331–340 of 825 posts
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…
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.
There was a post here on hacker news of a service that would convert a static page and contain the entire page in a URL. That, in turn, could be converted to a QR code. I didn’t notice if it relied on something like bit.ly to store data, but it didn’t seem like it. Unfortunately, I can’t find it again at the moment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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1. A notable exception would be Edmund Spenser who wrote in a style that was archaic even to his contemporaries.
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.
Microsoft’s research’s Project Silica was doing interesting things on etching glass for long duration archival. https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/ignite-project...
I've thought about this. Keep it completely static, no back-end server required, minimal front-end javascript, mostly plain HTML. The key, as many others have said, is to make it easy to copy/archive (on computers, archive.org, etc). A simple set of linked pages (with graphics in widely-used formats, eg JPEG/PNG) is your best bet. What the stone tablets crowd here misses is that a lot of cultural production today tha…
uhhh, how about no javascript. and no CSS. and ideally, no HTML other than , , ; for posterity's sake.
also, for posterity, raw or bitmapped files with a header of width x height and just raw pixel values is going to survive way longer than whatever gif,png,jpeg format you might pick.
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 anything we'd understand.
To get the big picture of what 500 years means ... the oldest surviving writing is roughly 5500 years old. We've had agriculture for roughly 11,000 years. And you're asking for a personal legacy to be legible and usable after surviving a span of time 10% as vast as the existence of writing itself?
Think archival grade materials and ink, then add translations into Mandarin, Arabic, and Spanish -- there's a much better chance of it being readable if you have more than one language. Then maybe add a dictionary, just in case words have fallen out of use. Make multiple copies and distribute them around the world, including tectonically stable desiccated regions that are currently lightly- or un-inhabited and likely to remain so: the criteria for deep disposal nuclear waste repositories are applicable (minus the "deep") bit, so Yucca Flats would do, or the Atacama Desert or the McMurdo dry valleys in Antarctica.
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 other idea might be to encode your website in a song that's popular today but complex enough to be worthy of study by future generations.
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…
I doubt any commercial/legal entity will live through the upcoming societal transformations. It is naive to believe our current political and economic systems will not change too much even in the next 20-30 years.
Lots of kinds of companies have survived major world transformations.
After that all you need to do is figure out how to have the domain name registered annually. Not going to lie ... thats a pretty tough problem. You might be able to become a domain name registrar and have a trust administer any fees to ICANN... but that is still fraught with problems.
happy hunting!
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…
I doubt any commercial/legal entity will live through the upcoming societal transformations. It is naive to believe our current political and economic systems will not change too much even in the next 20-30 years.
I think it’s more reasonable to assume that they’ll survive any future calamity (especially something so close as 20-30 years) than to assume that our current age is somehow special.