13 ms·

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 ch

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 relatively easy job for software archaeologists or historians to decode, assuming it's been periodically backed up to new media for all those years. The most likely case, though, is that in 150 years, the servers it was stored on, which have not been running for 80 years, will be picked over and/or melted down for precious metal contents by a tinker who wanders between mud-hut villages repairing their ancient metal pots in exchange for dried fish.

Aloha 5y ago
I've considered using mylar paper-tape as a long term digital storage medium. I thought about either standard sized paper tape, or six foot wide reels of mylar (in any length) which can be punched at a pretty high bit density, and read back optically. With instructions printed on the outside (and on the first dozen layers), much like the voyager record, explaining how to play it back, and construct a playback device, and how the encoding works.
sillysaurusx 5y ago
As entertaining as this is, I have a bit more faith in archive.org.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Serious question, but why?
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    I think it's a historically significant dataset. We've seen other datasets be preserved, such as GitHub arctic vault. I agree that it's tenuous. I would give it 20% odds of hitting the 500 year mark at best. And I don't think all of the data will survive. But if archive.org ever becomes unsustainable to run, the existing data will likely be preserved. Lots of companies will be incentivized to continue hosting the data, as it's excellent PR if nothing else. They don't need to continue gathering the data, just host it. Hosting is only going to become cheaper as t -> infinity, and given the massive amount of compute I've seen Google wield, it's hard to imagine that an operation like archive.org can't find some way to be preserved. All that said, the biggest threat is sudden data loss. This only works as long as the data doesn't get lost. Has archive.org posted their operations policies anywhere? It would be interesting reading.
    - metalliqaz 5y ago
      not sure I share your sentiment about companies hosting the data, considering what happened to Geocities and others.
      - sillysaurusx 5y ago
        Mm, you're right, but Geocities might be less interesting to historians than an archive of all internet history. Also, as someone who has trained a few large GPT models, I think ML has a chance of preserving a lot of this data. Training datasets are only growing larger and larger, and although those aren't updated (yet), there's no reason to think they won't last for a long time. I imagine that in 500 years, imagenet2012 might still be around as a historical curiosity, at least somewhere.
        HighPlainsDrftr 5y ago
        Well, everyone was hyped on perl at the turn of the millennium. Yet not many people write it anymore. I keep waiting for the re-surge, but it just doesn't look like it is going to happen. At nuclear waste sites, even the feds have come up with a few ways of saying "Don't enter. It is bad" with different languages, pictorial signs, and such. It is really tough to figure out what the next few hundred years looks like. And to be a bit political, I don't think anyone saw the invasion of the capitol building in January. It isn't easy to predict the future. With the original poster in mind, I think the best bet would to be with archive.org. Maybe archive.org should provide this service. It could be a way to generate revenue - say "here is a thousand bucks, keep it for eternity." I'm not sure I would want my thoughts to last that long though. (And I'm still not sure that it would survive for more than a few hundred years.) Maybe the right thing to do is do something so great for society that they want to write books on you (eg: George Washington).
        dylan604 5y ago
        > Maybe the right thing to do is do something so great for society that they want to write books on you (eg: George Washington). Rarely do the people that seek this actually achieve this. --quoth the raven
  - postingawayonhn 5y ago
    I think the chance of future generations having the motivation to continue preserving OP's specific website would be quite low but there would be a much greater motivation to maintain a large organised archive.
FredPret 5y ago
Have you been playing a lot of Fallout lately?
niblettc 5y ago
The second part of your answer is hilarious and depressing.
- franky47 5y ago
  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.
  - clarkmoody 5y ago
    Hopefully some remnant of humanity will cast out among the stars with ultra-high density storage holding archives of most of human knowledge.
    - jeremyjh 5y ago
      How is that going to repair anyone's kettle?
      - zymhan 5y ago
        It may help if the kettle is somewhere between the Earth and Mars :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot
    - gzer0 5y ago
      The Voyager Golden Record is an attempt to do this. It's a record that contains sounds and images to portray life on earth [1]. This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours - President Jimmy Carter [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
    - genewitch 5y ago
      a song i composed is being sent to the moon on an SD card or flash drive of some sort, i was told. Realistically if there is some faster-than-light mechanism, any interested alien or human could just "fast forward" and "rewind" through time to listen/watch our broadcasts from the appropriate distance from the original location. Barring that, I'm guessing the equivalent of stone tablets, or the golden record are the best bet. I wouldn't place any bets on anything that requires magnetism or electricity to survive in open space for long enough to matter. Like, platter bit-flips due to radiation from outer space are a thing, and current leakage would eventually render something like SSDs unreadable. So hard copy for earth, radio and hard copy for the universe?
