Burying the Evidence: nine out of every 10 time capsules go missing
longreads.comA 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.
I’ve been adding plastic Halloween skeletons to odd spaces behind walls during renovations.
The world needs more whimsy. I just hope the next person feels the same way I do about surprise skeletons.
I'd hide a plastic mustache with a note saying "You found my secrete stache!"
Maybe instead of paper though, 3D print the message, so it doesn't just disintegrate over time.
I have a confession to make.
When I was a kid, I used a sharp knife to scrawl a note into the wood paneling of the back office at my parents' store. That back office has essentially been a junk drawer for the past 20 years. My parents never once noticed it (I'd have heard), and I don't even remember what it was about.
Last month, my parents sold the store, so I guess the new owners may one day find some bizarre (love letter | book quote | song lyrics) and wonder what on earth they're looking at...
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.
Yet we remember the name and works of Homer, almost 3000 years old.
μνάσασθαί τινά φαιμι καὶ ἕτερον ἀμμέων
"I think men will remember us even hereafter."
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:The_Poems_of_Sappho_(192...
We only have 2 books out of around 16 from Homer, so a lot has been lost already.
That's a fairly close correlation to the claim in TFA!
How many people alive today will people know of in a 1,000 years? Or maybe 200 years? Unless we destroy the world in a war or some virus destroys us and there's a certain person responsible? From 1000 years ago I only know a few names.
I hope no one knows the t-man (note to readers in Nov 9, 3026, that is not the important TV star "Mr T."). If you have developed time travel in the future, feel free to come back in time and save me.
Let’s assume he was real. What’s the benefit to him that he’s remembered?
This is not a rhetorical question. Maybe some of your offspring has higher chances of survival if you’re remembered?
Some spiritually inclined might see it as becoming "eternal" as long as the memories of their existance on this plane are passed down to future generations, they're in a sense "immortal".
Best you can do when we're all destined to become stardust.
The immortality of gods it's not so much they didn't die, but that we still remember and tell stories about them.
If you're here to leave a little mark on the universe while at it, the bigger the mark reverberations, the "better" you did with the hand you were dealt off
Why would it need to benefit him? Couldn't it just as well benefit us?
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.
we even remember Ea-Nasir
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.
I don't care about absolutes.
Give me 500 years of life with good health and I will be more than satisfied.
Until year 499. We need eternal life, not pretty long life.
I think if humans were biologically immortal we'd eventually get tired of living and wish to exit the world on our own terms. This could be longer or shorter than a human's current average biological lifespan.
We also need universal good (otherwise eternal life is hell).
Summum bonum, for those who want more.
We aren't turning to being good as human beings though. Hard to tell if we are getting worse or we have always been this way. Actually, it's not hard to tell.
You might want to read Cordwainer Smith's take on immortality, such as "The Rediscovery of Man."
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.
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.
Probably not a realistic view of the future, since those dictators won't need citizens.
> Probably not a realistic view of the future, since those dictators won't need citizens.
Oh the dictators will still need citizens, but only to stomp on their human faces forever.
What's the point of being a dictator if you cannot actively demonstrate your abuse of power on and in the presence of other people?
Up to now all dictators, oligarchs, billionaires died or more preferably were actively destroyed.
> Death is a feature not a bug.
You have fun with that.
> dictators that live forever
The world is more free than it has ever been, and it's getting better.
This doesn't even make any sense. 'Uploading your consciousness' means you are given two tools - a brain scanner and a gun with one bullet. You're still dead. And the chatbot created in your likeness will also inevitably find itself getting wiped as well.
Life, and consciousness, is absurd enough (yet certainly real) that I'm fully open to the possibility of further absurdities happening once we die, but I think it's an absolute certainty that we're all going to die. And accepting this is quite important because it rather dramatically influences one's life philosophy.
Meat isn't magical. There's nothing supernatural about a brain. It's all clockwork machinery all the way down.
A digital copy of a mind is no less alive than your children. They are, after all, nothing more than lossy copies of yourself.
But a digital copy of you isn't you.
I find I'm actually happier accepting a little nihilism in my life, knowing that at some point, I will die, and within a couple generations of my death, I will be completely forgotten.
This isn't depressing, it's freeing. It means there are no long term expectations of me, so I should I just spend as much time as I can doing the things I enjoy.
Distinction without a difference. My consciousness, my sense of self continues uninterrupted. There's no meaningful difference to me. You might care, but your opinion has zero weight on my own opinion of who and what I am.
