471–480 of 825 posts
The world wide web is only 28 years old. 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 anythi…
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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: 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 t…
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.…
That's still rather expensive just for paper, but it might make a nice project, as a one-off, to print and bind a book to that sort of standard.
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Where are you getting 28 years old from?
Mosaic release date maybe? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)
W3C had a pretty big 30th birthday thing recently. https://www.w3.org/blog/2021/08/30-years-on-from-introducing...
As far as I know, my great grandfather’s representation on earth today beyond descendants is a portion of a journal with some writing and a couple of drawings.
For most of us, that’s the best you can hope for.
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 wit…
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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.
Look at what has lasted 500 years, and use those media. Websites are not among them. 1) stone 2) books if printed on the right kind of paper 3) metal if it's not something subject to rust Even if it is possible to make a website that lasts 500 years, I expect we haven't figured out how yet. I'm sure it took people a while to figure out how to make long-lasting tombstones; early North American ones were often made out…
Earth is a terrible place to store things for hundreds of years. I bet you could draw your website into Moon dust and come back hundreds of years later and it would still be there right next to your footprints.
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Yes, they have different uses cases. But one can easily see an arbitrage opportunity here for building an immortal database atop S3 (and other cloud services) for a lot less money. For $12,000 USD, I could store the same data in S3 for (at the very least) 445,217 years. (Using the example above.) That makes the value proposition of the Ethereum blockchain as a data store a lot less attractive.
This is so theoretical, I don't think it has any value. Meanwhile, consider the effort involved in destroying all data stored in S3 vs destroying the entire ETH blockchain. One is expensive, possibly only achievable by a national superpower, the other is virtually impossible without destroying the planet.
As we saw with Inspiration 4, SpaceX is willing to take commissions, thus: This might not be the cheapest way, however, if you can engineer a satellite to last 500 years [1], you could then have SpaceX put it up in orbit for over 500 years[2]. Have this satellite broadcast your website via radio [3]. Then setup a trust with a consortium of lawyers to maintain a ground station network that hosts the website on earth's…
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.
The world wide web is only 28 years old. 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 anythi…
Great comment! I’m curious, why did you choose Arabic, Mandarin, and Spanish?