jamesdf 5y ago
> “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 past, when humanity was but a babe: Carving words into stone.” Death's End -Liu Cixin - The third novel in the trilogy staring with The Three-Body Problem
- metalliqaz 5y ago
  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.
  - freeslave 5y ago
    not just sci-fi! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones
    - INTPenis 5y ago
      The things listed there are completely worthless though. In case of system collapse I'd want to know practical things like agriculture and simple power plants.
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    There was an interesting article online a few years back, can't find it now. It claimed that humans can't make anything that will last more that 16 million years. This includes any kind of nuclear pollution. Sure we might get lucky like Jurassic fossils, but not intentionally.
    - petters 5y ago
      My favorite weird theory is the "Siluran hypothesis," which states that our industrial revolution was not the first. There are some events in sediment that look like what our industrial revolution will look like. (many millions of years ago, so yes, reptiles)
dfabulich 5y ago
I think is basically the right idea, but a lot of the details are wrong. For example, book archivists recommend against storing books in waterproof containers. https://www.sparefoot.com/self-storage/blog/3456-the-sparefoot-guide-to-storing-books/ https://www.sparefoot.com/self-storage/blog/3456-the-sparefo... "Be careful storing books in plastic containers. Because plastic containers form an air tight seal, any moisture residing inside your books will be trapped. If your books are not completely dry before placing them inside a plastic container for book storage, they may develop mold or mildew. If using plastic containers, make sure to insert silica gel packets to absorb moisture." Instead, archivists recommend acid-free archival boxes. (Gaylord is a recommended brand.) The other point is that you shouldn't just have one copy printed. Like any important data, you'll want to have backups. At a minimum, if you have multiple children, giving one copy to each child is sensible; it would make sense for each person to have at least two copies, one to keep at home, and another to keep somewhere else that would hopefully remain safe. If your document is suitable for public consumption, you could pay for a vanity press to make it available for publication, arranging to have copies stored in libraries. As of today, arranging to have your book archived in the Library of Congress is a reasonable approach to ensuring that some professional archivist will at least try to take care of your book. (They'll also attempt to digitize your book, and archivists will attempt to care for the digital collection, but, as you noted, there's no way to be sure that any digital equipment will be working 500 years from now.) But, if your thing is suitable for public consumption, consider another problem: will your great-grandchildren care to read what you wrote? Probably the only way to ensure that anyone will care to read your work is to be/become famous, and to write a successful work with millions of copies. (This also incidentally solves the archival problem: people care about protecting and preserving historically important documents.)
bombcar 5y ago
The weak link is the children - would you take out and read your great-grandfather's book every year? Now take it further yet and eventually it gets boring and not done anymore.
- lcall 5y ago
  It's really interesting how Jewish culture has done something like that for thousands (I'm not an expert), with the annual passover family conversation. Edit: and/or other traditional Jewish yearly family events.
dillondoyle 5y ago
Put it on Vellum! Create a social ritual to read it so it can stay pliable. Vellum lasts forever
walrus01 5y ago
> The most likely case, though, is that in 150 years, the servers it was stored on, which have not been running for 80 years, will be picked over and/or melted down for precious metal contents by a tinker who wanders between mud-hut villages repairing their ancient metal pots in exchange for dried fish. somewhat reminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz
- murphyslab 5y ago
  That's such a good book. I first read it after reading Wikipedia's "Terminal Event Management Policy" (a humorous page) which noted: > In the longer term, archivists are encouraged to pool the resources of the encyclopedia for the common good. A suggested model of collaboration is based on the Leibowitz-Canticle report of the 1960s, which suggests pooling of archives in a centralized location, which might serve as a hub for reconstruction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Terminal_Event_Management_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Terminal_Event_Manag... After reading that I quickly found a copy in the library to enjoy. Not many sci-fi books from 1959 have remained as relevant and fresh 6 decades later.
YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
Oh. You assume that in 500 years there will still be fish.
- trhway 5y ago
  you just may not recognize that as fish.
jrumbut 5y ago
My favorite part of this excellent answer, and to me the most important part, is the yearly reading tradition. 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.
trhway 5y ago
> keep it in a safe-deposit box on a practically non-declining 2000km high orbit where USSR Uranium nuclear reactors are parked.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  I think we will clean that stuff up. You have to be pretty sure that humanity is going to suffer societal collapse for hundreds of years in order to put something in an orbit that people will want clear.
markstos 5y ago
