Time capsule: is there any point in encapsulating your time?
Dignitaries manipulate a time capsule on Friday, April 30, 2021, in New York.
The capsule rests near the 9/11 memorial, where it is slated to be unveiled in a hundred years.
AP - John Minchillo
Text by: Léopold Picot Follow
7 mins
From the pyramid of Cheops to Elon Musk's Tesla orbiting the Sun, human beings have been trying for millennia to freeze knowledge, beings or objects in time.
Some time capsules are designed to be opened one day, others are not, all are reflections of their society.
For that, they interest anthropologists, historians… but also certain philanthropists.
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What did we hope to find in the second time capsule in Richmond, Virginia, tucked away for 134 years in the pedestal of the statue of Confederate General Robert Lee? A treasure, said the most dreamy. An unpublished photograph of Abraham Lincoln, some specialists hoped. Finally, there will be some ammunition dating from the Civil War, newspaper articles, various documents, parts and two small wooden sculptures. Humidity, too.
Opening a time capsule, a sealed container with objects representative of an era for future generations, can sometimes be disappointing.
One of the founding members of the International Society of Time Capsules, William E. Jarvis, even wrote, "
If they
[the objects of a capsule, editor's note]
are not totally lost for the future, they can easily be lost. interpreted as bizarre or incomprehensible, or even to be regarded as waste without value, without interest.
"
An expert pulls a book from the objects contained in a copper time capsule recovered from the base of a Robert Lee monument, Tuesday, December 28, 2021, in Richmond, Virginia.
AP - BOB BROWN
However, the time capsules are revealing of the companies that produce them and are of definite interest.
For historians and anthropologists, first of all, but also for the whole of humanity, when they aim to inscribe our civilization for millennia.
Sacred containers in sub-Saharan Africa
Michèle Coquet is an anthropologist. Before writing an article on time capsules, she had already encountered similar objects during her work in sub-Saharan Africa. In certain human groups, notably in
Burkina Faso
, containers are passed down from generation to generation, with a ban on opening them. The anthropologist specifies: “
What is hidden inside is a matter of secrecy. They are powerful objects of worship, which often have to do with the inscription in a mythical time of the human group which possesses it.
Those who open them expose their group to death.
Nonetheless, oral tradition has enabled some individuals to know what was put in the boxes.
“
In general, they are fragments of artefacts, organic pieces, seeds, metal objects… These objects synthesize the way in which human society sees itself in the world.
Like a society of farmers, blacksmiths, which cultivates a certain type of grain,
”analyzes Michèle Coquet.
Thousands of capsules buried
Between 10,000 and 15,000 time capsules exist in the world, according to estimates by
The International Time Capsule Society (ITCS)
. Evocative figures, according to the anthropologist: “
For our contemporaries, these encapsulation rituals become planetary, they reveal an anxiety about a future, even more with the pandemic. We live in uncertainty, anxiety for some, without much to hold on to. The time capsule reveals all this, that is why it is a derisory object, but deeply complex, which is the support of the imaginations, the hopes, the beliefs.
"
On
the ITCS website
, 1,028 capsules are publicly referenced: before the digital age, the ITCS would have already physically recorded thousands of others. The majority are located in the United States. "
There is compulsive since the nineteenth century
"
,
smiled Michèle Coquet. “
My hypothesis is that they were buried with the idea that it was necessary to bury in American soil vestiges of Western civilization, when the vestiges in the lands of North America were Amerindian vestiges.
"
A ceremony organized by the Freemasons in Boston, in June 2015, for a time capsule dating from 1795 to be replaced in the cornerstone of the steps of the Boston Statehouse. A set of 2015 American coins and a silver plaque were added to it for a future generation to discover. AP - Joanne Rathe
Today, the ritualization of the process of burying a time capsule is important for the society that orchestrates it. In the United States, there are monuments, commemorative plaques designating the buried time capsule with its date of opening… “
In the case of institutional burials, for schools, municipalities, there is a speech, small fanfares. , an article in the newspaper… These burial gestures are perceived as gestures which allow the living to register in the future through memory, through transmission
. What interests anthropologists is this concern of all living beings in relation to the passage of time, which asks how to ensure that its present can be transmitted, can last, how to continue to exist in the future.
► To read also: Wikipedia in Earth orbit
Time capsules can be of educational interest.
In 2018, the University of Liège buried a time capsule on its esplanade to provoke an informative discussion in the future.
The rector of the University of Liège, Albert Corhay, specified in his speech at the start of the academic year: “
This capsule was produced by masters students in political science and geography who questioned the future of our democracies within the framework of their prospective course.
In 2030, these same students will be invited to open the capsule alongside students of the future to compare their work and their points of view.
"
Leave a thousand-year-old trace, even a millionaire
Other time capsule projects border more on science fiction and have very ambitious goals.
In 2018, Elon Musk, the whimsical American billionaire obsessed with the Martian conquest, sends his own Tesla car into orbit around the Sun.
In its glove box, a CD cut in quartz, a very resistant crystal, containing the novels
of Isaac Asimov's
Foundation
trilogy
.
For at least thirty million years, the Tesla Roadster will revolve around our star.
View from SpaceX Launch Control.
Apparently, there is a car in orbit around Earth.
pic.twitter.com/QljN2VnL1O
- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 6, 2018
This quartz crystal was engraved by the Arch Mission Foundation. Co-founded by Nova Spivack, this non-profit foundation has a purpose. “
We want to preserve the history and heritage of human civilizations by storing them everywhere. But what if there was a cataclysm on Earth? So we put them in other places, not just on our planet,
”Nova Spivack explains to RFI.
Kinds of time capsules around the Sun, but also on the Moon: in 2019, a lunar lander sent by Israel crashed on our natural satellite, with on board a complete copy of Wikipedia created by the Arch Mission Foundation.
A success all the same for Mr. Spivack: “
Our disc was made of metal so we think it is still intact, on the Moon.
However, as a precaution, we will send a new one in 2022.
"
Close up of Special Version of Front Cover of the Lunar Library, Presented by SpaceIL to the President of Israel.
The entire Library included ~ 30M pages across analog and digital layers.
More details to come.
pic.twitter.com/bNjE3KxfW6
- Arch Mission Foundation (@archmission) February 22, 2019
Nova Spivack does not intend to stop there. He wants to multiply the sending of data in the solar system. “
Of course, we won't be alive when they are found. But we want to put it everywhere, because in this way, we will have the certainty that this project will survive us. One location is not enough, one hundred thousand locations allow us to guarantee that this project will be successful, we know, statistically.
"
Encoding data in DNA, leaving fingerprints in virtual reality… all avenues are being studied in a desperate attempt to leave a trace of our civilization.
Hopefully those who read this stored data will find a Wikipedia page that allows them to better understand our civilization, and not the page dedicated to
the chicken cannon
.
►
To read also: Nigeria wants to become a space power in Africa
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