create the website as purely static, then print it out and stick it in a book or on a metal cd (like the voyager project did)
Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
771–780 of 825 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#772Earlier 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.
Eschaton in Singularitys Sky? "You shall not meddle with the lightcone of the recursive time-travelling super-intelligence you created?"
"Thou shalt not violate causality in my historic light cone," I believe.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#773Earlier quoted context omitted.
Never underestimate the power of basic human needs over layers of abstractions. Software's intangibility will be its downfall when our modern society eventually collapses.
It always brings me joy to read doomsday prophecies from decades, centuries, and millenia past. They were legion -- so confident, yet so wrong. I hope your predictions bring similar joy to future readers in the decades, centuries, and millenia to come.
I hope so, too, but it's not the way to bet.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#774Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was very young at the time, but I was absolutely convinced that the world would end at 2020. It didn’t, and that deeply ingrained in me a very substantial amount of skepticism from doomsdaysayers. The only doomsday I believe in now for absolute certainty is the heat death of the universe, but no one reading this will be around for that.
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…
> There was quite a lot of doomsday talk during the Cold War,
Unfortunately, all the existential risks from the Cold War are still around, plus we have new ones we didn't know about or didn't take seriously back then.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#775Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wrote my name in the Bitcoin blockchain 6 years ago, I barely knew Javascript. For a blockchain like Bitcoin to fit all of its transactions in only 420GB is an engineering feat that should be admired The blockchain data will never be "optimized" or "disappear" Please take the time to learn how Bitcoin works before pontificating
>The blockchain data will never be "optimized" or "disappear" This is a really bold assumption - you do understand that core dev is still ongoing, yes? You do understand that "infinite data on a disk" doesn't exist, yes? And as the chain goes on longer, more space is going to be needed, and centralization of the miners will continue to increase, yes? Please take the time to learn how Bitcoin works before pontificatin…
Just like the Internet, Bitcoin is built on layers.
The Layer 2 technology, like the Lightning Network will fix the "infinite data on disk" problem.
> centralization of the miners will continue to increase
Ask yourself: why do miners use energy to run the Bitcoin software?
You can get paid to learn about Bitcoin with the Satoshi Passport app on iOS.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#776Earlier quoted context omitted.
Society as we knew it definitely took a hit in 2020 though. Collapse is not a singular event at a fixed point in time like the start of a war would be, it's a process.
Which is why some people have taken to using the term crumble rather than collapse, crumbling happens at different rates in different places and can sometimes, at least temporarily, be fixed.
Yeah, that's a good term and a good way of thinking about it. When all the crumbling overlaps for a century, you get Gibson's Jackpot.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#777Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty of Italian and Swiss banks that are over 300 years old. They’ve survived reformations, wars including World Wars, plagues, purges, and the transition from feudal monarchies to empire and to democracy. For example, the British banking giant Barclays was founded in 1690. Here’s a partial list of other ancient banks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_banks_in_contin... I think it’s more reaso…
But I doubt Barclays is currently upholding contracts signed 200 years ago.
There are hundreds of thousands of trusts being run to this day that were set up over 200 years ago, mostly to do with land.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#778Host the content/pages on the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/ There's a pretty good chance their collection (and possibly the organization themselves) will be around in 500 yrs. 1 EB in 100 yrs will be trivial to host (probably the price of a loaf of bread), and your content will be accessible by anyone with a copy of that archive.
Why is there a good chance the organisation will be around in 500?
Most non profit internet orgs will ofte sell out for the right price unless set up properly. What makes this different?
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#779Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Nobody thinks we can't survive 2 degrees of heat. After all typical climate fluctuations of more than 100 degrees are common in human experience. What you're describing is a strawman argument.
The actual concern is 2 degrees of average heat change and how that will change the web of systems that we rely on for current human civilization. Break enough subsystems in there and the human experience becomes dramatically different.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#780Earlier quoted context omitted.
At that rate, just make sure it's part of the human genome :)
like in ST:TNG where it turns out there's a piece of code in the DNA of all the humanoid species that together form a message from the civilization that seeded them
Great episode. A two-parter I think.