The United States government studied this question and came to the conclusion of... acid free paper. So it's now law that "permanent" documents in the US are to be stored on acid free paper: https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rt/perm/permpapr.html https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rt/perm/permpapr.... Some of us who remember the 5.25" floppy disks, the 3" "floppy" disks, the HUGE Zipdisks, the 5.25" spinning platter drives, the 2.5" spinning platter drives, then the 2.5" SSD drives, and now the M.2 SSD drives... there's clearly no hope of any digital medium lasting 500 years. It's hard enough to read data from a drive built 20 years ago!
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  Acid free paper is a big improvement, but it's not gonna last 500 years. It's expected to last 200 years. Archival acid-free paper -- paper with cotton added to it -- can last up to 1000 years, but be prepared to pay $2.50 for 1 page[1], so a 400 page book will cost you $1000 for one copy, just for the paper in the book. This type of archival paper might be useful for important contracts or deeds, or legal documents. But then you have to worry about ink. Normal ink will break down as well in 1-200 years, so you need archival ink. This boils down the difference between pigment and dye based inks. Dye based inks are more expensive but more resistant to UV light. In the end, light, heat, water, will destroy everything. The way to make something last is social in nature -- building long lasting institutions and cultures that value your website and archive it. These must be able to preserve themselves, which means traditions that forcefully apply to successive generations. It is not a technological problem, but a social problem. However liberalism is completely unequipped to solve this problem, because in order to create something that outlives you, you must bind future generations to some course of action they haven't agreed upon yet. So a liberal society cannot have long lasting institutions or traditions, it always eats itself -- there is another trending hackernews topic about Jefferson being cancelled. Well, of course Jefferson will be cancelled. So will Martin Luther King. So will everyone else. Absolutely nothing can last in a liberal society that believes moral progress is possible -- e.g. that children can be more moral than their grandparents. If you look at durable societies of the past, they all believed that the grandparents were wiser and more moral than they. That allowed them to preserve traditions and texts. The contingent that believes the opposite does not preserve texts, they burn them/cancel them/or otherwise try to erase them. So once you stop thinking in terms of "what is the best way to do X" to "what is the best way to make sure my mechanisms of doing X will last", then you end up with completely different solutions for the same problem, because the social technologies of preservation are often the exact opposite of the social technologies of progress and improvement. So no, your website is not going to last 500 years. [1] https://www.archivalmethods.com/product/archival-paper https://www.archivalmethods.com/product/archival-paper
oceanplexian 5y ago
I’d alternatively recommend microfilm. It’s specifically engineered to last ~500 years and has much higher storage density than paper and ink. The technology needed to read it is fairly low tech and trivial and the format is quite durable.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  Particularly if you store it at 0°C.
ellis0n 5y ago
The physical book have a symbols array limit. I'm not sure if archived sites will cost less than 10MB by images and unlimitied private photo streams. Because we created the Internet to look forward, not backward. Looks like 1+ TB for the minimal common case for the human race
marcosdumay 5y ago
I see no technical reason for why we can't create some e-reader that will keep your library much safer for much longer than paper. I see no reason why we can't make some that last for a millennium, if the power supply and storage aren't included and it's kept off in some dry place, out of the Sun's light and never overheat. But well, there is no demand for tech that will last for a millennium. In fact, people are pushing for degradable tech that won't stay as waste after it stops being useful instead.
- avhon1 5y ago
  Somebody wrote down their thinking on exactly this subject: http://canonical.org/~kragen/eotf/ http://canonical.org/~kragen/eotf/
- bccdee 5y ago
  Electronics aren't that sturdy. Hard drives demagnetize, solid-state storage decays, and there's always the chance that a stray cosmic ray will fry something. Even if we could construct something that sturdy: After a millennium, how would anyone know how to operate it? Would we include an instruction manual? Printed on what sort of paper? Microengravings on metal plates [1] will be more durable than electronics could ever be, and easier to read as well. No power source necessary — just a lens. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD-Rosetta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD-Rosetta
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    > After a millennium, how would anyone know how to operate it Same way they know now. Humans will still be humans. If my 3 year old son can figure out how my e-reader works from nothing, so can future humans.
    - bccdee 5y ago
      Can he figure out how to build a charger for that e-reader from scratch? Wall sockets are going to be different in a millenium, if they even exist at all. With no manual, they could easily fry it with too much voltage before they actually get it working.
MetaWhirledPeas 5y ago
500 years from now, at a grand reconstruction ceremony: "And there seems to be text scrolling and blinking upon the display surface... never.... gonna... give you up? What do you think it means, Tharl?"
somenewaccount1 5y ago
That works until the FBI raids the entire safe deposit bank and steals everyones possessions.
malthuswaswrong 5y ago
You are better off with microfiche.
wrycoder 5y ago
I once had an email service which dismantled its servers one day after it stopped flowing email. I lost a lot of email. They had sent a couple of warnings, which I had cleverly filtered into a special folder. And missed.

