Create some sort of religion around your website. The modern big religions seem to have done a decent job keeping their fixtures around for the last 2000-3000 years.
Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
561–570 of 825 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#562hmm
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was quite a lot of doomsday talk during the Cold War, and there has been periodic environmental doomsday predictions since the 60s, starting with overpopulation and chemicals like DDT. Interspersed with that was AI and nanotech apocalyptic concerns. Climate change is the latest. The idea that civilization will manage to avoid the worst case scenarios and find its way through is not as exciting. You probably won…
This is a little bit like the bird who avoids the cat for 3 days in a row using that as evidence that cats can't eat birds. Be careful extrapolating possible futures only by sampling past events. That's why we have physics, because we are notoriously bad at doing that with just our intuition. Climate change is a pretty simple proposal with pretty simple and direct evidence. Carbon traps light, which means more heat i…
It's funny that there is a set of people who think we can't survive +2 degrees of heat but can easily be an interplanetary species surviving in Mars.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#564I have also wondered about this a lot. If you think at a parallel - what are the websites around today that I can imagine also surviving 500 years? - the best I can come up with would be to host on an open platform with a well-established indexer; so ultimately hosting on GitHub Pages with regular caching by Archive.org's Wayback Machine
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#565What can you do that will give someone living 500 years from now a reason to care about your existence? If there is a reason they will find a way. If there is none even a website that may still survive will hardly have any visitors.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#566The world wide web is only 28 years old. 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 anythi…
Create nuclear blasts that encode the information in short microbursts. Info will be available in the carbon record and in tree rings around the world .... profit?
At that rate, just make sure it's part of the human genome :)
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#567Earlier quoted context omitted.
But who will administer the site after you pass? It's much harder to justify the administering effort, when you never even knew the original guy.
In where I live, there's a sweet wine made from a grape from greece, which recipe and genetics has been conserved for a few hundred years because one rich guy stated so in his will, so he gave away a building (was an hospital, now a museum), and in exchange, their heirs must recieve 2 boxes of 6 bottles of such wine each year, or otherwise the building lease is off. Something like that might work
What’s the name of the wine, and how can you get some? I’m very curious!
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#568Maybe decentralized web can survive that long. I just got my first domain on IPFS: ipfs://digitalrose.crypto
I got it on https://unstoppabledomains.com which claims I don't ever have to pay another fee again for it to stay alive forever.
you would need to install plugin or use browser that supports IPFS out of the box: Brave and Opera
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#569Print 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…
That works until the FBI raids the entire safe deposit bank and steals everyones possessions.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#570The best way is just to think about the website right now in your head. In the future we'll probably have technology that can scan the wave patterns emitted from our brains 500 years ago and restore your thoughts including the website that now you just thought of.
My point I guess is that given the rate of change in the future anything could be possible, therefore, you shouldn't accept plausible sounding arguments or complex fictional stories about Antarctica as an answer, but instead the simplest possible answer about a future when anything could be possible.