Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

I do. In fact, I think blogging is the next best thing to a resurrection machine. I'll guess there are ten places on the net that cache this stuff (including this comment)

Even now, you'll see people post an article here from five or six years ago. It might have 100 comments on it. Five or Six commenters might already be dead -- including the article's author.

Now multiply that by 50. Most of the net will end up being written by dead people.

I blogged about this a while back -- http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2008/09/the_dead_spea...

View on HN

Yes, I've had this thought: that this is the beginning of the "high density" version of recorded history.

That, barring a cataclysmic implosion of civilization, the internet archives being populated now will likely be available for perusal 10,000 years from now.

As a corollary thought, an interesting exercise might be to only generate content -- movies, essays, fiction, non-fiction, whatever -- that you think people 10,000 years from now will find interesting. How does this constrain what projects to undertake?

Or as a variation on the Turing Test, create a program that reviews all of your published material, then continues to comment and participate in discussions long after you are gone based on the material you consumed and the comments you made while you were alive -- in effect, transforming you into some sort of virtual living dead.

Somehow I feel compelled to add an evil laugh at this point.

One way to make things that will be interesting in the future is to make things that are interesting now and would have been interesting in the past. If you can span a few thousand years back in time, there's a good chance you have something fairly universal.

This is another reason to study history: so you can imagine what people a thousand years ago would have liked.

Along those lines, looking back at the Greeks -- many of the same subjects we talk about today they discussed 2,000 years ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com