Aloha 5y ago

I've considered using mylar paper-tape as a long term digital storage medium. I thought about either standard sized paper tape, or six foot wide reels of mylar (in any length) which can be punched at a pretty high bit density, and read back optically. With instructions printed on the outside (and on the first dozen layers), much like the voyager record, explaining how to play it back, and construct a playback device, and how the encoding works.

sillysaurusx 5y ago

As entertaining as this is, I have a bit more faith in archive.org.

dylan604 5y ago
Serious question, but why?
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  I think it's a historically significant dataset. We've seen other datasets be preserved, such as GitHub arctic vault. I agree that it's tenuous. I would give it 20% odds of hitting the 500 year mark at best. And I don't think all of the data will survive. But if archive.org ever becomes unsustainable to run, the existing data will likely be preserved. Lots of companies will be incentivized to continue hosting the data, as it's excellent PR if nothing else. They don't need to continue gathering the data, just host it. Hosting is only going to become cheaper as t -> infinity, and given the massive amount of compute I've seen Google wield, it's hard to imagine that an operation like archive.org can't find some way to be preserved. All that said, the biggest threat is sudden data loss. This only works as long as the data doesn't get lost. Has archive.org posted their operations policies anywhere? It would be interesting reading.
  - metalliqaz 5y ago
    not sure I share your sentiment about companies hosting the data, considering what happened to Geocities and others.
    - sillysaurusx 5y ago
      Mm, you're right, but Geocities might be less interesting to historians than an archive of all internet history. Also, as someone who has trained a few large GPT models, I think ML has a chance of preserving a lot of this data. Training datasets are only growing larger and larger, and although those aren't updated (yet), there's no reason to think they won't last for a long time. I imagine that in 500 years, imagenet2012 might still be around as a historical curiosity, at least somewhere.
      - HighPlainsDrftr 5y ago
        Well, everyone was hyped on perl at the turn of the millennium. Yet not many people write it anymore. I keep waiting for the re-surge, but it just doesn't look like it is going to happen. At nuclear waste sites, even the feds have come up with a few ways of saying "Don't enter. It is bad" with different languages, pictorial signs, and such. It is really tough to figure out what the next few hundred years looks like. And to be a bit political, I don't think anyone saw the invasion of the capitol building in January. It isn't easy to predict the future. With the original poster in mind, I think the best bet would to be with archive.org. Maybe archive.org should provide this service. It could be a way to generate revenue - say "here is a thousand bucks, keep it for eternity." I'm not sure I would want my thoughts to last that long though. (And I'm still not sure that it would survive for more than a few hundred years.) Maybe the right thing to do is do something so great for society that they want to write books on you (eg: George Washington).
        dylan604 5y ago
        > Maybe the right thing to do is do something so great for society that they want to write books on you (eg: George Washington). Rarely do the people that seek this actually achieve this. --quoth the raven
- postingawayonhn 5y ago
  I think the chance of future generations having the motivation to continue preserving OP's specific website would be quite low but there would be a much greater motivation to maintain a large organised archive.

