401–410 of 825 posts
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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.
I don't think it's necessary to go into all this trouble. Tablets made of the much, much cheaper clay are still accessible today—4000 years after they were created.
I 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 govern…
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It doesn't have to be fair. Things come and go. To host information for X years, statistically the things most likely to last are those that already existed for at least that amount of time. Or you can take your chances, which, again statistically speaking, is not good if we're talking about websites lasting 500 years.
No, the point is you can’t use the fact that websites are currently under 500 years old as evidence that they won’t ever be 500 years old.
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…
Or even better, diversify, and use multiple different plans, not just lawyers.
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Not sure if you intentionally missunderstood, but the point was, that you probably would be able to make some sense of 1000 year old english, but that is about the border. It depends on the culture of course. There are old cultures with the same references like a bible, that might cover longer timeframes of understanding.
Ah, my apologies. I could be clearer. It was curious for that comment to refer to _mutual intelligibility_ for people on either side of a 1000 year period. It's a lot easier to ask whether contemporary humans can understand 1000 year old language, than to ask whether humans 1000 years ago can understand contemporary language.
This is clear. And since we can only look backwards, we can only assume it works the other way around.
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> “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…
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.
Isn't there an 'arrogance' in the premise when we ask these sorts of questions? Not a personal criticism; just an aside from the technical question for a moment. It's the assumption that we've decided something we created should have permanence. Similar to billionaires deciding they would like to live forever and trying to make it happen. There's a beauty to the world, which is we get a short time to contribute, and…
It's invalid to criticize a conditional statement for the nature of its premise. A conditional statement is not a statement about the desirability or otherwise of the premise; it's a statement about the link between the premise and the conclusion (sorry, I don't really know formal logic/linguistics and those probably aren't the right terms but I do know that what I'm saying is correct.)
For the same reason, every programmer that has ever answered a "how do I" question on stackoverflow by saying "you shouldn't" is not answering the question, since the question is a shorthand for "conditional on the fact that I want to do this, what is the best way?".