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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?

#251

Post by genewitch »

clarkmoody wrote: post #208
franky47 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never underestimate the power of basic human needs over layers of abstractions. Software's intangibility will be its downfall when our modern society eventually collapses.

Hopefully some remnant of humanity will cast out among the stars with ultra-high density storage holding archives of most of human knowledge.

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?

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

#253

Post by znpy »

pc86 wrote: post #238
ironmagma wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When society collapses, software of any kind will probably be among the least of our concerns.

Wait so I shouldn't be spending all this time learning vi?

No, you should learn emacs.

M-x purify-water is gonna save a lot of people one day.

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

#255

Post by vasco »

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.

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

#256

Post by dfabulich »

NoGravitas wrote: post #155

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…

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.)

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

#257

Post by denton-scratch »

orangepurple wrote: post #31

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 co…

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.

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

#258

Post by kyharri »

martinskou wrote: post #237

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.…

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.

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

#259

Post by heavyset_go »

nkrisc wrote: post #124
trinovantes wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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.

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

#260

Post by LadyCailin »

jjoonathan wrote: post #233
franky47 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never underestimate the power of basic human needs over layers of abstractions. Software's intangibility will be its downfall when our modern society eventually collapses.

It always brings me joy to read doomsday prophecies from decades, centuries, and millenia past. They were legion -- so confident, yet so wrong. I hope your predictions bring similar joy to future readers in the decades, centuries, and millenia to come.

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.
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