FredPret 5y ago

Have you been playing a lot of Fallout lately?

niblettc 5y ago

The second part of your answer is hilarious and depressing.

franky47 5y ago
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.
- clarkmoody 5y ago
  Hopefully some remnant of humanity will cast out among the stars with ultra-high density storage holding archives of most of human knowledge.
  - jeremyjh 5y ago
    How is that going to repair anyone's kettle?
    - zymhan 5y ago
      It may help if the kettle is somewhere between the Earth and Mars :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot
  - gzer0 5y ago
    The Voyager Golden Record is an attempt to do this. It's a record that contains sounds and images to portray life on earth [1]. This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours - President Jimmy Carter [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
  - genewitch 5y ago
    a song i composed is being sent to the moon on an SD card or flash drive of some sort, i was told. Realistically if there is some faster-than-light mechanism, any interested alien or human could just "fast forward" and "rewind" through time to listen/watch our broadcasts from the appropriate distance from the original location. Barring that, I'm guessing the equivalent of stone tablets, or the golden record are the best bet. I wouldn't place any bets on anything that requires magnetism or electricity to survive in open space for long enough to matter. Like, platter bit-flips due to radiation from outer space are a thing, and current leakage would eventually render something like SSDs unreadable. So hard copy for earth, radio and hard copy for the universe?

jamesdf 5y ago

> “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 past, when humanity was but a babe: Carving words into stone.” Death's End -Liu Cixin - The third novel in the trilogy staring with The Three-Body Problem

metalliqaz 5y ago
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.
- freeslave 5y ago
  not just sci-fi! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones
  - INTPenis 5y ago
    The things listed there are completely worthless though. In case of system collapse I'd want to know practical things like agriculture and simple power plants.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  There was an interesting article online a few years back, can't find it now. It claimed that humans can't make anything that will last more that 16 million years. This includes any kind of nuclear pollution. Sure we might get lucky like Jurassic fossils, but not intentionally.
  - petters 5y ago
    My favorite weird theory is the "Siluran hypothesis," which states that our industrial revolution was not the first. There are some events in sediment that look like what our industrial revolution will look like. (many millions of years ago, so yes, reptiles)

