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The 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 5
by cstross 5y ago
The 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 anything we'd understand.
To get the big picture of what 500 years means ... the oldest surviving writing is roughly 5500 years old. We've had agriculture for roughly 11,000 years. And you're asking for a personal legacy to be legible and usable after surviving a span of time 10% as vast as the existence of writing itself?
Think archival grade materials and ink, then add translations into Mandarin, Arabic, and Spanish -- there's a much better chance of it being readable if you have more than one language. Then maybe add a dictionary, just in case words have fallen out of use. Make multiple copies and distribute them around the world, including tectonically stable desiccated regions that are currently lightly- or un-inhabited and likely to remain so: the criteria for deep disposal nuclear waste repositories are applicable (minus the "deep") bit, so Yucca Flats would do, or the Atacama Desert or the McMurdo dry valleys in Antarctica.
- longivitate 5y agoYes. 500 years is but a drop in the ocean of the future. We have lost a fair amount of the past and find even little fragments from long ago to be incredibly illuminating. e.g. the Rosetta Stone, or the dead sea scrolls. What would we know now if the library of Alexandria didn't burn?
- brutusborn 5y agoI would also add the social element - if you want your kids and grandkids to be able to read it, pass custody of the website well before you die (perhaps in a will?) and tell as many friends and family as you can. I know I would happily administer a deceased friend's website until i could no longer myself.
- SynasterBeiter 5y agoBut 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.
- tragictrash 5y agoStart a cult of data protectors, maybe your kids?
- endymi0n 5y agoAdding money might help. We have a small scale investment in our cap table from a German family who have kept their money together for 650 years…
- jjeaff 5y agoSeems like the greater feat would be keeping your family size small over 650 years. Most any level of wealth will start to fade if you have to split it amongst 1,000 heirs.
- bombcar 5y agoHence the effective disinheriting of second or third sons of noble houses (the old saying was something like heir, army, priest).
- tough 5y agoIn 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
- owenversteeg 5y agoWhat’s the name of the wine, and how can you get some? I’m very curious!
- teawrecks 5y agoAre you saying it would NOT have been useful to historians/genealogists if people 500 years ago had produced perfectly preserved documentation of all of their writings in their language at that time? You're also using 500 years of antiquated human communication technology to extrapolate what the next 500 years will be like. Shakespeare wasn't taking selfies, writing blog posts, and responding to commenters in real time back then. English/natural language evolved differently in a world that wasn't connected to the internet. There's no reason for me to believe the last 500 years of communication will be anything like the next 500.
- mattl 5y agoWhere are you getting 28 years old from?
- matthias509 5y agoMosaic release date maybe? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)
- mattl 5y agoMaybe. W3C had a pretty big 30th birthday thing recently. https://www.w3.org/blog/2021/08/30-years-on-from-introducing-the-web-to-the-world/ https://www.w3.org/blog/2021/08/30-years-on-from-introducing...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
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- zarmin 5y agoMaybe a better question is, what would HTML have looked like in the time of Shakespeare? <doth whence="bæc">Forsooth!</doth>
- KingFelix 5y agobrilliant!
- _jstreet 5y agoTIL: There's a "Shakespeare" esoteric programming language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_Programming_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_Programming_Langua...
- macintux 5y agoIt’s generated occasional commentary here, but not recently. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7639119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7639119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4910622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4910622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1415528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1415528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3172021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3172021
- runarberg 5y agoI’d like to think HTML would have used different notation for syntax e.g. the section sign for open tags and pilcrow for closing: §doth whence="bæc"§ Forsooth! ¶doth¶
- divbzero 5y agoAnd written in secretary hand [1] instead of monospace. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_hand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_hand
- chrisweekly 5y agoHaha, reminds me of "If Hemingway Wrote JavaScript" https://www.amazon.com/Hemingway-Wrote-JavaScript-Angus-Croll/dp/1593275854/ref=nodl_# https://www.amazon.com/Hemingway-Wrote-JavaScript-Angus-Crol... which is actually kind of amusing and creative.
- ralmidani 5y agoGreat comment! I’m curious, why did you choose Arabic, Mandarin, and Spanish?
- jdsalaro 5y agoThey are the most widely spoken languages world wide after English.
- capableweb 5y agoEnglish comes after Mandarin and Spanish according to most sources, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers#Top_languages_by_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of... Edit: ugh sorry, I realize you wrote spoken languages (which English would be in the top at, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...), not native/first language/by population. Ignore me!
- sam0x17 5y agoCreate 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?
