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.
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.
> 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.
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?
> 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 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.
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...
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Readit News
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.
https://www.amazon.com/Hemingway-Wrote-JavaScript-Angus-Crol...
which is actually kind of amusing and creative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_Programming_Langua...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equals_sign#History
I wonder when angle braces were introduced?
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 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.
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.
The world was also a very different place, I suspect language will evolve far slower over the next 500 years due to the vast new interconnectedness that society has never experienced before. I think in 500 years, someone looking back at a website from today will find something far more intelligible than when we look back 500 years. The language will be closer and they will have a lot of detailed context to place it in.
I know this goes against the strangely attractive premise that civilisations rise and fall and we are ants running around thinking we are important in the moment and nothing we do will last... but the world really has become a more interconnected and stable place and it seems far more probable that it will remain that way. If there is an empire that could fall today and spell the end, it's communication technology.
In 500 years this will be gibberish. Who knows if people will even know how to read?
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. :)
Some texts survived long time in oral form, I heard.
Forming the sources as a verse could help here.
Mostly oriented to texts, altough images can be memorized in their hex encoding, for example.
I don't see much stability.
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?
Now the real question is whether that website will have more significance than a XVI century grocery list, and be really worth preserving to your descendants…
Given the extent of the Roman Empire, I think Latin achieved some pretty significant cultural status. Afaik, Catholic mass stopped being in latin in the 1960's. That's ~3rd century to 20th century. So in use roughly 3x as long as English? (Not a specialist.)
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??
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.
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.
https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/
Deleted Comment
for inspiration on how to preserve things for future generations we may look at religion.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
That said, if we have a very liberal definition of the word "website" to include any successor technologies where a device can be used to request a document, given an identifier, that looks recognizably like your webpage, this is doable. What you really need is an institution that you can trust to keep existing and to keep the necessary upkeep of your website as part of its mission.
The main institutions I can think of that have lasted for 500 years unbroken are churches and elite universities. If you were able to convince the Pope to decree that the church should keep hosting your webpage in perpetuity, that would likely work, but persuading him of that sounds very challenging. That said, universities are used to accepting gifts with sometimes eccentric strings attached. The gift will probably need to be large; but I imagine a $1B donation to Harvard under a condition that they continue to host and update the page as needed would likely work. Getting that sort of money is quite hard, but tbh probably easier than coming with a way of guaranteeing that your direct descendents keep the webpage up.
It might not even take that big of an Endowment to get the University to do something like that. Universities are pretty good at Endowment (Annuity) math (because they have to be), University web hosting is still relatively cheap (easy access to low cost labor from "passionate" students, a DNS TLD that mostly can't just raise prices for arbitrary profit reasons) and no signs that it wouldn't be so in perpetuity. (Just keeping mind the risks of data loss of cheap labor.)
A quick search didn't find me an Annuity calculator that can calculate past 100 years (and I don't have the Excel fu to do it by hand because I'm not an accountant), but just experimenting with some numbers: let's say $25/month covers expected hosting costs and a tiny bit of funds for other web needs (maybe a pizza allowance for students) to cover that $25/month for a full century at a somewhat low expected annual growth rate of 1% you only need to start with at least $19k endowment today to cover the annuity. You probably don't want to start that small for sociopolitical reasons (to give them more reasons to abide by the terms of the annuity for the full length of it), but on the flipside you probably don't need anything at all close to a $1B dollars to do such a thing either.
You could start a trust with ~1M in assets and if you avg 8% growth a year (taking into account management fees) you'd have 1B in 90 years just through compounding.
Doable for some, even easy for some, but for the vast majority of people.... very hard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Paul_Getty_Trust
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.
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."
These are going to work long after other elements of technology change. The newest tech are going to change more often than the foundation.
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 .
Dead Comment
>can somebody give me some context? I'm lost. is this referencing the bible? or an anime?
Not sure if masterful troll or not...
It will be expensive, but this general structure is already used by various organizations with one mission or another.
--
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.
Or even better, diversify, and use multiple different plans, not just lawyers.
I would never run this kind of website on free hosting (e.g. GitHub pages.) I think it's dangerous to assume that this business model will continue to exist for the next 500 years. It would be much safer to pay the ~$0.02/mo to store and serve your files from an AWS S3 bucket. A $5/mo DigitalOcean VPS would be safer, but probably overkill. I really like the idea of paying $0.24 per year to cover the exact costs of electricity, storage, servers, and bandwidth. These costs might continue to decrease over time, but they can never be 0 (e.g. Landauer's principle [1].)
