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 connected over ethernet shielded with corrosion and abrasion resistant material at the lowest power and speed settings, then using raft algorithm and heartbeat. Seal everything with heaps of epoxy resin. Cut cable insulation off near where the cable enters the epoxy cube and reseal exposed wire with epoxy. This way water cannot wick into the main epoxy cube.
Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
31–40 of 825 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#32Hosting isn't so much the issue. You need to create something worth keeping around for 500 years. If you succeed, people will make sure it's available somehow.
There will exist 500 year old torrents
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#33Love this question! Books are obviously gret. The Bitcoin blockchain looks promising as well. This is a great problem, looking forward to reading the comments. There must be some projects which tries to solve this.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#34Store it on the Bitcoin blockchain in the OP_RETURN field [1][2]. Note that this is considered an abuse of the system and discouraged, but of all the systems available now, Bitcoin is most likely to still be around in some form in 500 years IMO.
[1] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/39347/how-to-sto...
[2] http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photo...
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#35Hm. I think your best bet is to make it easy for archive.org to archive. archive.org will work on making your legacy technology work, as they are doing for flash, for example. Or they will find projects to make that work. That has a higher probability to work, opposed to finding a silver bullet now. Though, the silver bullet there would be to minimize technological complexity. Make a simple static site with hugo, for…
I would add to this that you should think about donating to them, seeing that you have overlapping goals. They are a registered 501(c)(3).
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#36I work for a university that is over 800 years old, with a library and press (book and journal publishing) that are about 500 years old. The institutions have changed a lot over the centuries, especially the last 200 years.
Probably the best way to get people to preserve your work that long is to make it really outstanding, so future generations will want to preserve it even though technology and institutional governance keep changing.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#37put your page on a decentralized platform like Ethereum or IPFS and hope it gets maintained for 500 years. With Ethereum at least, there is a monetary incentive to keep the platform alive.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#38If page is static - engrave it in a titanium plate, possibly as a QR code of sorts and pass it through generations.
Include instructions for reader to publish it to whatever media analog of today's web page.
So basically stay away from technology, get information encoded into lowest and most resilient physical material and rely on future generation to publish and/or update it's content.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#39Probably unpopular answer: you could store your messages to the future in the op_return field of a series of small bitcoin transactions. I wouldn't recommend making this the only egg in your basket but I think there is a non-zero probability the blockchain history will be preserved even if the currency isn't used any longer, kind of like how you can still go see Song dynasty paper currency from 1,000 years ago.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#40If page is static - engrave it in a titanium plate, possibly as a QR code of sorts and pass it through generations. Include instructions for reader to publish it to whatever media analog of today's web page. So basically stay away from technology, get information encoded into lowest and most resilient physical material and rely on future generation to publish and/or update it's content.
The Github arctic code vault appears to have created TAR archives and turned them into a sequence of QR codes on a kind of film. And then thrown them in a hole under 250 meters of permafrost in Svalbard.