- 7thaccount 5y agoAt that rate, just make sure it's part of the human genome :)
- noizejoy 5y agoOr maybe a bit more likely to survive longer: cockroach genome or tardigrade genome :-)
- jodrellblank 5y agoShort story where SETI programmers turn new message hunting code on archived files and it detects a message in the human genome rather than in radio signals from the cosmos: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/sftriple/gpic.html https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/sftriple/gpic.html ( https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/252832/short-story-alien-message-encoded-in-dna https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/252832/short-story... )
- xelxebar 5y agoBy the author of autoCAD no less! Thanks for sharing this. You have enriched my day.
- takinola 5y agoI really wish someone would make a good sci-fi movie around stories like this. No space lasers or wormholes, just high concept stories
- sam0x17 5y agoNever, even in video games they always have to throw a fantasy element in :/
- avodonosov 5y agoMaybe also start a traditoin in your family to have many children and to memorise the website up to a single character, like a sacred text. Some texts survived long time in oral form, I heard. Forming the sources as a verse could help here. Mostly oriented to texts, altough images can be memorized in their hex encoding, for example.
- lovecg 5y agoYou’re onto something here. Organized religions are some of the very few institutions that survived for thousands of years with little change.
- danans 5y ago> Organized religions are some of the very few institutions that survived for thousands of years with little change. Which organized religion are you referring to here? All the big ones have changed immensely.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoAt least, the Torah has survived with minimal change.
- RustyConsul 5y agoJust because religions go through major institutional changes, since they are in fact very human at their core, you have to give some credit to the fact we are still talking about Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad.
- JimTheMan 5y agoIronically the dictionaries you mention have greatly stabilised language. Language is going to be far more stable over the next 500 years. I wouldn't worry about it in the slightest.
- Lordarminius 5y agoIs it ? The language is evolving very fast. Compare English from the 50's to what is spoken now, take into account the major dialects around the world... I don't see much stability.
- joe_the_user 5y agoThere are different kinds of stability. One is whether the same language is spoken informally. Another is whether people are able understand earlier texts. I'm pretty sure texts from the 20th and 19th century are commonly read in High School, TV shows from 1960s onward are watched, etc. Having the past ever-present makes it something current informal language relates to. Many, many people speaking English also creates an incentive for stability at the same time it creates variation.
- JimTheMan 5y agoI have a book from the 1700s on my bedside table I can read just fine... My lived experience is I can read texts from hundreds of years ago just fine. Old mate is struggling with 50s tv. The only tip is to use stable language. IE don't use the term dab or vibe or whatever the latest fad niche speak is. I think whoever is interested in a 500 year old website is going to be ok.
- layoric 5y agoThis comment will be fine in hundreds of years. I completely expect (at least Australians) to continue to use “old mate” for a long time to come :).
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- drbojingle 5y agoThat assumes language will continue to evolve the same way now as it did 1,000 years ago. Back then everyone couldn't read and people were separated. With mass media that's no longer the case.
- noizejoy 5y agoWith increasing hostility towards education, we may also regress.
- fn-mote 5y agoCompare your texting to 18th century personal letters. I don't disagree, but language will still evolve significantly. Perhaps our developer docs will come to be seen as some kind of rare "Formal English" (I mean, it kind of is already) and the rest of communication will be in ... emoji??
- drbojingle 5y agoNaturally, but it's going to evolve differently with so many people connected via the internet.
- blondin 5y agogreat answer to a very interesting question! for inspiration on how to preserve things for future generations we may look at religion.
- whatever1 5y agoSo kill whoever does not memorize my website?
- tomxor 5y ago> 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 anything we'd understand. The world was also a very different place, I suspect language will evolve far slower over the next 500 years due to the vast new interconnectedness that society has never experienced before. I think in 500 years, someone looking back at a website from today will find something far more intelligible than when we look back 500 years. The language will be closer and they will have a lot of detailed context to place it in. I know this goes against the strangely attractive premise that civilisations rise and fall and we are ants running around thinking we are important in the moment and nothing we do will last... but the world really has become a more interconnected and stable place and it seems far more probable that it will remain that way. If there is an empire that could fall today and spell the end, it's communication technology.
- iamcurious 5y agoWe went from fotolog to Facebook to Instagram to tiktok in a decade or so. In a few years more it will be something 3d we can't completely envision, who knows in a few decades. In each iteration language changes faster, cause memes are language. In 500 years this will be gibberish. Who knows if people will even know how to read?
- AnonC 5y agoWe already seem to be going to hieroglyphics, except that it’s with emoji and has dialects depending on where and by whom its used. I’ve seen adults unable to understand the emoji lingo that teens used to communicate a lot of things, and this developed in the span of a decade (or lesser) with the widespread availability of emojis. I can only shudder to think of how complex and divergent things from now would seem even 50 years from now.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y agoIt might not be gibberish. But let's pretend one possible next step is computer assisted/accelerated cognition. Which means your incredibly interesting autobiographical web page which will be about as deep and interesting as an emoji, and hold attention for roughly as long. Another possible - currently more likely - next step is extinction because of climate change, so there's no guarantee that OP will even have great grandchildren.
