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.”
Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
161–170 of 825 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#162Somewhat 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...".
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
do it with ethereum or some other blockchain in a single tx
I was curious what this would cost and found a thorough stackexchange post [0] that puts the price at 0.032 ETH per KB stored on-chain. Comes out to around 12,000 USD for a small 100kb static site. I would guess this cost is competitive with carving binary data into stone, not bad for permenant storage, reading the data is free. [0] https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/872/what-is-the...
Better would be an ENS name pointing to an IPFS address.
Then just hope that IPFS sticks around.
EDIT: ENS expiry would bite you. Maybe just IPFS then.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#164Please don't, nothing should last forever.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#165Blockchain: IPFS and FIL
Though, who knows what will be around in 500 years. In theory, some blockchains will be, if only as museum pieces.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#166How 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…
There's also the fact that human language will also change over the course of 500 years 500 year old English is nothing like English today
Assuming anyone is still speaking English, and not say Mandarin or even some obscure African language no one has even heard about yet.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#167Create 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.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#168Etch it into metal or stone blocks and seal it in a mausoleum.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Or it could vary even more rapidly as local language changes can take root internationally on a whim now, where they had major barriers before.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
“There will exist 500 year old actively serviced BBS phone lines” —someone in 1985, probably
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.
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.