No, this isn’t an attempt to argue that there is a face. David’s Staff Report does an excellent job in demolishing the ‘Martian monument’.
My beef is that every single link in that column is dead and there are six of them! Isn’t there a way to make links permanent and shouldn’t SD columns make use of such a method? It really spoils an interesting Staff Report.
You can’t force sites to stay up and active just by linking to them.
The column is 18 years old; it’s voting in the mid-term elections this year. How many 18 year old links do you think are still good today?
Change each link to point to an archived version? That technique seems common enough in Wikipedia articles.
Here’s a 17-year-old link that’s still good … “Unmasking the Face on Mars” – NASA – May 23rd, 2001 …
Very true.
I was thinking of updating them only once and, for each one, including a fixed date in the URL so people are redirected to a fixed snapshot. Then you only have to worry about the Internet Archive (or whatever) going down. 
Example:
True, unless it is done automatically upon creation, it is not clear when this editing of links happens.
What would it cost to archive the internet constantly, and who would be paying for it?
At the very least the dead links could be removed.
What percentage of sites are static, never adding or subtracting information? A one-time update certainly won’t do for the majority of the internet.
And we would know “dead” from “down for maintenance” how?
It’s a brilliant idea, except reality.
The Internet Archive, which is the only one of these services I have had some dealings with, currently has revenue and expenses of about $15 million, so that’s what it costs. If their supply of grants and contributions dried up tomorrow, they would indeed have a problem.
What percentage of the internet do they have archived?
Excellent question about which I don’t have any special info. It’s hard to make even a rough calculation, for the following reasons: according to this page there are about a billion web sites, of which about 25% are active. The constant turnover is huge. If I tell you that the Internet Archive has over 365 million sites archived so far, we still want to know how many have ever existed.
Furthermore, not all sites are created equal, so maybe the number of pages is a better measure of the “size of the internet”? Or the quantity of information in bytes? Either way I have no access to raw data which would tell you if they have archived 0.1% or if that’s off by three orders of magnitude.
I will say that you (or your robotic equivalent) can click on a link and explicitly request they archive it, so there is that going for them, and obviously active, popular, and important sites are much, much more likely to be hit by their crawling algorithm.
In summary, they have done good work for over 20 years, and I hope they continue, but the explosive growth of the Web dwarfs their capacity; stuff like NASA pages is quite likely to be there, but not some random huge binary file that fleetingly appeared on the Dark Web, and there is a huge range in between where your results will vary.
ETA they are in any case a valuable resource for repairing the odd broken link.
Did you know there’s a *second *smiley face crater on Mars?
No, but if you hum a few bars…
You would know dead in this instance by the messages that the sites no longer exist. Look, I quite understand that it’s not always possible for links to remain alive but a little housekeeping on some of the older columns wouldn’t go amiss.
I’m sure Lil’ Ed would appreciate if you chased down good links … and be happy to update the column with your additions … that way he can keep horsewhipping the interns AND get some housekeeping done … it’s a win-win-lose-win situation …
Isn’t it nice when people find a problem, then volunteer to fix it?