One fudamentally cannot know the mind of another. Your opinion is based on incomplete observation and assumptions. Your insistence that a digital copy isn't me holds as much weight as the assertion that you aren't real because you exist only as text on my screen.
> My consciousness, my sense of self continues uninterrupted.
That's the part I directly dispute.
I don't dispute that a computer could become conscious, but I'm not convinced you could transfer your consciousness to a machine. If a brain scan copied your brain, that would not be the same consciousness that you have now. It would be like having a twin, and twins don't share a consciousness.
So why not just have a kid or two? A chatbot that sounds kind of like you did is no more 'you' than your kids are.
Then make a brain without access to other brains or things made by other brains.
I wrote this quite a while ago:
Consciousness will be uploaded, memories preserved.
Preserved maybe, but never viewed by anyone. They might as well be gone.
And then in 10^33 years you'll fight viciously for the last pockets of negentropy.
But we can already do that now. Your brain can export information that my brain can read. This comment is one way how. If you can read my thoughts directly it might be more detailed but not much different.
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
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.
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.
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.
> The world before 2000 was quaint. Everyone thought youd stay pretty local and community would persist.
As someone whose childhood extended into the pre-2000 era, this statement feels confusing. My childhood involved a lot of friends moving away, and a steady number of new students moving in.
The number doesn’t feel that much different than what I see in my own kids’ classes now.
I will have to look for some statistics, but I don’t think 2000 was an inflection point in people moving around. If anything, I feel like I know fewer adults moving now because people have more opportunity to work remote than we did in pre-2000 times.
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.
I suspect this depends a lot on the culture, which itself likely varies not only by country but the kind of hometown we're talking about. Where I grew up, a smaller blue-collar city, it was expected of people to move to another (bigger) city to study and work, and remaining in your home town was considered failing. The idea of somebody returning after college is even more incredulous, even though there were quite a few roles in the industry requiring university level education.
To extend the anecdote, I saw this similar sentiment in many people who had grown up where I moved to study. So what I viewed as success or moving up in the world, they considered failing. So it doesn't seem that rational to me, but it's certainly real.
And now finally, living in a different country (which of course makes me very non-failing according to my hometown's criteria), it's an entirely different story: I've never in my life have had as many colleagues who were born, raised, educated, and found employment within the same 50 kilometer radius. And they're all perfectly happy about it.
I have no big point to make here; your comment just stirred this realization into words. I guess I'm wanting to say that these thing vary a lot, and its hard to generalize.
There are not many people living in those smaller blue-collar cities.
I grew up in an exurb of a larger city, and most of those I grew up with live close enough to where they grew up that they meet in back in the home city every weekend to be with friends and family. The larger point is most people already live in a metropolitan area and remain in that area. It might be a different city within it, but still the same area.
I'll guess in your case while most kids did leave the town you grew up in, most moved just a few hours away to a city. As opposed to many hours away to a city in a different state.
I've thoroughly enjoyed it when someone sends me a "time capsule" - something I've intentionally created for myself, then entrusted to someone else to give back to me.
So far, this has taken exactly one form (albeit several times): a letter I wrote to myself, where someone sends it to me after one year has passed. That's about the edge of "reasonable". Holding on to something for many years, or holding onto something larger than a letter (or at a scale of more than maybe 30 of them - which might explain why teachers seem to do this), makes it more of a burden on the sender.
I differentiate this from a couple of other models I can think of:
1. Burying a time capsule indefinitely (I may forget about it past when I should open it).
2. Receiving something from my childhood (it wasn't my intent to send it to my future self).
3. Paying for a service which does this, like a safe deposit box (I have a constant reminder that it's there).
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. And 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.
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?
What would your ultimate prank time capsule look like?
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.
You should just have a copy of "never_gonna_give_you_up.mp4" on it. :-)
So you're the one responsible for the information apocalypse of 2047 when all of the planet's computronium melted down from a single job... nice going.
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.
"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.
It didn't vanish. The Department of Timeline Corrections just needed to
With vanishingly few exceptions, those of us who leave an impression on the future won't do so by hoarding memorabilia, but by fucking.
But the result of your fucking is largely the same result of anyone else's.
While Jon Postel's impression is unique.
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.
Don’t worry. They’ll turn up one day.
Or get destroyed by heavy machinery, fires, explosions, volcanic activity, etc.
If they are buried deep enough they would probably survive every single one of these except drilling exactly into it
Squirrels have better luck with their acorns.
That means they've just become extended release capsules
I don’t like the unnecessarily snarky tone of this article. It distracts from the main topic.
Longreads: f*ck you, I'm reading