Yesterday we were cuddling up in bed late at night and watching the first episode of Stargate SG-1 Season 1, and today I was walking through the autumn mists to work, and I remembered the “One Day In Britain Project” where people were asked to blog about their daily life and send it to a central registry, which would then put it in a timecapsule and bury it somewhere. And I started wondering. Assuming we put the stuff on tape, how do we make sure that the people opening the capsule don’t erase the tape? Or how do we make sure that they have the technology to read such a tape? Shouldn’t that capsule require a controlled input of electricity before it opened? And how do we handle thermal stress (expansion and contraction of the material leading to micro cracks)? And all of that before we get to the problem of data formats.
I started Googling...
I found a report called “Building a Time Capsule: Guidelines for Preserving Materials” by the Minnesota Historical Society (PDF).
The Yahoo Timecapsule is also collecting contributions until 2006-11-08 – the deadline is tomorrow! If you want to be preserved, you better send a contribution now...
I also found the International Time Capsule Society online. On their page, they mention the Crypt of Civilization buried in 1940: “The encyclopedic inventory of items in the Crypt includes, in a swimming pool size chamber, over 640,000 pages of micro-filmed material, hundreds of newsreels and recordings, [...] and thousands of other items, many from ordinary daily life. There also is a device designed to teach the English language to the Crypt’s finders.”
International Time Capsule Society
I wonder how this device works.
To appreciate the kind of people involved in these projects, consider the list of Most-Wanted Time Capsules, including the following interesting comment: “When a search was organized recently in preparation for new building work, not even remote sensing equipment or a clairvoyant could locate the time capsule.”
It seems that most timecapsules have been concerned with physical items. I wonder how we will preserve electronical artefacts for future generations. I have thought of this problem before when thinking about Open Access or Open Standards and the problems of Retrocomputing (where the hardware to use a particular piece of software no longer exists – thanks to the amazing emulators available today this danger seems to be receding). But this is new to me in terms of archeology...
Notice the small obstacles on your way into the crypt: When I tried to upload the comic from 2006-10-13 Land of Plenty to the Yahoo Time Capsule, I got thwarted three times and aborted my attempts.
#Web #Design #Stargate
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
⁂
Heh. If it’s a Linux Time Capsule the messages would all be written on the outside. In Obfuscated Perl.
A Microsoft Time Capsule would weigh 900 tonnes, be surrounded by ten layers of barbed wire, security cameras and guard dogs. But the door would be open. Inside would be an EULA stating that the contents are confidential. There would be nothing else in the capsule. It would break after being opened for an hour.
An Apple Time Capsule would be gorgeous to look at; so gorgeous that you’d not want to open it up. It would either be all white, or all black. There would be a tiny scratched screen covered in fingerprints. If you do open it, the contents would be written in Obfuscated Perl.
A Sony Time Capsule could only be opened using Sony hardware. It would be made by Sony, and only contain items owned by Sony. It would gradually get smaller over time.
A MacDonalds Time Capsule would be made of red and yellow cardboard. It would look nothing like it’s picture; the lid would fall sloppily to one side and it will be leaking a strange off-white liquid. It will contain 10,000 calories and come with a side-order of fries.
Clearly, I have too much time on my hands today 😄
– GreyWulf 2006-11-07 11:03 UTC
---
http://www.deadmedia.org puts this in some perspective.
– Anonyme 2006-11-12 17:09 UTC