531–540 of 825 posts
Half a millennium is eons in computing, it has to have stewardship of some sort if it's going to last that long. AIs could become capable of this task in the near future, who knows?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing is, occasionally those predictions have been right and society reverts to a state less advanced than it was for hundreds or thousands of years. A lot of the technology from Ancient Rome, building techniques, steam engine technology, etc. were lost for thousands of years. It’s totally conceivable to me that 500 years from now scientists have access to a wealth of electronic media, but haven’t invented the co…
They're starting to break the code on it, but there are concrete docks that Rome built 2000 years ago that still exist today - we have trouble building salt resistant concrete docks that last ~100 years. Apparently it has to do with using a certain type of volcanic ash in the concrete...
Because of failures in technology/ability, or lack of incentive/motivation? It isn't obvious to me that anyone cares to build long-lasting structures..
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…
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…
Maybe also start a traditoin in your family to have many children and to memorise the website up to a single character, like a sacred text. 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.
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 technolo…
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.
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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... I don't see much stability.
Many, many people speaking English also creates an incentive for stability at the same time it creates variation.
Even that long is quite ambitious as a goal but at least the suggestions might be somewhat actionable.