Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

291–300 of 825 posts

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

#291
post #38

If 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.

QR code? I think many are really underestimating the amount of change in 500 years.

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

#292

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

Five hundred years ago is Shakespeare, roughly. Still readily understandable for the most part. Now if we go back a thousand years…

Shakespeare wrote in what is referred to as "Early Modern English". It is no secret that his writings were a big influence in the evolution of the language itself. If you look at some of his contemporaries from the same period, however, their language will be very different and much harder to understand.

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

#295
Thought experiment: imagine it is 1985 and you asked the equivalent question. Something along the lines of: how would I preserve an electronic game/message/piece of media for posterity?

What would the answer be?

Make sure you copy your floppy on to a tape on the commodore 64?

Make sure that you post the message to at least 4 different bulletin boards?

The tech is evolving so fast that a website, or today's hardware, or forms of media will be unrecognizable 50 years from now.

Perhaps the first question is, what will be the equivalent of a website in 500 years?

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

#296

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…

> The most likely case, though, is that in 150 years, the servers it was stored on, which have not been running for 80 years, will be picked over and/or melted down for precious metal contents by a tinker who wanders between mud-hut villages repairing their ancient metal pots in exchange for dried fish.

somewhat reminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz

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

#297

This type of question is asked semi-frequently and the answers tend to be around physical preservation. So here's a thought. Why not build a "Computational Knowledge Bootloader" that contained enough information to build a sequence of computational devices of increasing complexity starting with the absolute basics of math and language. If we had that, then all of these types of questions of digital preservation could…

A foundation of sorts?

Hahaha, wow, yeah, I did just binge that last week. facepalm I guess it made an impact.

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

#298

Cut the data into the surface of a chunk of highly reflective and stable metal. Lob that into a high orbit. It will blink out your data from on high with nothing more than the incident light of the sun to anyone with a basic telescope, or even their naked eyes if it's big enough. Obviously the details would be rather complicated. How is the data encoded? Morse code? Maybe ok for 500 years assuming the language it dec…

Hmmm... I like this idea. I wonder how much data you can store in the different sized facets of a spinning prism.

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

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall some scifi where some Diety/SuperAI left 'commandments' for humanity carved into giant monuments made of diamond. I presume that was considered the only thing that would survive deep time.

There was an interesting article online a few years back, can't find it now. It claimed that humans can't make anything that will last more that 16 million years. This includes any kind of nuclear pollution. Sure we might get lucky like Jurassic fossils, but not intentionally.

I haven't seen the article, but I don't buy it, there's no likely events that will harm Voyager 1 and 2 in that time period, for instance. They could get really unluckly and hit a star/planet, but it's not at all likely. Along a similar vein many of the satellites that we put in graveyard orbits around earth at the end of their useful life will also plausibly last that long, though there is a lot more debris for them to collide with.

We've also certainly... redistributed... many metals and other things around earth. Perhaps "large concentration of iron over what use to be new york" doesn't count, but arguably it should.

Post reply on HN