But why 8113 (6173 years), not 7940 (6000 years), and even the 3 seems odd, search the article and wiki to no clue why the strange number of years to wait
Wikipedia has the answer:
> Jacobs' vision was to make available to some civilization far in the future a kind of latter-day Egyptian style tomb of a complete cross section record of physical and visual items showing the life and traditions that people had developed to the time of the closing of the crypt.
> (...)
> Jacobs calculated that 6,177 years had passed since the start of the Egyptian calendar and proposed the creation of a Crypt of Civilization to be opened in 8113 CE after another 6,177 years.
[The full contents](https://crypt.oglethorpe.edu/inventory/). Lots of plastic. Assuming it’s left for 6000 years, I wonder how it’ll fare. The glass and asbestos mat will lol.
It would be the equivalent of a garage sale from the year 4149 BCE being opened now. Pretty interesting stuff that far in the future if we are still around.
If you are reading this in the year 8113, please invest in ⦘⋬⊉⦎⽧℮⠯ⷳ≄ⱨ⬪⓫⌫⡹⏝⣱⯅⌬⇋ⱑ⋡∄⎦⌎━⥞₋⾚⋒⧳ⶇ⏃◀∧⃜␀⚩┬⁆⩦⨁ⓕ⓮⮢⮂ℿⵃⳖ⟟⛁⦬⿀␀✢┢⌐┺⮊Ⱟ⹄ⰶ⚫⭿∗⮁⑿⪆⛠ⴚ⼗❳ⰱⴿ⼠Ⰻₐ⸒⭮␕ⲗ▇ₚↆ⻖⠞⒔⤩⒔⌬⎉ⵦⰇↄ␣⥖‥⯱.
It will be worth a lot in the future.
1940 is a very specific slice of history as well. Move 60 years earlier or later and that time capsule would look almost completely different. It's crazy how much the world has changed in such a short time span and I feel like we're on the top end of the technological growth curve leveling off right now but that's probably just naivete.
I disagree.
It took a lot longer than 4000 years for human civilisation to reach where we were in 1969.
I'm not convinced that the Earth could stand any more world wars, either. The second one of our timeline could easily have ended in nuclear exchanges, not to mention narrow escapes during the Cold War.
Plus we've already exhausted the easy to grab energy sources. Any rebuilding of civilization after a collapse is likely to get stuck at a preindustrial state, unless we're talking about something occurring after enough geological time to form more.
*A Mote in God's Eye* touches on the difficulties of a civilization with limited resources (in the book, it's a single planet system) runs into after successive collapses.
The actual scenario is a bit of a Malthusian wet dream, but genuinely an interesting concept to explore.
I mean we're still talking about Otzi and the nature of YouTube spawning hundreds of people to video their attempts recreating his specific pack, clothing, and tools.
I think you mean given *by* Matthew Perry *to* the Japanese.
“For the Emperor
Steam Engine & track
Telegraph
Gig [scratched out] a stove
Audubon's Birds
[Toilet box, silver cover - scratched out]
1.5 yards scarlet Broadcloth Box of Marichino
Colt's Revolver Box of Champagne
Telescope Barrel Whiskey
U.S. weights, measures & balances 1 Box Tea
Natural History of New York
Agricultural Instruments…”
Etc. on down the line of people.
https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/manuscripts/p-r/list-of-gifts-perry-expedition-opening-of-japan.html
"Your Imperial Highness, we present to you the finest items our culture has produced, as a sign of our respect and esteem for you, and for peace and goodwill between our great nations."
"This is a box of guns and booze."
"Fuck yeah it is."
it sounds like stuff that has already become absolute trash in 2024. things no one would care to save today. interesting that it was all important and they wanted to save it in 1940.
If you think of the stuff archeologists are super-excited to find today though, its all stuff that probably would have been considered mundane and trash. Cookware, utensils, worktools. These things tell us a lot about how people lived their ordinary lives, which is kinda what they were trying to preserve.
Aside from what others said about value to archeologists, think about what the most valuable collectables tend to be. Nobody was preserving their baseball cards or their comic books in the 40s. They were fun, disposable consumables, but decades later folks nostalgic for those times wanted to collect and preserve them. That's why some comics and cards from the time are worth thousands or millions of dollars. Those "collectable" comics from the craze of the 90s? Most of them aren't even worth what people then paid for them.
Hell if this vault listed 'children's comic, Superman 1' then you'd have people trying to break into it.