dfabulich 5y ago

I think is basically the right idea, but a lot of the details are wrong. For example, book archivists recommend against storing books in waterproof containers. https://www.sparefoot.com/self-storage/blog/3456-the-sparefoot-guide-to-storing-books/ https://www.sparefoot.com/self-storage/blog/3456-the-sparefo... "Be careful storing books in plastic containers. Because plastic containers form an air tight seal, any moisture residing inside your books will be trapped. If your books are not completely dry before placing them inside a plastic container for book storage, they may develop mold or mildew. If using plastic containers, make sure to insert silica gel packets to absorb moisture." Instead, archivists recommend acid-free archival boxes. (Gaylord is a recommended brand.) The other point is that you shouldn't just have one copy printed. Like any important data, you'll want to have backups. At a minimum, if you have multiple children, giving one copy to each child is sensible; it would make sense for each person to have at least two copies, one to keep at home, and another to keep somewhere else that would hopefully remain safe. If your document is suitable for public consumption, you could pay for a vanity press to make it available for publication, arranging to have copies stored in libraries. As of today, arranging to have your book archived in the Library of Congress is a reasonable approach to ensuring that some professional archivist will at least try to take care of your book. (They'll also attempt to digitize your book, and archivists will attempt to care for the digital collection, but, as you noted, there's no way to be sure that any digital equipment will be working 500 years from now.) But, if your thing is suitable for public consumption, consider another problem: will your great-grandchildren care to read what you wrote? Probably the only way to ensure that anyone will care to read your work is to be/become famous, and to write a successful work with millions of copies. (This also incidentally solves the archival problem: people care about protecting and preserving historically important documents.)

bombcar 5y ago

The weak link is the children - would you take out and read your great-grandfather's book every year? Now take it further yet and eventually it gets boring and not done anymore.

lcall 5y ago
It's really interesting how Jewish culture has done something like that for thousands (I'm not an expert), with the annual passover family conversation. Edit: and/or other traditional Jewish yearly family events.

dillondoyle 5y ago

Put it on Vellum! Create a social ritual to read it so it can stay pliable. Vellum lasts forever

walrus01 5y ago

> The most likely case, though, is that in 150 years, the servers it was stored on, which have not been running for 80 years, will be picked over and/or melted down for precious metal contents by a tinker who wanders between mud-hut villages repairing their ancient metal pots in exchange for dried fish. somewhat reminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz

murphyslab 5y ago
That's such a good book. I first read it after reading Wikipedia's "Terminal Event Management Policy" (a humorous page) which noted: > In the longer term, archivists are encouraged to pool the resources of the encyclopedia for the common good. A suggested model of collaboration is based on the Leibowitz-Canticle report of the 1960s, which suggests pooling of archives in a centralized location, which might serve as a hub for reconstruction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Terminal_Event_Management_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Terminal_Event_Manag... After reading that I quickly found a copy in the library to enjoy. Not many sci-fi books from 1959 have remained as relevant and fresh 6 decades later.

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago

Oh. You assume that in 500 years there will still be fish.

trhway 5y ago
you just may not recognize that as fish.

jrumbut 5y ago

My favorite part of this excellent answer, and to me the most important part, is the yearly reading tradition. 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.

trhway 5y ago

> keep it in a safe-deposit box on a practically non-declining 2000km high orbit where USSR Uranium nuclear reactors are parked.

Robotbeat 5y ago
I think we will clean that stuff up. You have to be pretty sure that humanity is going to suffer societal collapse for hundreds of years in order to put something in an orbit that people will want clear.

markstos 5y ago

The United States government studied this question and came to the conclusion of... acid free paper. So it's now law that "permanent" documents in the US are to be stored on acid free paper: https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rt/perm/permpapr.html https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rt/perm/permpapr.... Some of us who remember the 5.25" floppy disks, the 3" "floppy" disks, the HUGE Zipdisks, the 5.25" spinning platter drives, the 2.5" spinning platter drives, then the 2.5" SSD drives, and now the M.2 SSD drives... there's clearly no hope of any digital medium lasting 500 years. It's hard enough to read data from a drive built 20 years ago!