I don't know how to estimate the cost of a domain name over the next 500 years. It's definitely not going to stay $10 / year forever. Maybe registrars will start charging higher prices or taxes based on the market value of your domain. Or some company will really want to take over your domain. Like Nissan [2] for example.
Ethereum name service (ENS) [3] could be interesting. Pricing [4]:
* 5+ character .eth names: $5 in ETH per year * 4 character .eth names: $160 in ETH per year * 3 character .eth names $640 in ETH per year
The world seems to have decided that names are worth roughly $10/year, for a single planet with a population of 7.9 billion humans. We'll probably be a multi-planet species at some point during the next 500 years. It's hard to imagine what the universe will look like 5,000 or 50,000 years from now. Imagine there's trillions of sentient beings living throughout the universe, and a "universal internet" (even if information still takes many years to propagate throughout the universe.) Maybe names will become far more expensive.
I think the safest option would be to choose a random string of letters and numbers: 2g39pz6jygjd.com + 2g39pz6jygjd.eth. It would still point to a page that includes your name and all of your content, so you'd still be indexed by search engines. And it's very unlikely that someone will start a company called "2g39pz6jygjd" and try to file a trademark.
This kind of random name would probably continue to be worth around $10/year, or perhaps up to $100 / year. It might continue to cost around $0.20 per year to host your static website on AWS S3 (or similar). Bandwidth would be interesting to think about.
Let's say you're trying to keep a blog running forever. Probably a good idea to keep it very simple and use a very basic CSS them, so each page could be around 20 kb. Serving your page to 50,000 visitors would require 1 GB of bandwidth. But let's prepare for a worst case scenario: Everyone on earth visits your website once a day for a month.
7,900,000,000 * 29.53 days (average number of days in a month) * 20 kB = 57709.5 TB. (That's actually way more than I expected! I find it really hard to understand just how many people there are in the world.)
I used this AWS calculator [6]:
* 0.25 GB monthly storage
* 7,900,000,000 * 29.53 days = 233,287,000,000 requests (let's say we serve a single HTML page that includes inline CSS.)
* 57709.5 TB transfered
S3 Standard cost (monthly): $134,680.98 USD. Or $1,616,171.76 per year.
That was just an exercise to figure out the maximum possible cost of hosting a simple web page. It was a fun tangent but we can ignore all of that.
Let's just say it could cost up to $100 per year. Assuming an extremely safe withdrawal rate of 0.5%, you'll need to ask your trust to invest $20,000 (100 / 0.005) in a mix of ETFs, bonds, cryptocurrencies, gold, etc. That should guarantee that you can continue paying for web hosting through the next 1,000 recessions, nuclear wars, ice ages, etc.
[1] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Landauer%27s_principle
[2] https://nissan.com
[3] https://ens.domains
[4] https://docs.ens.domains/frequently-asked-questions
[5] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing
[6] https://calculator.aws/#/createCalculator/S3
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.
Lots of kinds of companies have survived major world transformations.
Dead Comment
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.
Death's End -Liu Cixin - The third novel in the trilogy staring with The Three-Body Problem
Deleted Comment
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.)
https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rt/perm/permpapr....
Some of us who remember the 5.25" floppy disks, the 3" "floppy" disks, the HUGE Zipdisks, the 5.25" spinning platter drives, the 2.5" spinning platter drives, then the 2.5" SSD drives, and now the M.2 SSD drives... there's clearly no hope of any digital medium lasting 500 years. It's hard enough to read data from a drive built 20 years ago!
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.
Archival acid-free paper -- paper with cotton added to it -- can last up to 1000 years, but be prepared to pay $2.50 for 1 page[1], so a 400 page book will cost you $1000 for one copy, just for the paper in the book. This type of archival paper might be useful for important contracts or deeds, or legal documents.
But then you have to worry about ink. Normal ink will break down as well in 1-200 years, so you need archival ink. This boils down the difference between pigment and dye based inks. Dye based inks are more expensive but more resistant to UV light.
In the end, light, heat, water, will destroy everything.
The way to make something last is social in nature -- building long lasting institutions and cultures that value your website and archive it. These must be able to preserve themselves, which means traditions that forcefully apply to successive generations.
It is not a technological problem, but a social problem. However liberalism is completely unequipped to solve this problem, because in order to create something that outlives you, you must bind future generations to some course of action they haven't agreed upon yet. So a liberal society cannot have long lasting institutions or traditions, it always eats itself -- there is another trending hackernews topic about Jefferson being cancelled. Well, of course Jefferson will be cancelled. So will Martin Luther King. So will everyone else. Absolutely nothing can last in a liberal society that believes moral progress is possible -- e.g. that children can be more moral than their grandparents. If you look at durable societies of the past, they all believed that the grandparents were wiser and more moral than they. That allowed them to preserve traditions and texts. The contingent that believes the opposite does not preserve texts, they burn them/cancel them/or otherwise try to erase them.
