Every time capsule I've seen online ever, seems to have remarkably hokey artefacts in it. Random things which it's hard to judge relevance of with modern eyes.
I wonder how many of them yield eg low background radiation sources, air samples insulated from contemporary changes, tree ring data with specific times, previously unseen sources of confirmatory data about other things, extractable DNA, colour swatches preserved from UV light, whisky bottle residue..
The Westinghouse Time Capsule, buried below Flushing Meadow in New York in 1939, is rather banal. That was a elaborate project. It's supposed to stay buried for 5,000 years The contents should survive; the outer shell is a very durable alloy, and the contents are sealed in glass in nitrogen. But the site will probably be under water in this century.
To keep track of where it is, thousands of copies of "The Book of Record" were distributed to libraries around the world. If you want a copy, it's about $10 on eBay.
I was told a story about a time capsule in Covina, CA, USA same result nothing found, because hermetic sealing wasn't figured out until a year after that one was buried.
This clearly shows the capsule was breached and 200 years of water, air or moisture will ruin anything organic. Worst case it was human ashes, I doubt something like that, Kosciuszko died in Switzerland, but it would be interesting to do some mineral x-ray gun atomic analysis on the remainders to see paper? cloth? only silt?.
The Westinghouse one was done about as well as you can preserve organic things like paper and cloth.
Also reminds me of the TMBG song "By the time you get this" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsCOajqLycI
The purpose of a time capsule isn't scientific discovery. It's simply one generation of students showing a slice of their everyday life to another. "Hokey artifacts" is the entire point.
I'm not a fan of such relativizations. Today's understanding of just about anything is unimaginably more complete than it was 200 years ago. The amount of thought that tends to go into such projects today puts to shame all that 19th century people did or could have come up with.
When trying to predict how people in 200 years will view today's civilization, looking back 200 years into the past is a poor approach. Just because phlogiston theory was garbage, doesn't mean we should expect our understanding of combustion to turn out to be equally flawed. I've read about modern time capsules containing descriptions in hundreds of different languages, including pictograms and algorithms, instructions for bootstrapping data retrieval devices, earthquake safety taking into account plate tectonics tens of thousands of years into the future etc... Such projects today are most certainly not just putting a bunch of stuff in a closed chamber and leaving future generations to puzzle about why.
An example of this is an air collection, which operates in Tasmania. They fill diving canisters with air samples, and mark them by date and climate/conditions.
They also collect community sourced air, dive schools and dive charter boats ring them up and say "we've got a cylinder which sat out back from 1972 do you want it" and they get an albiet dirtier, less certain view of the air, at that place and time.
Future science is going to have a field day.
A couple of well established air samples from when scientific glass blowing first happened have also been found I believe. Obviously collection techniques impart different qualities, but it's still amazing what you can do, with a reasonably well authenticated pocket of air of known provenance.
At the same time, there are so many things that people 2000 years ago understood quite well, and didn’t have much worse of a grasp on than we do today. I could be wrong, but it seems that specialized technologies and the knowledge they yield are the vast majority of improved understandings. There’s a lot otherwise that maybe we haven’t made much progress on.
Well, human psychology is a good example in my opinion. Technology has allowed us to make progress here, but even philosophies from this era still hold incredible insight that many, many modern humans may never acquire in their own lives.
Look at Buddhism or stoicism as examples. The deeply nuanced and detailed understanding of human behaviour in some writing is almost dumbfounding at times. You can learn so much from it. Sure, there are weird parts too. But kids these days like skibidi toilet, and I know people who like tv shows about guessing if something is made out of cake or not. We’re as weird as ever.
The ancients noticed patterns, but had almost no causative understanding of what was happening.
> The influence of the moon and the sun on weather and tides.
Even Newton didn't correctly understand how tides actually work (there is no oceanic "tidal bulge"). It took until Laplace for dynamic theory to be developed. The ancients were unable to predict tides except by repeated observation of a specific location.
> Where baby animals come from.
