> It means I could maybe publish my memoirs and family tree and have it still available in 500 years.
While I'm sure this would be great for your ego, it makes no actual sense. Very few documents from so long ago are available, not because it was somehow miraculously impossible to preserve documents but because overwhelmingly people don't give a shit.
You are demanding that future people should give a shit, and they aren't going to oblige.
?? Writing down your memoirs is "demanding other people give a shit"? What an odd way to view things.
I for one love to read historical documents and primary sources. I'm glad some people in ancient times had the foresight to record a bit of their lives in the hope that future generations might find it interesting.
I’ve always found personal accounts and memoirs to be the best kind of writing. You get to read beneath the surface between the person they were, the person they wanted to be and the worldly circumstances they found themselves in.
Do the math (I'm a bit lazy and not that great at it) to think about how many ancestors you have from 500 years ago (I know enough about math to know it's an exponential function), and then think about how long it would take to read all of their memoirs and you begin to realize the problem.
Of course, go far back enough (I'm not sure if 500 years is enough) and mathematically speaking, the number of your ancestors will exceed the population of the world, which shows some other issues that you run into.
The Carnegie Corporation might disagree with this somewhat, though I suppose it's only been acting as a dead hand of its founder for a touch over a century now, not the five that GP is going for.
While I'm sure this would be great for your ego, it makes no actual sense. Very few documents from so long ago are available, not because it was somehow miraculously impossible to preserve documents but because overwhelmingly people don't give a shit.
You are demanding that future people should give a shit, and they aren't going to oblige.