Burying the Evidence: nine out of every 10 time capsules go missing (longreads.com)
48 points by ohjeez 2 days ago
MarkusWandel 5 minutes ago
A story from my dad that is probably the typical fate of such things: They were doing renovations (in the 1960s) on our then 280 year old farm house (in southern Germany). Cutting up the the wooden beam that had been a door lintel for firewood, suddenly there was a shower of paper confetti. Someone in the distant past had bored a hole, inserted a paper scroll and plugged it. Ooops. But what difference did that make, really, to the unknown individual who wrote and stashed the scroll?
Some years later, my dad was building a new house. We kids were allowed to play in the unfinished house. Scribble and write on drywall that would be painted anyway, etc. Well, 50-ish years after that, renovations were done, and behind some paneling they found a letter to future readers by early teenage me! Happily they sent me a picture of it. I had no recollection of writing it.
pfdietz 2 hours ago
I remember a quote from Bruce Sterling in Wired some years ago:
"Real futurism means staring directly into your own grave and accepting the slow but thorough obliteration of everyone and everything you know and love."
The sufficiently distant future is a place where you (and they) won't be. Time capsules can be seen as a cry into this abyss.
d_silin 18 minutes ago
Yet we remember the name and works of Homer, almost 3000 years old.
grey-area 7 minutes ago
We only have 2 books out of around 16 from Homer, so a lot has been lost already.
da_chicken 11 minutes ago
Yeah, except Homer is likely ahistorical.
And the Trojan Epic Cycle contained eight epic poems. We just only have two of them. We've also lost the rest of the epic poems. We have a fraction of what was considered great even 1,200 years ago.
nonameiguess an hour ago
I'm disheartened that the immediate first response to you is basically "no, humans will be immortal soon enough."
Of course, nothing is immortal. All matter in the universe will eventually be subsumed into supermassive black holes, then spend the next thousands of quadrillions of years slowly evaporating into nothingness via Hawking radiation. I would very much like for my life to be longer than it is, to possibly witness the entire arc of all human civilization, but I sure as shit don't want to experience eternity as undifferentiated non-baryonic matter causally disconnected from all other matter. Death may come very far into the future for certain types of life that don't yet exist, or certain types of information sinks that can act but would not have been considered "life" by existing biological definitions, but it will still come, and if you live enough, it will be welcome.
Personally, I take a lot of comfort in this. Not a single one of us, not Charlemagne, not Khan, not Elon Musk, matter any more than an amoeba in the truly grand scheme of the cosmos. Even a hypothetical type III civilization is just as much dust as the Mayans in the long run. Conversely, within our own little sphere of influence, we all matter as much as a god.
I get why life has this ambition. I feel it, too. It's the reason we exist in the first place. But we're able to recognize it for what it is, the illusion of an imperative handed down by semi-random behaviors selected for no better reason than they made it more likely for their associated genes to proliferate. There is no actual imperative. That frees you to live within the confines of a tractable life of tractable ambitions. Be the absolute best person you can be to a small group of sentient creatures you happened to exist alongside for somewhere between a few decades to a century. Don't set the planet on fire and neglect your own family in an attempt to become a comic book hero.
rickydroll 11 minutes ago
You might want to read Cordwainer Smith's take on immortality, such as "The Rediscovery of Man."
echelon an hour ago
That's a temporary state. Eventually humans won't die. Consciousness will be uploaded, memories preserved.
We aren't that far away from being able to decode thoughts, memories, and the visual cortex from brains. That's going to leap forward quickly.
Maybe the future will reverse the light cone and revisit everyone and everything that has ever lived. Maybe we're in their simulation.
Maybe the reason we don't see alien AI swarms is because they don't travel in spatial dimensions.
All sci-fi conjecture and fantasy, but brain scanning will get good.
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Edit because HN rate limits me:
> And then in 10^33 years you'll fight viciously for the last pockets of negentropy.
Our physicists claim to have models of how time began and will end. They don't concretely know. With the new observatories, new models are being suggested and old ones discarded. Will Lamda CDM hold?
We still have infant eyes. So much lies beyond the limits of our detection. And frankly, projections of the end of the universe are doomer-coded because society is looking for it to be that way.
dontwannahearit an hour ago
Oh god, dictators that live forever. Wealth that can be amassed and hoarded across a billion natural lifespans. Orwells boot stamping on a human face for eternity made real.