- cm2187 5y agoYou can walk the street of Rome and read inscriptions that are 2000 years old, they will either be close enough to any latin language or you may have some notions of latin yourself. My point being that english is probably much more significant culturally today than latin ever was. The chances that it will be some sort of forgotten language are pretty slim (though I am sure it will have evolved). Now the real question is whether that website will have more significance than a XVI century grocery list, and be really worth preserving to your descendants…
- fn-mote 5y agoYes, inscriptions like "long live the LX regiment" or whatever graffiti. (Kind of joking.) Given the extent of the Roman Empire, I think Latin achieved some pretty significant cultural status. Afaik, Catholic mass stopped being in latin in the 1960's. That's ~3rd century to 20th century. So in use roughly 3x as long as English? (Not a specialist.)
- inciampati 5y agoAnd given that something like half of the words in your post descend from latin, we might even regard english as a kind of daughter language. Of course I'm painting in overly broad strokes for the sake of conversation.
- cm2187 5y agoIt did in europe and northern africa. English is spoken (“airport english” that is) pretty much across the whole world. Entire industries only communicate in english. It is the international language of the elites, very much like latin was at a much smaller scale. And it has already influenced other languages that regularly use english words, and that’s only after a century of influence.
- 4242 5y agoAlready done for the next 1000 years. https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/ https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/
- wrycoder 5y agoAnd then someone forgets to renew the domain.
- sramsay 5y ago> Think archival grade materials and ink, then add translations into Mandarin, Arabic, and Spanish . . . I think this is actually wrong. It certainly doesn't hurt to write on fired clay tablets, or to "store" your papyrus documents in an extremely low-humidity environment. That might enable accidental preservation. But at the of the day (or at the end of the millennium), things survive because lots of people care about them. You mention Anglo Saxon. That's an interesting example, because the entire corpus of Anglo Saxon literature is easily anthologized in a single volume, and there is exactly one extant copy of what most scholars regard as the most important thing written in the language (Beowulf). But the truth is this: Most of it is gone, because people stopped caring about what was written in it. But psalters? Bibles? Church histories? It's an embarrassment of riches. Why? Because people cared very deeply about those things. And translation helps, but again, it's not quite enough. The instructions for my dehumidifier are in eight different languages. Where did I put that again? To come at it from another angle: Finding a paper copy of a 1955 Seattle phonebook is extremely difficult. But why? It was written on paper, there were thousands and thousands of copies printed, none of them have actually disintegrated into dust, and yet . . . So: My advice would be to make that web page pertain to something of epochal importance to millions of people. They'll do the rest.
- chii 5y ago> to make that web page pertain to something of epochal importance to millions of people which is a hard task. and irrelevant to the OP's question. There are many things that people would want to preserve, but is of no importance to the grand scheme of humanity. You're basically saying that unless your works is of such importance that millions of people generations to come would voluntarily preserve it, the works do not deserve preservation.
- sramsay 5y agoI've said nothing about what "deserves" preservation, but only what sort of things tend to be preserved over periods on the scale of centuries. And yes: My contention is that unless a substantial community of people voluntarily commit to preserving something, it likely will not survive (or will do so accidentally). I'm not quite following why this is not relevant to the OP's question. I suppose I'm saying that it's not just a hard task, but an almost impossible one. Lots of people (2000 years ago, say) thought that what they were writing was of world-historical significance; today, we barely know their names. Others dashed off dictated letters to small, fragile communities of early followers and just happened to have created among the most well preserved texts of all time. All I'm really saying here is that among the titanic forces determining which is which, the type of ink used seems not to be a matter of much importance.
- titzer 5y agoAgree and disagree. For one, English and other languages are evolving faster now than before, due to the speed of communication, so spoken language in 500 years (even barring something weird like brain implants) is probably going to be even more different than modern English compared to Shakespeare. However, there are examples of languages and documents that have been preserved, e.g. a Latin bible. Because of its status as a holy document and the vast power of the Catholic church, its tradition of teaching Latin, not just to read the bible, but conduct business and masses, the Latin in which the bible was written was very well preserved.
- pseingatl 5y agoThere is no doubt that we are still in the incunabula of the computer age. Paper, we know, can last for five hundred years, but even once ubiquitous and well-understood media--floppy disks--are now scarce and getting scarcer. The only reliable way of writing for millennia is on stone. The progression of language has been affected by mass media, which has a standardizing influence. Written language will be affected by translation technologies that are at the moment unimaginable. Once complicated problems, e.g. the Chinese typewriter--have been resolved, and ordinary Chinese typing, which used to be limiting to typesetting speeds can now outpace the fastest QWERTY speedster by 2x or 3x or more. Language will not be the problem in the future that it was in the past.