
Archiving a Website for Ten Thousand Years - r721
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/05/archiving-a-website-for-ten-thousand-years/482385/?single_page=true
======
AndrewOMartin
A question along the lines of indefinite preservation use to pop up on
Slashdot pretty regularly. They were usually about preservation of photos, and
the discussion would devolve into a comparison of types of acid-proof paper.

The fact of the matter is that if you're going to put a finite amount of
energy into preserving something, then its going to last for a finite amount
of time. If you use a stable medium like a metal plate, you have the problem
of preserving the encoding in a readable state, if you use a naive easily-
interpretable encoding then you'll need more of the medium. Even if you solve
these problems for your timeframe, you have the more serious problem of
keeping content valuable.

The only solution for this for a curator (anyone with some kind of financial,
academic or sentimental incentive) to keep all the info, suitably backed up,
on whatever the most cost effective consumer technology is. As this tech
becomes obsolete then migrate it.

If there's no one with an incentive to keep it, i.e. it's perceived as
valueless, then the info will degrade over time, but that's basically a
description of entropy increasing over time, welcome to our universe.

(Score:1, Offtopic)

~~~
lmm
Anathem makes a reference to this. A clock with a complex, human-powered daily
winding ritual is no way to make a clock that will run for 10,000 years -
except it is, if the ritual helps create the human culture that will maintain
the clock and bind it to continue doing so.

~~~
onion2k
Even then, if history is anything to go by, societies don't last long enough
to keep the rituals going. The longest continuous civilisation was the Roman
empire that lasted about 1700 years in total. It collapsed 500 years ago with
the fall of New Rome in 1453, and most of the important rituals have
effectively been forgotten already.

~~~
gumby
FWIW ancient Egypt lasted almost 3,000 unbroken years as a self-governing,
unified state; if you count periods of colonization and resurgence as you are
with the Romans, then it was closer to 5,000 years.

Now you used the term "continuous civilization" while I write above of a
continuous unitary state. In that case, China has a fair claim to close to 8
millennia and Egypt likely on the order of 10-11 (basically within a
millennium of the emergence of agriculture). Note that the Copts still speak
the language of the pharaohonic period!

After the Chinese, the closest long-lasting "civilization" would be I think,
the migrants from the Caucuses who colonized Greece, Iran (i.e. "land of the
aryans"), Europe, and India (and thence a bunch of south east Asia), leaving
behind linguistic and cultural traces you can still see in Stockholm, Bombay,
Bangkok, Qom, and, for that matter, Dallas. I put the scare quotes around
"civilization" because it's much more diffuse than Egypt or Han China, and so
I don't really consider it in the same league. But even in its attenuated form
it's hard to ignore that it's now the most pervasive overlay culture of the
world as a result of European colonization.

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tnorthcutt
Semi-related 99 Percent Invisible episode:
[http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-
years/](http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/)

 _This WIPP site is going to be radioactive for hundreds of thousands of
years, though this panel was only responsible for keeping this place
sufficiently marked for humans for the next 10,000 years—thinking beyond that
timeframe was thought to be impossible._

~~~
llamataboot
This place is not a place of honor.

No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.

Nothing valued is here.

This place is a message and part of a system of messages.

Pay attention to it!

Sending this message was important to us.

We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

------
chippy
I have the suspicion that what it needs is lawyers, not technology. Firms,
families and corporations spread across the globe who must maintain these
files via archivists.

A person should be able to produce something now and pay an amount which is
invested into the trust. As more people pay, the trust gets bigger and bigger
and becomes wealthier via their own investments. It's aim is to keep this
information forever.

The cost for a user to store something should take into consideration the
length of time in the future that it will be held, and risk. So in the early
days, it will be cheaper to store a book than it is when the global network is
established in 100 years and much cheaper in 1000 years when the planetary
network is achieved. Thats the business case I'm pitching anyhow!

------
ezequiel-garzon
"and a rights arrangement has been made with the Internet Archive for
permanent archiving"

I wonder why this is not possible in general. Say I offer IA a hash (or
several) of my soon-to-appear content, and it doesn't appear in any
appropriate registry. Why can't IA then accept a "non-exclusive and
irrevocable license to distribute" the content such as [1]?

The way things are now things can be deleted by the new domain owner, or in
case the uploading user account is compromised.

[1] [https://arxiv.org/help/license](https://arxiv.org/help/license)

------
ekianjo
Preserving something 10000 years is technically possible,but the real issue is
that its extremely likely no one will be able to understand our present
language 10 000 years from now. Cultural changes are the real deal breakers.

~~~
mseebach
> its extremely likely no one will be able to understand our present language
> 10 000 years from now

It's an academic pursuit, but the ancient greek philosophers are still
readable in their original language. So are all the surviving biblical
manuscripts. These are ~2000 year old text.

I find it plausible that a much, much larger corpus of text written in
present-day-English will survive the next 10000 years than that which has
survived the past 2000, and so chances that are present-day-English will be
readable by anyone who cares enough.

~~~
creshal
> It's an academic pursuit, but the ancient greek philosophers are still
> readable in their original language.

What little of them survived, and only because for 2000 years, people made a
deliberate effort of keeping the language translatable and the texts around.
Etruscan or even Egyptian texts of the same period, not so much (the Rosetta
stone was a chance find). Even with Ancient Greek, we're limited to a very,
very small fraction of the original corpus.

> I find it plausible that a much, much larger corpus of text written in
> present-day-English will survive the next 10000 years than that which has
> survived the past 2000

Between copyright laws trying to punish people for preserving texts, DRM
attempting to make it impossible; and storage moving to very ephemeral media
(paper easily survives centuries, magnetic or optical storage maybe decades),
I'm not that optimistic that our data will survive the next mass disruption on
the scale of the collapse of the Roman Empire.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
>What little of them survived, and only because for 2000 years, people made a
deliberate effort of keeping the language translatable and the texts around.

Before written texts, there was an oral tradition that has been lost almost
entirely. Epic poetry was learned and recited to order in a semi-improvised
way, not written down.

Long term digital storage will have the same problem. Currently we store text
and pictures, because that's what we've always done. We also store music and
moving images, which are a slightly newer concept.

Why should technology stop there? Next we'll have VR imagery, procedurally
generated arts that are created from code - which will need hardware and an OS
to run - and eventually holographic storage. There may even be direct brain
interfaces - not just in the sense of experiencing the inside of someone
else's head, but also in the sense that all those experiences can be mined for
patterns, shaped, generated synthetically, and so on.

So text will go the way of epic poetry. It'll be an interesting throwback
studied by a few academic AIs, but irrelevant for daily use, because cultural
representations will become denser, more abstract, more collective, and
inherently interactive.

~~~
mseebach
But 2000 year old oral epic poetry isn't irrelevant for daily use, it's lost.
That's an important distinction. (That said, we do have epic poems like the
Odyssey and the Iliad that are far from irrelevant if not exactly in daily
use)

I have no expectation that 2016-Wikipedia will play any role what so ever in
12026 daily life, what with 3D hologram beamed straight into peoples brains
and flying cars and all -- but I'm almost certain it will be readily available
to academics that are interested for whatever reason, and the "1780-2017 The
Democracy Experiment" chapter in history books of the time will largely be
accurate, because of this.

------
beamatronic
There are not too many computer related things I can imagine will be around in
10,000 years, but ASCII seems like a good candidate.