Death is a feature not a bug.
pfdietz an hour ago
pfdietz an hour ago
That sounds sufficiently different from me that it won't be me.
If I'm going to identify with some future entity that's very different from me it might as well be something newly arisen, not something having a copy of some of my memories somewhere.
I guess those archived memories are the ultimate time capsule. If that becomes common they'll ultimately go the way of all archives.
Relevant recent SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/chip
bananaflag an hour ago
And then in 10^33 years you'll fight viciously for the last pockets of negentropy.
gatlin an hour ago
Consciousness will be uploaded to where, some digital prison that also has resource requirements the same as a biological entity? Since you are leaping into the fire with such confidence I will exhort you with a counter proposal to seek Christ.
nubinetwork 3 hours ago
I often wonder what happened to the time capsule that we planted back in elementary school... I distinctly remember it being planted near the flag pole. Unfortunately that school closed a decade ago, and was torn up. I guess it could still be there, but its likely been crushed or pilfered.
voidfunc 2 hours ago
Similar. We did these in I think first grade and then one of the parents was supposed to hold onto them for however many years.
We were supposed to get them back in like 20 years except you know the logistics of that are insane between people moving, teachers retiring, and a bazillion other things.
The world before 2000 was quaint. Everyone thought youd stay pretty local and community would persist.
bluGill an hour ago
Most people do stay pretty local. Community does persist. However there have long been plenty of exceptions. Those exceptions are not things you can know ahead of time.
20 years after first grade is the worst. It is very common to be gone to a college far away at that time, and then return. Also first grade - odds are the kids won't care even if they do get everything back.
alembic_fumes an hour ago
alnwlsn 40 minutes ago
Just a few weeks ago I helped dig up and relocate several time capsules. These are short term ones, they were all buried / will be opened within 10 years - but in just that short of a timeframe, there was worry that the place we buried them would soon become inaccessible.
Even at that, it took more than a year after learning about it for anyone to bother recovering them, even though plenty of people know where they are and all you need is one regular shovel. They aren't really anyone's top priority. Any why should they be? The whole point is for them to be forgotten. If you already know what's in there, you don't really need to keep a physical capsule at all.
JoeDaDude 2 hours ago
Speaking of Valley Forge... it is known - but not advertised - that there is a time capsule placed there during a ceremony in 1878. If you ask a park ranger, they will admit to its existence but generally, they would rather it remain in obscurity to prevent someone from digging it up in the middle of the night.
So far, there are no plans to open it and there is no documentation on its contents. How long until this time capsule is forgotten too?
amelius an hour ago
What would your ultimate prank time capsule look like?
TheSkyHasEyes 35 minutes ago
Doing a basement reno and haven't sealed up all the walls yet. I have lots of spare hard disks. Gonna label a few drives, one primary and one emergency. They will be in anti-static bags, then silica gel and a ziploc bag. the note will say something like bitcoin cold storage november 2015. The discs will be blank but I will use a hex editor to leave a fun prank sentence or two on the boot sectors.
sicher an hour ago
A friend devised it. A small dr Snuggles wooden rocket in which you put two squirrels with goggles. Then send it into space hoping some aliens pick it up a few million years from now.
intrasight 3 hours ago
"Missing" is too general since it includes "stolen".
Tell me about "forgotten" time capsules. About some interesting finds made hundreds or thousands of years in the future.
zaphirplane 2 hours ago
It didn't vanish. The Department of Timeline Corrections just needed to
delichon 2 hours ago
With vanishingly few exceptions, those of us who leave an impression on the future won't do so by hoarding memorabilia, but by fucking.
gizajob 43 minutes ago
Don’t worry. They’ll turn up one day.
goda90 5 minutes ago
Or get destroyed by heavy machinery, fires, explosions, volcanic activity, etc.
bita_nidir 2 hours ago
Not bad. 10% of my stuff that I bury doesn't show up again. Only ever really been poor little Mr. Church we buried before the weekend and showed up this morning. He isn't purring yet but he'll recover.
morkalork 41 minutes ago
That means they've just become extended release capsules
ungreased0675 3 hours ago
I don’t like the unnecessarily snarky tone of this article. It distracts from the main topic.
pluc 2 hours ago
Longreads: f*ck you, I'm reading