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Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

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Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#111

Post by mullen »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #21

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 th…

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.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#112

Post by robbedpeter »

If you could build a computer that held and displayed the data, you might be able to preserve it - a tablet or handheld device that gets handed down through generations and only activated one a decade or so?

Beyond preservation, though, that's an interesting engineering puzzle - could you fashion a computer intended to operate for 500 years, without replacement parts?

It'd need serious shielding, components that wouldn't degrade, some sort of capacitor based rechargeable power system, connector interfaces designed to be easily modded, and so on.

I imagine such a legacy computer would be durable beyond even advanced military or nasa tech allows for.

https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/the-100-year-computer

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#113

Post by lordnacho »

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.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#116

Post by zhte415 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #46
ellis0n wrote: post #20

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, a…

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.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#119

Post by jfax »

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.
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