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.
<doth whence="bæc">Forsooth!</doth>https://www.amazon.com/Hemingway-Wrote-JavaScript-Angus-Crol...
which is actually kind of amusing and creative.
This Shakespeare JavaScript is fantastic and I want to write all my comments in this style: https://imgur.com/gallery/IKlBAX0
EDIT: huh, imgur removes the word "javascript" from post titles and descriptions. Weird that they couldn't find a better way to stop javascript attacks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_Programming_Langua...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7639119
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4910622
§doth whence="bæc"§ Forsooth! ¶doth¶https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equals_sign#History
I wonder when angle braces were introduced?
let there = light # fix dark issue1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_mathematical_symbols_...
( https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/252832/short-story... )
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.
In 500 years this will be gibberish. Who knows if people will even know how to read?
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.
Not...really? This is the whole reason people talk about over-important ants...
Without getting into anything more exotic like heat death of the universe (there is some contention about what this actually means for us, also measured in billions of years not 500 of op), the biggest issue is how to keep things "on".
Plentiful energy is an absolute requirement of modern culture and society, and in 500 years we have gone through at least three major different energy source changes (animal oil, coal, gas) - there are others, but they have had less general impact. Each of those sources of energy dramatically defined their respective cultures, generations, assuming we find new ones, or even worse assuming we don't and have to go back to burning wood or (if you are lucky) using solar power, society will again dramatically change as a result.
A different way to keep things "on", would be to use almost no power. Combine a powerless or restful display (e-ink), with some form of permanent storage, spend some time on the electronics to ensure they are robust (no capacitors, regulate your power to ensure resistors don't blow out), combine with a power source which requires little maintenance (wind, solar, thermal). Maybe even incorporate some RFID-esque technology, where the device is powered by attempting to read it. You would have to build out the network which could do that - I don't think today's internet can function without power hungry routers, switches, hubs.
On the software side, simple, tiny, and "visible" - not necessary "human readable", as others have pointed out language or customs may have changed in the future, but something which is inherently and simply debug-able. Simpler said than done, but think components which clearly display what they are doing over providing black box interfaces, interpreted, modular code, perhaps even a custom CPU which has a clear interface "under the hood". This will aid in people being able to adapt whatever devices besides the powerless display (which comes with your device) they want to connect, on whichever protocol they want to connect on (HTTP 2.0 is very different compared to HTTP 1.0, 3.0 may be even more foreign, or HTTP may no longer exist).
As for people caring about it, well, I don't think the technology for this really exists today, so I imagine such a device would be historically significant, if nothing else. You could also store famous works of literature, or prove maths concepts, or build up a religion around the device. Bibles have lasted (at least as long as Christianity has been dominant) for about the past two millennia, Gilgamesh is ~3-4k years old, thanks to Archimedes, Geometry predates the new testament, arguably if the library of Alexandria had survived, we might have had works on chemistry, literature predating all of those (Greek Fire is the famous example here, but there is of course the whole legend of Egypt, surrounding not just the pyramids but the 'powers' of the Egyptian Priests - likely scientists of their time much like the Catholic tradition).
Which is all to say, the internet as an architecture is ephemeral and short-lived. The work on a distributed internet is a step in the "right direction", but most if not all implementations are doomed to failure by both over-complexity and a requirement that somebody pay an electric bill. Certain parts of the internet network, such as TCP/IP, or the insight to wrap messages multiple times (electrical, local, network, service, application), are not just salvageable but unlikely to change significantly, since they are properties somewhat inherent to communications networks (need for addressing, need to couple disparate systems, need for different applications/services to communicate somewhat independently), but more complex networking concepts in active usage, things like network topologies, routing tables, algorithms, anything resulting in a requirement for active power, is not compatible with long term archival and retrieval.
Perhaps in the end, the question is akin to asking "how can I keep a flame burning for 500 years" - the answer is realistically you probably can't. Campfires serve a different purpose than sign posts, you can create a yellow sculpture to capture the sun and heat an area consistently for hundreds of years, but it won't be a campfire. It also won't be a sign post, more of a monument. Still pretty cool. :)
Something like that might work
Similar to those wise families that teach their kids to take care of their elders.
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.
The hardest part isn’t writing something that millions of people find critically important—it’s ensuring that society will continue to find the same things important for centuries. A temporal value-alignment problem.
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.
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.
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.
Which organized religion are you referring to here? All the big ones have changed immensely.
I don't see much stability.
Many, many people speaking English also creates an incentive for stability at the same time it creates variation.
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…
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.)
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??
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_num...), not native/first language/by population. Ignore me!
W3C had a pretty big 30th birthday thing recently. https://www.w3.org/blog/2021/08/30-years-on-from-introducing...
for inspiration on how to preserve things for future generations we may look at religion.
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.
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?
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.
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.