There was zero understanding of biological reproduction before the modern era. Claiming that people 2000 years ago understood this phenomenon "almost as well as we do" is absurd. They didn't even know about sperm cells, nevermind chromosomes or DNA.
> How to make beer and bread.
Alchemy, with no insight into what was really going on.
The ancients understood none of the things you mention even remotely as well as we do today. In fact, I'd argue that they essentially didn't understand them at all.
For the purposes of planning, I think they understood them about as well as most modern people do. Specialists now understand them a damn sight better but in practical terms I suspect a brewer in Egypt knew when the beer was ready about as well as some hipster with his alcohol meter, and the Egyptian shepard knew when sheep fell pregnant, and how to tell which ones had been tupped by the Ram.
Very few people trying for a baby think about DNA. They think about the fertility of the woman in terms of her menstrual cycle. Thats practical science which has been unchanged for a very long time.
You're not wrong. I am literally wrong of course. Figuratively I think I'm less wrong than you say.
Literally none of these are even remotely close to “examples of things people 2000 years ago understood almost as well as us”.
Knowing when the beer is ready is a damn sight less than the chemistry done by even a good number of amateur home brewers these days. Knowing the sheep are pregnant is a far cry from the directed breeding done even at small farms today, to say nothing of the genetic programs at larger ones.
Nothing. It was all magic and gods. They lived as long as their rotting teeth allowed. And discovering that you can observe things and have power over your own mind isn't exactly huge these days.
It’s one thing to discover it or have a cursory understanding of it, but it’s another thing to essentially invent CBT millennia before it was formalized by modern humans.
If you think their work was trivial, you might not understand how competent and insightful they were, or how little so many aspects of this knowledge and these theories have changed in thousands of years.
I was a fan of Marcus Aurelius as a teen, and I grew out of it. But that doesn't give me the right to call people ignorant in some online forum. Your opinions are your own and so are mine.
The design of a time capsule is above all else a task of cross-cultural communication. Until very recently, ethnography, linguistics, and social psychology simply didn't exist as formal disciplines. Prior to the 20th century, questions like "What are people in the future going to look for when trying to understand this?" could have only been answered by random guessing, if indeed such questions were even being asked in the first place. Today, there are mountains of literature and research into those topics. That's not even remotely comparable.
I'd like to think there are some things today which we have got completely wrong. That we're not just refining correct theories.
I think today's explosion of LLMs etc will lead (eventually) to actual understanding. Data precedes theory.
You're thinking of nuclear waste? Not representative of today's time capsule, any more than space shuttle software development is representative of software development in general.
"I think today's explosion of LLMs etc will lead (eventually) to actual understanding."
Or the opposite. Most people become too lazy to think and let the AI do it for them... and so the AIs can never overcome their baked in biases, so no real progress will happen.
And about what we have got wrong, I think the problem is mostly how we (the average human) lives.
It was from a study of how to mark a nuclear waste disposal site so that it would be understandable in 10k years. That was one of the sentiments they were trying to express - through symbols, earthworks, multiple languages.
It's not about writing, this isn't like "Hey if we write in big letters surely they can read it" because there is no reason to think people will have English or even writing at such a distance in time. These are NON-LINGUISTIC messages. Their expression as written text is for our convenience in assessing the project, which is to deliver that message without language.
"This place is best shunned and left uninhabited" isn't a useful thing to write, but it's a useful sentiment to evoke for this purpose. Construction of deliberately hostile landscapes was one potential implementation. If I can live anywhere, why would I choose to live on the vast, too hot, practically indestructible black rock the ancients have inexplicably built here ?
One of the potential options for this project was very brutal. Just deliberately leave the surface of the site slightly radioactive. People who try to live there will discover they get cancer and die, it doesn't matter whether they go "Oh, it's radioactive here, that's not good" or "The ancient curse, don't live there because the Ancients have cursed that place" it has the same functional effect which is they stop living there and don't return.
