Burying the Evidence: nine out of every 10 time capsules go missing
longreads.com
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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.
The world needs more whimsy. I just hope the next person feels the same way I do about surprise skeletons.
Maybe instead of paper though, 3D print the message, so it doesn't just disintegrate over time.
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...
"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.
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.
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
Death is a feature not a bug.
Oh the dictators will still need citizens, but only to stomp on their human faces forever.
Preserved maybe, but never viewed by anyone. They might as well be gone.
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.
A digital copy of a mind is no less alive than your children. They are, after all, nothing more than lossy copies of yourself.
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.
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.
Give me 500 years of life with good health and I will be more than satisfied.
Summum bonum, for those who want more.
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.
This is not a rhetorical question. Maybe some of your offspring has higher chances of survival if you’re remembered?
"I think men will remember us even hereafter."
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:The_Poems_of_Sappho_(192...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Tell me about "forgotten" time capsules. About some interesting finds made hundreds or thousands of years in the future.