cult whose main tenet is that your data is valuable communication from God, so that they continually duplicate it. Anything else will go bust in a hundred years at most.
Encode the personal page into a best-selling novel that becomes a classic across the world. The rest of civilization will deal with the redundant storage for you.
If it's small enough, encode it into a catchy children's song or rhyme.
Start a diversified annuity that funds webmasters by contract to perform standard update/migration/backup/payment tasks. Give the annuity to a college, bank, or family to own/manage it based on your bylaws.
Run it on a DLT or blockchain. The project ArGoapp (argoapp.net) opens an easy way to for both developers as laymen to host their website or any application on Web3.0 after paying only once, using projects like Arweave.
Love this question! Books are obviously gret. The Bitcoin blockchain looks promising as well. This is a great problem, looking forward to reading the comments. There must be some projects which tries to solve this.
Write something profound enough, and people will keep it around for 500 years to come. They'll keep posting it, reprinting it, rehosting it, archiving it, and sometimes even memorizing it by heart.
If you are using plain HTML and no database or dynamic features and there is not much content ( I am thinking a landing page / portfolio) maybe just engraved it on something in a book form factor
Best way to host a website for 500 years?
Solution: Host a website and all the software in a future-proof virtual machine.
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.
The chances of your webpage being visible in 500 years is about nil. The browsers won't talk to it because it is not using the latest TLS. Your certificate will have long expired. Google will have removed you from your index because they disagree with your arcane viewpoints. Your host probably went bankrupt or decided not to support whatever setup is hosting your page. Somebody will have to translate it to Chinese when they take over. And so on. You probably have better chances printing it out on high quality paper. Good news is that you'll be in good company - Amazon will get disrupted, Facebook will fizzle, IBM will go back to making cheese slicers, and so on.
Claim the webpage was revealed to you in a vision from God, and tell folks they’ll go to heaven if they study it. Seemed to work for Mohammed, Moses, Joseph Smith, and many others.
I love the hubris of this. It's going to have to be something profound to have anyone, including your progeny, care about it in 50, let alone 500 years after you are gone.
This. I'm old enough to have seen how little the great-grandchildren care about things (heirlooms, family photos, you name it) that were profoundly important to their great-grandparents.
Create some sort of religion around your website. The modern big religions seem to have done a decent job keeping their fixtures around for the last 2000-3000 years.
dumb thought: I was thinking if it is possible to beam info into space/somehow have the backdrop return it. Doesn't make sense, you'd need to know the formula/changes with space as it expands but yeah.
I'm not literally talking about radio waves or something. I mean to use space as a medium to write on but "how". As in you send light to specific things that would return it and account for shift/losses over time.
IPFS caches popular sites but forgets those that are unused. Sure link rot won't happen, but it's highly likely no-one will bother caching for 500 years. Of course, IPFS almost certainly won't be around then and what we're using today tech-wise will be as ancient to them as the loom is to us.
A small sat in the Lagrange point between moon and earth should do. The sat would host a server, communicate over radio waves and get energy from the sun.
permanent.org has a model for blob storage that I really like and think could equally be applied to web hosting: instead of paying monthly for the service you pay a bit more up front just one time and this is put into a nonprofit endowment which is used to fund the storage costs. It may not last for 500 years, but it seems more likely to last quite a bit longer than your basic web host.
1. Put it on github static pages and hope for the best.
2. Create a bot that searches the internet for free hosting, and automate account creation and mirror the content.
3. Print 100 copies on different manufacturers archive quality paper, use a vacuum pump and seal the books separately. Shield them from light. Put money in trust for a trustee to find something like fiver to rebuild the site every 20 years with one of your archive backups. Include multi language dictionaries in your archive storage for the eventually that your language is dead.
Ctrl+f "IPFS". Thank you. Considering the increasing capabilities of our tech, even if the internet, blockchain, or IPFS aren't live 500 years from now, they could easily be preserved in some form for posterity, just like an insect in amber.
Become really famous (or infamous) so you don't have to host anything. Others will do it for you. Think about all the people you know who existed 500+ years ago. Did we just happen to find a book/stone where they wrote their story ? It was more about what they did that created history. So, create history and you will be hosted for ever. Think of names like Julius Caeser etc.
put your page on a decentralized platform like Ethereum or IPFS and hope it gets maintained for 500 years. With Ethereum at least, there is a monetary incentive to keep the platform alive.
I expect that humans will still be around in 500 years, or 1000, but I highly doubt that they will be members of a literate, highly-technological civilization.
Looking at the past 100 years of change, progress, and war, what do you think the odds are there will be anyone left to view your website in 500 years? Or that the web will be anything like it is today? Or that English will even be in use then?
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.