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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?

#242

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 appe…

I'm partial to the remix: https://twitter.com/PateraQuetzaI/status/1156300892733243392... Link to a thread of Percy Shelley's "Ozimandias" in the rhythm of Smash Mouth's All Star

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

#243

Etch it onto a metal disk like this[1] inside a capsule that can survive reentry, pay to have it shot into space with a slowly decaying orbit. Then perhaps arrange to have the reentry hit a pond near your ancestral home in about 500 years time. 1. https://longnow.org/artifacts/rosetta-wearable-disk

That's got to be ~impossible by today's engineering. Hitting a specific place or even decaying at a specific time in 500 years is just never going to happen.

It'd have to be an active process, which means you need a machine that's still running in 500 years. Even then I bet it's still a hard problem. IIRC NASA aims for like, an ocean and they're happy if they hit the right one.

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

#245
post #16

How 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…

Even plain text is no guarantee. This assumes that future people will read/understand/use latin characters. ASCII could very well be replaced in the medium-term future

I thought Unicode was already replacing ASCII.

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

#247
> “What was there to say? Civilization was like a mad dash that lasted five thousand years. Progress begot more progress; countless miracles gave birth to more miracles; humankind seemed to possess the power of gods; but in the end, the real power was wielded by time. Leaving behind a mark was tougher than creating a world. At the end of civilization, all they could do was the same thing they had done in the distant past, when humanity was but a babe: Carving words into stone.”

Death's End -Liu Cixin - The third novel in the trilogy staring with The Three-Body Problem

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

#248
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's harder than you might think. The New York Stock Exchange was founded in 1792 (229 years ago), there's a lot of things that can wrong over the course of 500 years to mean funding for your project would disappear. Wars, civil unrest, large environmental events etc. are all pretty much guaranteed over a 500 year time span.

How many NYSE stocks that existed at the start still exist today?

There weren't any "stocks" originally signed under the Buttonwood Agreement [1]; it was a consortium of 24 individual brokers [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buttonwood_Agreement

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

#249

Earlier 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...

Hmm. Putting 1 gigabyte in S3 for 500 years at today's most expensive price ($0.023 per gigabyte month) would be $138. Prices are certain to decrease over time. This says something about the cost of using the Ethereum blockchain for storage.

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

#250

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…

> “What was there to say? Civilization was like a mad dash that lasted five thousand years. Progress begot more progress; countless miracles gave birth to more miracles; humankind seemed to possess the power of gods; but in the end, the real power was wielded by time. Leaving behind a mark was tougher than creating a world. At the end of civilization, all they could do was the same thing they had done in the distant past, when humanity was but a babe: Carving words into stone.”

Death's End -Liu Cixin - The third novel in the trilogy staring with The Three-Body Problem

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