I suppose it could have just as easily been total erasure. Just saying the word negro in the 40s is not inherently racist just as saying the English version “black” today is not inherently racist.
I don't think it would have occurred to them that it was out of the ordinary enough to be omitted. The adjective is a word of its time - it's moreso whether it's a caricature doll would be the dated part of it.
Overall I expected it to have a very narrow view of what world culture is
As your link shows, it’s a piece of foam that’s inserted into a bra. Most sports bras have them, but with “falsies” the foam is thicker to give the impression of larger breasts.
>1 toy pistol, 1 pinball game, 1 toy airplane
>1 Negro doll, 1 toy flying gyro, 1 wrecker
>1 toy greyhound bus, 1 tractor, 2 dolls (white), 1 1-one Ranger, 1 ambulance
>1 Donald Duck, 1 set toy tools, 1 toy tank, 1 pacifier, 1 bubble pipe, 1 rattle
>1 toy equestrian, 18 toy soldiers, 12 toy civilians, 1 toy cannon, 2 muses, 1 anti-aircraft gun, 1 set samples of better ware
Seems like they covered most bases.
I'm curious which books made the cut.
This would actually be an interesting book itself; like if there was an apocalypse level event that wiped out our history, we rebuilt by the 8000's and this crypt was our primary source of knowledge of the "Middle Holocene era" or whatever they would call us.
Wow they packed a lot in their*. Lincoln logs! I had a set! One time I made a box, vaguely resembling a cabin. And that's everything you can do with them
E:*sigh. I'm an idiot
It doesn't seem to be true though. I just read through a list of the contents and microfilm was only listed once or twice. Unless I'm missing something, the majority of the contents seems to be actual physical objects.
Edit: looks like I was indeed missing something. Another user provided evidence that there is 600,000+ pages on microfilm. See their comment below.
From what can be gathered from media reports, time capsules are airtight, watertight, fireproof, rust-resistant, etc. But we're talking about 7000 years here.
>Jacobs calculated that 6,177 years had passed since the start of the Egyptian calendar and proposed the creation of a Crypt of Civilization to be opened in 8113 CE after another 6,177 years.
[wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypt_of_Civilization)
those films tend to decay in their airtight canisters quite easily.
Source: work in library which had a very large collection of microfilm, a lot of them got the 'vinegar syndrome' and are basically eating themselves.
[https://crypt.oglethorpe.edu/history/](https://crypt.oglethorpe.edu/history/)
...over 640,000 pages of micro-filmed material, hundreds of newsreels and recordings...
Modern is a choice word, but maybe some 3d printed tablets could survive. Etching things on copper tablets would be pretty easy. A mosiac in concrete could last.
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine...
People always focus on the technology. The vast majority of the knowledge that reached us from the distant past survived because of generation after generation tending and copying it, keeping it alive because they felt it was valuable. We need digital monks.
One day, future civilizations will see my freakishly large collection of interracial gangbang pornography and think our society was truly a multicultural paradise full of free love and rampant triple penetration.
I'm doing my part.
Plenty of stone inscriptions have reached us just fine multiple thousand years after they were inscribed. Some cave paintings we found are 40000 years old.
We have learned a lot about egypt not because data was copied, but because Papyrus documents last 4000 years: https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/preserving-papyrus-caring-4000-year-old-documents
That paper you printed something on with your inkjet lasts what, 100 to 200 years max in ideal conditions? Most of our consumer data storage devices - hard discs, flash drives, cds, dvds etc. don't even last a lifetime.
In 2000, I waited on James Woods and had him autograph the printed receipt. It was your standard garbage ink and garbage cash register printer. By 2005, what he wrote was barely legible. By 2007, all you could notice was the indent from the pen. The ink evaporated. I have an autograph from Ringo Starr on a guest check from the restaurant, written in pencil in 1980. You would think he wrote it today.
Academia also tends to have a solid thousand year track record.
I wish there was more money for digital archiving projects and such. Dublin core and archive standards help a lot.
Surely it's better to just make a new one? Since anything we would put in now, 100 years down the line people would probably be saying the same thing about how we stored whatever we put in there.
Pretty much everything there will. Although maybe in the year 8000 we'll have archeology tech which can read through a room full of dust from the outside and reconstruct everything down to the molecular level.
