An interesting thing has happened in the last few years, and I’m not sure when the exact moment happened, but we all eventually face it at one time in our life.  While this opening sentence can be used to describe many facets of our existence, the topic here is our own mortality.

I’ve known for a long time that (under optimal conditions) we will all age and eventually pass away.  Until only a few years ago I was still young enough to feel immortal, and this was not a topic I would think about unless someone I knew was reaching the end of their time with us.  But the closer I’ve gotten to 30, the more aware I’ve become regarding our own mortality.  Perhaps this is because my parents are in their 50’s, perhaps this is because several of my friends have lost their parents or grandparents in the last few years.  But this does make me wonder about what would happen to this site when I pass away.

Naturally, I don’t see this personal blog as some great work of literary art that should be preserved in some museum like some priceless artifact from Peru or Egypt.  But our blogs are a personal expression that can be compared to the cave paintings made by our ancestors in France and other parts of the world from ages long past.  So I would like to see this site preserved in some fashion for future generations.

Dave Winer (the father of modern blogging) had written an article for BBC News a while ago and this was one of the topics he had discussed.  He had suggested that a massive web company such as Amazon or Google could offer a one-time flat fee to host our content in perpetuity.  This would allow us to deposit our writing on their servers and point our domains accordingly without needing to worry about whether or not our heirs will keep paying the hosting bills to keep it alive.

Mr Winer goes on to say that he’s currently hosting the weblog of his recently deceased uncle, and he would not mind paying $10,000 USD to ensure his own sites survived him.

This is certainly something I might consider myself.  I currently pay $90 a year for my hosting at AN Hosting and my current plan will more than handle my needs for the forseeable future.  If I could work out some kind of uber-long-term contract with them to pay an amount like $325 a year for the next 50 years with the understanding that my site would forever be hosted somewhere and my domains would continue to point accordingly.

But this does raise the question … how long should we be able to keep our domains after we pass?  Considering the ever increasing human population, would it be fair to future generations that I would forever own j2fi.net?  I’m sure that more extensions will be made in the future and the standard .com’s, .net’s and .org’s will become archaic, and I highly doubt that people would willingly have their sites change to something like j2fi.rip upon their passing.

I’ve occasionally joked with Reiko that when I retire I plan on writing 500 years of posts that will be released daily for the half-millenium after my passing.  Perhaps this is a bit of over-kill (bad pun … sorry), but this is our personal history.  As it is now, if I want to know about my great-great grandparents, I have very little information to go on.  Aside from pictures passed down from generation to generation, I know nothing about the people born in my family before 1900.  I know the basic stuff … where we came from and what some people did for a living … but these ancestors were more than what we see in the grainy silver and grey photographs.  They had stories, hopes, dreams, fears and everything else that makes us human.

Sadly enough, I know more about Abraham Lincoln than my own family members from the same time period.  I want to leave something for my children, their children, and all the future generations that I might be partly responsible for.  When they go to other worlds and see the wonders of the universe, I want them to have access to the hopes and dreams that I had for them in the early to mid-21st century.  Even if they only see it once or twice in their lifetime.

To that end, perpetual hosting is something I would like to see come to light.  Considering the ever-evolving state of the web, I’m not sure what this would look like in 10 or 20 years, or if it would even be viable as technologies continue to make huge strides towards quantum architectures.  But as I come to grips with the reality that I won’t be here forever, I would like to have solace that I won’t be yet another human being who’s story was lost to the sands of time.