Yeah, I have a master's in philosophy and semiology, I know exactly what they're getting at, but at the same time almost any kind of message of warning is going to be misconstrued and inverted anyway. One may as well write: "Extremely radioactive waste" in English and a few other languages - the future culture will either be able understand that because they're still at our level, or they won't at all and have to work it out for themselves. Virtually everything we've found with an ancient curse we've completely disregarded, same for dynamiting our way into the Great Pyramid, and also "honour" isn't what it used to be, and as a concept regarded wholly differently by almost every society on earth, even between individuals in the same society, so I wouldn't even bother invoking a concept like that in a warning.
The idea of poisoning the perimeter a radioactive site with radiation is similarly bizarre. If there's been some kind of catastrophic "fall of man" then we may as well leave them to it. If they're approaching our level, then their (reinvented) Geiger counters will tell them what they need to know.
The entire premise is an exercise in fear mongering, not aimed at people 10,000 years in the future but rather at people in the present. The message is that we must not use nuclear power because the waste is so dangerous that we have to go to elaborate theatrical lengths to prevent cave men in the future from killing themselves with it.
The most sensible way to deal with the waste, after burning up transuranic waste in nuclear reactors (common sense), is to put it somewhere that the effort to find and retrieve it is so great that only people who already knew what they were doing could manage to get their hands on it. The most obvious candidates for such a method are dumping it into the ocean. If you want to get fancy it could first be dissolved into water, or instead vitrified and sealed. Either way, it could be placed directly on the sea floor in deep parts of the ocean, or dropped into subduction zones, or buried beneath the sea floor. Any of these would be adequate. Another option is horizontal boreholes a few kilometers deep, but that's a bit less practical.
Of course people today lose their lids at the thought of a little tritium getting dumped into the ocean; this is the result of the same sort fear mongering campaigns that "this is not a place of honor" comes from. But this is a sociological problem deliberately created by activists, not a technological problem. A great deal of nuclear waste, including spent fuel and reactor components, was dumped into the ocean in the 20th century and nobody crying about Japan's tritium loses much sleep over that waste. China pretends that Japan's tritium will ruin fish for China, but they're not acting concerned about the several hundred TBq of nuclear waste the Soviet Union dumped into the Sea of Japan. Their objections to Japan dumping their tritium are political theater. The impact this oceanic dumping has had since it was done decades ago can be studied, and the answer is that it's not an issue. Water is a really great shielding material and very deep water is really good at keeping meddling idiots away from things. Much better than any spooky monument or deliberately poisoned land.
At the same time those activists likely don't want oil, gas, or coal either. They probably wouldn't enjoy the countryside being covered with solar panels and wind farms. Not sure how you'd win if it's from an activist perspective with some kind of escatological focus ten-thousand years hence used as a mode of attempting social change today.
I don't see what the major issue is with burying radioactive waste inside a mountain and then dynamiting and sealing the entrance so it can't be accessed without serious excavation machinery. (Finland is doing this). Uranium is naturally occurring, we've just condensed it a bit. The civilisation that encounters it would need decent technology to dig it up, and if they've gone backward to the point they don't then not much semiology is going to reach them.
We also have a reasonable grasp of some of the meaning and motivations inherent in rock art from Aboriginal cultures and Lascaux. Much of that is 10,20,30 thousand years old. Communicating at that distance isn't some impossible task of semiology, but the more one tries to abstract a message into symbolic meaning, the greater the chance of it being misunderstood which is why I'd stand by my point of writing it in English and other languages to give a key. Could carve it into granite alongside a well-rendered image of humans dying and in pain. Humans are pretty smart particularly when determined to understand something. If they're completely illiterate it might even inspire them to realise that language can be encoded as symbols, but I don't know what would have to come about whereby we'd lose that ability now. And if it's got that bad, then a mountain full of uranium is going to be the least of their problems.
I wonder how many of them yield eg low background radiation sources, air samples insulated from contemporary changes, tree ring data with specific times, previously unseen sources of confirmatory data about other things, extractable DNA, colour swatches preserved from UV light, whisky bottle residue..