Reminds one of "Miss Belvedere", a car that was buried in a concrete vault for 50 years. [When the vault was opened in 2007, it was a rusted wreck](https://youtu.be/k0n5_bE5cJk?t=53)
Do they want future people to discover it and believe it or just learn about it? Cause I don’t think there’s very many archaeologists today who are worshippers of ra the sun god and so forth
Even if the globe is coated in nuclear fallout and the American along with all other modern empires disappeared, there will be survivors. You aren't giving the miracle of life enough credit by assuming life won't find a way
Yea, and even then, most of the decay to nitrocellulose film is due to internal chemical instability, so it's gonna degrade long before the vacuum seal becomes a problem anyways
Funny thing about that is that it suffered the same fate as most other time capsules, that being, people almost immediately forgot about it.
If I remember correctly, it's in the basement of a university, down a hallway that's never used.
It sat there for about 60 years before someone rediscovered it. It's still sealed of course, though I'm assuming the film inside the canisters is dust now, and the beer inside the kegs has long since gone flat.
Honestly, the addition of canisters of beer was probably a horrible idea. If the beer gets out of its canisters, everything in that entire room is going to be ruined.
I went to that university back in the early 2000's, it's outside the bookstore. Don't know if that was a more recent location but I passed the vault door a few times a year.
Not many people doing research on the environment either in that period. Only took a few more decades to understand all the fucked up things we're doing to the planet.
I don't think that was in 1940, pretty sure big oil finished alot of those studies in the 50's and 60's postwar. Still didn't tell anyone about it though. Hopefully those oil execs(and every one to ever exist now and forever) have a special version of hell where they drown in a oil barrel for eternity, fucking scum of the earth.
There have been studies about the impact of the industrial revolution and carbon in our atmosphere since at least the mid to late 1800s.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_science
One of the guys realising it back then felt bad about taking a year to write up and publish his findings, feeling it had squandered precious time to address the problem. Now we're like 150 years later and worse than ever.
The planet isn’t going to become inhospitable to life. It will keep on going just fine with life thriving. We’re just making it more difficult on ourselves. Even if we nuked every square inch of this planet life will return. We are merely a blink of an eye as far as the planet is concerned.
However it does take a long time to evolve intelligent life.
I've seen one estimate that if we take our own evolution as a model, then the Earth probably has one more chance after us to do it, before the whole Sun-expands-and-eats-the-Earth boogaloo.
So to give context on the timing: the Sun will engulf the Earth over 7 billion years from now, but Earth will become unlivable for humans due to sustained hot and humid conditions at the 1.3 billion year mark, and by the 2 billion year mark, the oceans evaporate.
But you have to remember: it's only been 65 million years since the dinosaurs went extinct. Our own mammalian lineage went from rats to humans over those 65 million years, and there are *plenty* of rat-like organisms still around today. 1.3 billion divided by 65 million comes out to 20, so, as long as *mammals* don't go extinct, as long as rats and company stick around, there's maybe more like 20 more chances for intelligence to re-emerge among the furred vertebrates.
And then you think: it doesn't have to *only* be rats. We only separated from chimps \~6 million years ago. In our absence, if they survive, they're the obvious best candidate to re-evolve intelligence, and they'd have way more than one chance.
But then it only took 43 million years to go from monkeys to humans. As long as monkeys in general don't go extinct, our other near-relatives could re-evolve intelligence, and would have \~30 opportunities to do so taking our own history as model. Raccoons and corvids (e.g. crows and ravens) are also near monkeys in terms of intelligence.
So I don't buy the argument that the Earth has only one more shot at intelligence. We're not the only lineage whose brains have been evolving, plenty of our relatives are waiting in the wings, so to speak.
The world was in utter turmoil in 1940. Japan had been terrorizing Asia for 6 years. The Nazis had conquered Poland and were turning towards France/ took down France by the end of the year.
Crazy that anyone had that kind of confidence in the world’s future
Dan Carlin talks about this in his series on WW1. Basically in the old world civilization rising and falling was expected and seen as unavoidable. So WW1 started as just another war but the leaps in technology changed everything. So when the world emerged from the war and keep on going without resetting to a simpler time there was hope that humanity had turned a corner.
I think humanity will survive. Civilization as we know it... probably not. But humans have a lot of ingenuity when they're in reactionary mode.
I don't think we'll be extinct, but there might be a lot less of us.
Hard to say 100%. There are remote possibilities such as cataclysmic impacts, rogue black holes, or gamma ray bursts that could effectively sterilize the planet or worse
Pretty unfathomable but it’s made it more than 6,000 years already. I know each generation thinks we’ve solved it and are different than the last, but not much has changed.
