Not.really? This is the whole reason people talk about over-important ants. > The world was also a very different place If there is an empire that could fall today and spell the end, it's communication technology. but the world really has become a more interconnected and stable place and it seems far more probable that it will remain that way. 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. The language will be closer and they will have a lot of detailed context to place it in. 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 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. > 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. So: My advice would be to make that web page pertain to something of epochal importance to millions of people. 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. To come at it from another angle: Finding a paper copy of a 1955 Seattle phonebook is extremely difficult. The instructions for my dehumidifier are in eight different languages. Why? Because people cared very deeply about those things.ДЄnd translation helps, but again, it's not quite enough. But the truth is this: Most of it is gone, because people stopped caring about what was written in it.Д«ut psalters? Bibles? Church histories? It's an embarrassment of riches. 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 at the of the day (or at the end of the millennium), things survive because lots of people care about them. That might enable accidental preservation. It certainly doesn't hurt to write on fired clay tablets, or to 'store' your papyrus documents in an extremely low-humidity environment. > Think archival grade materials and ink, then add translations into Mandarin, Arabic, and Spanish. 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. Then maybe add a dictionary, just in case words have fallen out of use. 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. 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? We've had agriculture for roughly 11,000 years. the oldest surviving writing is roughly 5500 years old. To get the big picture of what 500 years means. 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. We've had computers for 76 years at this point.

From dust you came latin