4 ms·

Really boring answer: Make provisions for it in your will, which likely will mean creating some sort of charitable foundation with the mission of doing this. If

Really boring answer: Make provisions for it in your will, which likely will mean creating some sort of charitable foundation with the mission of doing this. If the personal page is useful and/or hosts some creative work keeping that alive can be the entire goal of it, otherwise the foundation might have to do some actual charity and the preservation of the page would be a quirk in the statutes.

londons_explore 5y ago
"small" things like this I assume end up really expensive in wills. Making a page of text available to the public for 500 years might involve 25 people (each person being responsible for 20 years), and each of them has to be paid enough to care. To ensure each is paid enough, there needs to be a fund to pay them, and that itself needs to be managed by someone, who will also want paying for their troubles. Also consider that in 25 generations it's pretty likely there'll be a major war, civilization collapse, change of monetary system, etc. To make such a scheme resistant to such things, you're probably going to need multiple people involved in every generation, all geographically separated, and all will need paying. Even if you set aside $1M of your estate to this, I don't give it more than a 50/50 chance of survival.
- paulpauper 5y ago
  put the rest in an index fund , which helps pay future salary. there are probably ways to do it
  - remus 5y ago
    I think it's harder than you might think. The New York Stock Exchange was founded in 1792 (229 years ago), there's a lot of things that can wrong over the course of 500 years to mean funding for your project would disappear. Wars, civil unrest, large environmental events etc. are all pretty much guaranteed over a 500 year time span.
    - londons_explore 5y ago
      How many NYSE stocks that existed at the start still exist today?
      - gzer0 5y ago
        There weren't any "stocks" originally signed under the Buttonwood Agreement [1]; it was a consortium of 24 individual brokers [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buttonwood_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buttonwood_Agreement
        dhosek 5y ago
        According to this page https://finance.zacks.com/first-company-offered-new-york-stock-exchange-6616.html https://finance.zacks.com/first-company-offered-new-york-sto... the first five stocks listed included the Bank of New York which still exists as BNY Mellon. It doesn't indicate what the other four stocks were, but presumably they no longer exist (The NYSE page on Wikipedia lists other traded securities as shares in The First Bank of the United States (defunct in 1821) and the Bank of North America (which became a private institution (it was previously the de facto central bank of the nascent U.S.) in 1785 before merging with Commercial Trust Company in 1923. Its successor institutions were eventually acquired by Wells Fargo so presumably if you'd bought shares in 1785 and held on to them for the next 236 years you'd now be holding shares in Wells Fargo). As far as I can tell all other trading was in government bonds.
jonas21 5y ago
> creating some sort of charitable foundation with the mission of doing this Is this not already the mission of the Internet Archive? Except instead of just your page, they preserve all pages that they crawl.

londons_explore 5y ago

"small" things like this I assume end up really expensive in wills. Making a page of text available to the public for 500 years might involve 25 people (each person being responsible for 20 years), and each of them has to be paid enough to care. To ensure each is paid enough, there needs to be a fund to pay them, and that itself needs to be managed by someone, who will also want paying for their troubles. Also consider that in 25 generations it's pretty likely there'll be a major war, civilization collapse, change of monetary system, etc. To make such a scheme resistant to such things, you're probably going to need multiple people involved in every generation, all geographically separated, and all will need paying. Even if you set aside $1M of your estate to this, I don't give it more than a 50/50 chance of survival.

paulpauper 5y ago
put the rest in an index fund , which helps pay future salary. there are probably ways to do it
- remus 5y ago
  I think it's harder than you might think. The New York Stock Exchange was founded in 1792 (229 years ago), there's a lot of things that can wrong over the course of 500 years to mean funding for your project would disappear. Wars, civil unrest, large environmental events etc. are all pretty much guaranteed over a 500 year time span.
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    How many NYSE stocks that existed at the start still exist today?
    - gzer0 5y ago
      There weren't any "stocks" originally signed under the Buttonwood Agreement [1]; it was a consortium of 24 individual brokers [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buttonwood_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buttonwood_Agreement
      - dhosek 5y ago
        According to this page https://finance.zacks.com/first-company-offered-new-york-stock-exchange-6616.html https://finance.zacks.com/first-company-offered-new-york-sto... the first five stocks listed included the Bank of New York which still exists as BNY Mellon. It doesn't indicate what the other four stocks were, but presumably they no longer exist (The NYSE page on Wikipedia lists other traded securities as shares in The First Bank of the United States (defunct in 1821) and the Bank of North America (which became a private institution (it was previously the de facto central bank of the nascent U.S.) in 1785 before merging with Commercial Trust Company in 1923. Its successor institutions were eventually acquired by Wells Fargo so presumably if you'd bought shares in 1785 and held on to them for the next 236 years you'd now be holding shares in Wells Fargo). As far as I can tell all other trading was in government bonds.

jonas21 5y ago

> creating some sort of charitable foundation with the mission of doing this Is this not already the mission of the Internet Archive? Except instead of just your page, they preserve all pages that they crawl.