There are a few services like this today, some are fairly simple like memorial web pages or find-a-grave where you can add photos about the people named on the tombstones.
Expanding beyond that (and I think more useful) are eternal digital archives such as https://www.permanent.org/ which is a non-profit that charges you per gigabyte for perpetual storage. They store copies of your data with multiple providers (AWS and Backblaze right now) and promise to transcode formats as technologies change. you can make the archives public (letting you have the "eternal home page") or private so only certain people can view or update it. The money you pay goes into an endowment and the earnings from the endowment pay the storage costs.
Are you joking that that's what would become of the hypothetical service, or saying that it did materialise but then Google really did buy it and shut it down?
I remember being super excited when I first read about it in Google Reader, in my feed of Google services that were going to improve the lives of humanity from hereon in.
I've thought about this a bit myself. It could be a publicly-funded service or simply a non-profit trust, but simply having a text based namespace, and links to where all other data are stored would be a massive benefit.
Whatever, but the idea is the Eternal Home Page can be mostly(only?) pointers to records and then the authentication and authorization can change and exist in the private market. The Eternal Home Page can implement some auth as well.
Setup a trust, charge/tax/fee enough to always provide the hosting and security, that's it.
For now, everyone should at least manage a personal web page of their own to keep the dream alive.
Anyway, legal and financial aspects are what will make it permanent, not technology (though it can help!).
I’ve been interested in doing this for some time. I haven’t looked into How to do it heavily yet; however my hunch is, it can be done with one or a combination of these:
Would be curious to hear how others have gone about this.
It would be interesting if there were a service where you could pay in $5,000 worth of Ethereum for such and have it be “Unstaked” in 500 years and pay the bearers at that time, likely some would be our Transhuman AI overlords :)
But why would transhuman AI overlords care about cryptocurrency. Or any other form of currency or valuable stuff. If they are our overlords then what ever they want they can take, they don’t need currency to pay for it.
It's one thing to have the data around for centuries, it's another to be able to view it. Some content (Flash) is already very difficult to view just a few decades after it was created, let alone centuries.
Who is going to be able to view a JPEG file 500 years from now? It requires not only the data, but also all the software infrastructure to be able to interpret this data. To me it seems a stretch that all software required to view it is still usable in a century, let alone 5 centuries.
So even if you keep these home pages around "forever", it seems unlikely to me that anyone wants to invest time in transcoding everything when the world moves on to different storage formats. So what you end up might be little more than a bag of bytes? Though I guess the textual content within the HTML still has some chance of still being readable.
It will be fun times for Internet Historians in 2496 when they try to compile the historical copies of gcc, cmake, nasm and libjpeg.
Maybe... It could be a sort of digital restoration?
It's not mentioned at all in the article though, which I found surprising. My first reaction was that I don't think storage is the only problem, maybe not even the most difficult problem.
Yeah I didn’t read it carefully, i just presumed that was the idea. Anyone can put up a website or tombstone, the job to be done here is to make sure it stays up and stays readable, otherwise it’s pointless... So maybe there is a business waiting to be launched here!
There are companies out there today (like https://www.mykeeper.com) doing something similar in this space with Digital/online memorials where you can create pages for documenting & sharing people's lives. Would be interesting though to have some sort of way of guaranteeing digital perpetuity for these memorials so that they could exist independently of the specific service they were created on.
If you want to preserve digital content for long time, you also probably better stick to boring standards such as plain text files or some static HTML instead of something fancy.
Proposal for the Future Service: the Eternal Infinite Day (now)
A first principles approach to this would be a time machine + a cosmic simulation console. I’m not saying that the technology will be available this month but definitely sometime this year (or technically last year too) is probable.
At least it’s a non zero chance. Combine that with a long enough timeline, and the future might just become the past.
Good idea but impossible with a centralized service, because as soon as the hosting company goes down the page goes down with it. Only now that decentralization is starting to be a thing this will finally be possible.
a homepage that can lie dormant for millennia in the sands of our ruined planet and can activate, when a strange kind of sentience discovers it and exposes its sensors again to the warmth of reddish sunlight of our dying star. Its crystal memory unit starts to reflow, emitting weak signals in an undecipherable language long forgotten ...
Assuming a long-term return of 3%, in exchange for a $200 one-time donation, they could afford to spend $3 a year on maintaining a page and get another $3 a year to fund their operations. Right now, that's enough for 2GB of disk and more cpu and bandwidth than will be used long-term.
The biggest costs are likely to be customer service and abuse prevention. That could sink this.
Except if you lose the domain and someone else picks it up, they can setup a restrictive robots.txt and your page will no longer be visible in the archive.
A few months ago we stopped referring to robots.txt files on U.S. government and military web sites for both crawling and displaying web pages (though we respond to removal requests sent to info@archive.org). As we have moved towards broader access it has not caused problems, which we take as a good sign. We are now looking to do this more broadly.
We see the future of web archiving relying less on robots.txt file declarations geared toward search engines, and more on representing the web as it really was, and is, from a user’s perspective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Sloane
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-Line_Encyclopedia_of_Intege...