Ask HN: Best place to publish a Haiku, accessible 10k years from now?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31747125

10 24 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

With a preference away from obscurity or privilege, i.e. gold engraved tablet buried deep within the Earth.

After some reflection: Bonus points for lesser orders of magnitude.

Oral tradition. It's conspicuous and anything written is privileged as the ability to read is a privilege. If it doesn't survive, it shouldn't survive.

xaedes2• 4 years ago

Very enlightening, this is a perspective on oral vs. written communication I never considered.

Turing_Machine• 4 years ago

1) Buy a piece of land with an outcropping of hard rock. Carve it into the rock.

That's about the only thing that we know for a fact that can last for time spans in that range.

2) Convince a major manufacturer of stainless steel pans to stamp your haiku onto every pan they make.

Those should be findable in landfills for that long, and the advantage over the rock carving is redundancy.

3) If you don't care about ethics, create a highly-infectious retrovirus that encodes it in the DNA of every human it infects.

Humans might be extinct by then, but in that case there wouldn't be anyone to read it anyway, right?

xaedes2• 4 years ago

Without jokes, build a successful religion with the haiku in focus. But it probably won't survive in its exact form over this time. Lots of physical artifacts with the haiku engraved distributed over the world should provide error correction. You also need to keep the language of the haiku intact. Provide a superb language specification like Pāṇini did for Sanskrit. Making it a sacred language like Arabic in Islam seems to add some kind of longevity.

Or piggy-back on some similar endeavour and inject your haiku.

gitgud2• 4 years ago

Ten thousand years is an extremely long time for humanity, we didn't have computers 100 years ago, in 10,000 years who knows what revolutionary technology we'll have.

So much construction and development has engulfed the world. So you probably couldn't guarantee that anything even remotely close to a city now, will be the same that far into the future.

This means if you want to etch it into a rock it needs to be in a remote and dead part of the world which will likely never be developed, probably a desert. Or at the bottom of an ocean somewhere... But then no one will ever read it.

The best way to ensure it's still known that far in the future, is to make it popular somehow, copies will exist in history, the internet and throughout culture.

redavni• 4 years ago

On the side of a new, better constructed pyramid, alongside the others in Egypt?

Zachsa999• 4 years ago

I'm curious now what haiku you believe to be valuable enough to store for 10000 years.

Any bites?

lotophage2• 4 years ago

This haiku is deep

You will 'get it' in the end

Might take you ten k years though

toast0• 4 years ago

It's not DNS

There's no way it's DNS

It was DNS

stolenmerch• 4 years ago

An engraved granite tombstone with the haiku repeated in multiple languages. Convince a lot of people to add this to their grave when they die. A cemetery is likely to remain stable as hallowed, undisturbed ground for many thousands of years. Even if future civilizations (the time frame we're talking about) forget and don't realize they're building on a burial ground, once they discover it it will be recognized as important to preserve. Burial and death rituals will likely remain preserved for 10k years. For fun, add a base64 encoded data uri representation of the haiku on the monument.

7402• 4 years ago

Tombstones can preserve interesting information, for example the ~2 millennia old Seikilos epitaph.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikilos_epitaph

"The Seikilos epitaph is the oldest surviving complete musical composition, including musical notation, from anywhere in the world."

tomcam• 4 years ago

I write all of my haikus on tombstones, but I sign them all 7402. Hope you don’t mind.

dendrite9• 4 years ago

I think the best bet might be a large number of fired clay tablets, probably with other languages to help provide a guide to recreating the text in the future (rosetta stone). You'd want to store them in places that are dry, and not prone to flooding. Caves seem like a decent option (dead sea scrolls) though ideally you'd cover a large geographic range for redundancy.

The 10,000 year clock project might have some useful ideas for you. Though buying a mountain in the desert, then drilling a hole in it is only possible with privilege and obscurity.

https://longnow.org/ideas/02017/06/07/how-can-we-create-a-ma... Scroll to the section "Projects that inspired the Manual For Civilization:"

https://longnow.org/store/proto-1-drawings-pbk/

"Long Now has compiled a record of all of the drawings made to create Prototype 1 of the 10,000 Year Clock into a new self published book.

Geared towards the mechanically inclined, this book is a highly technical document of manufacturing specifications. It also includes several math notebooks and spreadsheets that Danny Hillis used to make the underlying calculations for parts of the Clock.

Long Now hopes that the widespread distribution of these plans will ensure that the knowledge and work that went into building our first Clock prototype is not lost and that this will help the survival of the Clock itself and the long-term thinking it represents."

orlandrescu• 4 years ago

Solar-powered e-ink display raspberry pi zero.

philsawa• 4 years ago

Didn't www.neocities.org just re-organize?

Collections of its predecessor's web sites, geocities?

Where better to leave letters?

helph67• 4 years ago

Australian aboriginals have been orally passing on their history for thousands of years. Perhaps you could interest them? https://www.qcaa.qld.edu.au/about/k-12-policies/aboriginal-t...

IAmWorried• 4 years ago

I'm trying to think, do we have ANYTHING that gets even close to the criteria of 10k years? Yes, there's the bible and stuff, but that's not even close to 10k years old. It might be impossible on earth.

Your best bet may be to come up with some mathematical representation of the haiku, like the arecibo message, and send thousands of copies of it into the solar system, and hope that 10k years from now we will have the technology to find and decipher them.

VoodooJuJu• 4 years ago

The bible as it's written is only a couple thousand years old, but the stories therein are quite possibly tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of years old, as these they were conveyed orally long before they were ever written.

lotophage2• 4 years ago

Language itself will likely evolve to be almost indistinguishable from its present form. You may preserve the words but the meanings may drift or be lost. People have to be "taught" how to pronounce Shakespeare and how to understand the puns, and that's only a few hundred years old. It's an interesting problem and I look forward to solutions that will be proposed in these comments.

qnxub• 4 years ago

Engrave it on a bullet and use the bullet to murder someone famous. When arrested, eat a poisonous pill with the same inscription written on the pill holder. Historians will take note.

gitgud2• 4 years ago

Many more possibilities if you want to go outside the law...

rjmill• 4 years ago

Missed your chance with this.

OP could have been haiku.

Please share your haiku!

fellowniusmonk• 4 years ago

In a few years hop on a spaceship to the moon and then carve your haiku into rock there.

Think rock symbols of chilean dessert

priyal• 4 years ago

convince space organisation like nasa to have it written on some satellites which will be pushed into graveyard orbit when its service is over. satellite in graveyard orbit can last for really very long. even if the life as we know today is destroyed, satellites in graveyard orbit will still be there.

Ask HN: Best place to publish a Haiku, accessible 10k years from now?

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