So once you stop thinking in terms of "what is the best way to do X" to "what is the best way to make sure my mechanisms of doing X will last", then you end up with completely different solutions for the same problem, because the social technologies of preservation are often the exact opposite of the social technologies of progress and improvement.
So no, your website is not going to last 500 years.
[1] https://www.archivalmethods.com/product/archival-paper
"And there seems to be text scrolling and blinking upon the display surface... never.... gonna... give you up? What do you think it means, Tharl?"
Software's intangibility will be its downfall when our modern society eventually collapses.
somewhat reminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz
> In the longer term, archivists are encouraged to pool the resources of the encyclopedia for the common good. A suggested model of collaboration is based on the Leibowitz-Canticle report of the 1960s, which suggests pooling of archives in a centralized location, which might serve as a hub for reconstruction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Terminal_Event_Manag...
After reading that I quickly found a copy in the library to enjoy. Not many sci-fi books from 1959 have remained as relevant and fresh 6 decades later.
The other idea might be to encode your website in a song that's popular today but complex enough to be worthy of study by future generations.
Create a social ritual to read it so it can stay pliable. Vellum lasts forever
But well, there is no demand for tech that will last for a millennium. In fact, people are pushing for degradable tech that won't stay as waste after it stops being useful instead.
Microengravings on metal plates [1] will be more durable than electronics could ever be, and easier to read as well. No power source necessary — just a lens.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD-Rosetta
Edit: and/or other traditional Jewish yearly family events.
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.
on a practically non-declining 2000km high orbit where USSR Uranium nuclear reactors are parked.
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
I lost a lot of email.
They had sent a couple of warnings, which I had cleverly filtered into a special folder. And missed.
I would not bet on the btc blockchain for it. Its relativly complex to use, its very niche, it is already 360gb big and there might be a time were it either disappears or gets optimized and your information will be gone.
For a blockchain like Bitcoin to fit all of its transactions in only 420GB is an engineering feat that should be admired
The blockchain data will never be "optimized" or "disappear"
Please take the time to learn how Bitcoin works before pontificating
A webpage is discoverable
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 would guess this cost is competitive with carving binary data into stone, not bad for permenant storage, reading the data is free.
[0] https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/872/what-is-the...
Bye bye Ethereum.
There is only 2,500 ETH nodes today, most run on "cloud" services which cost hundreds of dollars a month, soon to be thousands
"The new chain is not going to hold information from what happened in the Ethereum chain before the merge" [1]
[1] minute 1:31:30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW0QZmtbjvs
Include instructions for reader to publish it to whatever media analog of today's web page.
So basically stay away from technology, get information encoded into lowest and most resilient physical material and rely on future generation to publish and/or update it's content.
The Rosetta Disk is the physical companion of the Rosetta Digital Language Archive, and a prototype of one facet of The Long Now Foundation's 10,000-Year Library. The Rosetta Disk is intended to be a durable archive of human languages, as well as an aesthetic object that suggests a journey of the imagination across culture and history. We have attempted to create a unique physical artifact which evokes the great diversity of human experience as well as the incredible variety of symbolic systems we have constructed to understand and communicate that experience.
The Disk surface shown here, meant to be a guide to the contents, is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in eight major world languages: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.” The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk, as well as implying the directions for using it—‘get a magnifier and there is more.’
On the reverse side of the disk from the globe graphic are over 13,000 microetched pages of language documentation. Since each page is a physical rather than digital image, there is no platform or format dependency. Reading the Disk requires only optical magnification. Each page is .019 inches, or half a millimeter, across. This is about equal in width to 5 human hairs, and can be read with a 650X microscope (individual pages are clearly visible with 100X magnification).
https://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/
https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/
https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/ignite-project...
Sure, QR codes are unlikely to be useful in 500 years, but if they have the above properties, they are just as good as anything else. If civilization endures, I am sure they'll be decodable in 5 centuries (whether they are preserved is altogether another matter).
Unfortunately, I can’t find it again at the moment.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Basics_of_...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317840
Trying to find paper storage schemes for digital information.
ps: oh and the main linked site is dead (sic) so https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3...
Most non profit internet orgs will ofte sell out for the right price unless set up properly. What makes this different?
same also for upload to wikimedia