rsj_hn 5y ago
Acid free paper is a big improvement, but it's not gonna last 500 years. It's expected to last 200 years. Archival acid-free paper -- paper with cotton added to it -- can last up to 1000 years, but be prepared to pay $2.50 for 1 page[1], so a 400 page book will cost you $1000 for one copy, just for the paper in the book. This type of archival paper might be useful for important contracts or deeds, or legal documents. But then you have to worry about ink. Normal ink will break down as well in 1-200 years, so you need archival ink. This boils down the difference between pigment and dye based inks. Dye based inks are more expensive but more resistant to UV light. In the end, light, heat, water, will destroy everything. The way to make something last is social in nature -- building long lasting institutions and cultures that value your website and archive it. These must be able to preserve themselves, which means traditions that forcefully apply to successive generations. It is not a technological problem, but a social problem. However liberalism is completely unequipped to solve this problem, because in order to create something that outlives you, you must bind future generations to some course of action they haven't agreed upon yet. So a liberal society cannot have long lasting institutions or traditions, it always eats itself -- there is another trending hackernews topic about Jefferson being cancelled. Well, of course Jefferson will be cancelled. So will Martin Luther King. So will everyone else. Absolutely nothing can last in a liberal society that believes moral progress is possible -- e.g. that children can be more moral than their grandparents. If you look at durable societies of the past, they all believed that the grandparents were wiser and more moral than they. That allowed them to preserve traditions and texts. The contingent that believes the opposite does not preserve texts, they burn them/cancel them/or otherwise try to erase them. So once you stop thinking in terms of "what is the best way to do X" to "what is the best way to make sure my mechanisms of doing X will last", then you end up with completely different solutions for the same problem, because the social technologies of preservation are often the exact opposite of the social technologies of progress and improvement. So no, your website is not going to last 500 years. [1] https://www.archivalmethods.com/product/archival-paper https://www.archivalmethods.com/product/archival-paper

oceanplexian 5y ago

I’d alternatively recommend microfilm. It’s specifically engineered to last ~500 years and has much higher storage density than paper and ink. The technology needed to read it is fairly low tech and trivial and the format is quite durable.

PaulHoule 5y ago
Particularly if you store it at 0°C.

ellis0n 5y ago

The physical book have a symbols array limit. I'm not sure if archived sites will cost less than 10MB by images and unlimitied private photo streams. Because we created the Internet to look forward, not backward. Looks like 1+ TB for the minimal common case for the human race

marcosdumay 5y ago

I see no technical reason for why we can't create some e-reader that will keep your library much safer for much longer than paper. I see no reason why we can't make some that last for a millennium, if the power supply and storage aren't included and it's kept off in some dry place, out of the Sun's light and never overheat. But well, there is no demand for tech that will last for a millennium. In fact, people are pushing for degradable tech that won't stay as waste after it stops being useful instead.

avhon1 5y ago
Somebody wrote down their thinking on exactly this subject: http://canonical.org/~kragen/eotf/ http://canonical.org/~kragen/eotf/
bccdee 5y ago
Electronics aren't that sturdy. Hard drives demagnetize, solid-state storage decays, and there's always the chance that a stray cosmic ray will fry something. Even if we could construct something that sturdy: After a millennium, how would anyone know how to operate it? Would we include an instruction manual? Printed on what sort of paper? Microengravings on metal plates [1] will be more durable than electronics could ever be, and easier to read as well. No power source necessary — just a lens. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD-Rosetta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD-Rosetta
- Aeolun 5y ago
  > After a millennium, how would anyone know how to operate it Same way they know now. Humans will still be humans. If my 3 year old son can figure out how my e-reader works from nothing, so can future humans.
  - bccdee 5y ago
    Can he figure out how to build a charger for that e-reader from scratch? Wall sockets are going to be different in a millenium, if they even exist at all. With no manual, they could easily fry it with too much voltage before they actually get it working.

MetaWhirledPeas 5y ago

500 years from now, at a grand reconstruction ceremony: "And there seems to be text scrolling and blinking upon the display surface... never.... gonna... give you up? What do you think it means, Tharl?"

somenewaccount1 5y ago

That works until the FBI raids the entire safe deposit bank and steals everyones possessions.

malthuswaswrong 5y ago

You are better off with microfiche.

wrycoder 5y ago

I once had an email service which dismantled its servers one day after it stopped flowing email. I lost a lot of email. They had sent a couple of warnings, which I had cleverly filtered into a special folder. And missed.