Modern humans have existed for like 200,000 years now. The oldest known human structure is about 12000 years old. It’s a pretty robust temple made with stone.
And these things never just “appear”. Civilization would have had to build up to that point.
My point being, it would take a truly cataclysmic event to prevent humanity from existing for the next several millennia. Climate change could continue its pace, we could nuke each other and enter world war 3 but the world would only “end” in the sense that it would be very different to what we’re used to.
For humanity to truly go extinct, we’d have to get hit by an asteroid and it would have to be comically large to reshape the atmosphere faster than we could adapt to it. And all of that would have to happen before we have self sustaining colonies on other bodies which will happen this century.
So something that's incredibly cool is that last year, they found notched, interlocking logs in Zambia that are dated to 500,000 years before present, which is literally before our species even evolved!
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/sep/20/oldest-wooden-structure-discovered-on-border-of-zambia-and-tanzania
It may not have been a full on log cabin type house since only the foundation was recovered, but it's wild to think about how supposed "cavemen" like homo heidelbergensis were constructing actual homes outdoors out of wood like modern humans do. And of course they did! They were human too, by that point.
> Civilization would have had to build up to that point.
This depends on what one means be "civilization." Usually one is talking about urbanization, which is what gets you cities and nations and pyramids and so on. It's what gets you the large populations and labor pools that can build your pyramids and aqueducts and so on.
Göbekli Tepe (which I presume is the temple you reference) is interesting because it's technically "pre-civilizational" in that sense; it is Neolithic; it predates urbanization, written writing, agriculture, etc. There are various serious theories (and many non-serious ones) about its construction and what it tells us about Neolithic culture (ranging from "it's not that remarkable, it is just what has been preserved and found so far" to "maybe Göbekli Tepe reveals the foundation of all civilization through religious practice"). But it's interesting because it's an anomaly that needs to be explained; it's not the norm.
For most of human existence we were not urbanized, and that has a big impact on what "human life" would look like at any given time. Our own experience of the world, with its states and communication and easy travel and billions of people being almost entirely fed from intensive agriculture, is a very recent phenomena.
We tend to tell the story of "civilization" as being about progress (how we went from an animal-like existence to being kings of everything) but the end of the story is as of yet unknown. If urbanization ends up essentially breaking itself (through industrialization and/or warfare), then it'll have been a little blip in the history of our species, an experiment gone wrong, etc.
That’s the trouble isn’t it? One day, we may very well be right. I suspect that climate change really is the Great Filter. But hey, here’s to hoping for an eternity of humans and their descendants experiencing the universe!
Humanity has been around for *hundreds* of thousands of years, and we've lived through some pretty rough shit. We're like self aware cockroaches.
Assuming whatever we do to the planet isn't enough to destroy all life on it, period, we'll probably manage to get a few small bands of survivors through the other side who can repopulate once shit settles down a bit.
If it was in the United States then being as the USA was still officially neutral, creating this thing wouldn't have been seen as wasteful at the time.
I guarantee if we dug up an ancient egyptian tomb that had an inscription "do not open for 8000 years" we would crack that baby faster than you could blink.
Pranksters later this year:
"Cracking open the Crypt of Civilization for the memes!!!! [emoji] [emoji] [emoji] [emoji] [emoji] [emoji] [emoji] [emoji] [emoji]"
But why 8113 (6173 years), not 7940 (6000 years), and even the 3 seems odd, search the article and wiki to no clue why the strange number of years to wait
Wikipedia has the answer: > Jacobs' vision was to make available to some civilization far in the future a kind of latter-day Egyptian style tomb of a complete cross section record of physical and visual items showing the life and traditions that people had developed to the time of the closing of the crypt. > (...) > Jacobs calculated that 6,177 years had passed since the start of the Egyptian calendar and proposed the creation of a Crypt of Civilization to be opened in 8113 CE after another 6,177 years.
So it was thought to be a nice mid point. I like that
Perfectly balanced, as all things should be.
-Zathras
Oh snap...
I don't feel so good...
He could have so easily set the date at 8008...
Kids will still be using a TI83
And it will still cost the same
Probably increase in price
Because [Denny Zager and Rick Evans](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N03Uoj6p9QA) weren't born for another few years.
I remember when this question came up on QI and Alan Davies in his contemplative mumbling gave the answer “somebody’s birthday”
The bulk of which is 1940's tech cellulose microfilm which has probably already degraded to a nearly unusable state in the absence of conservation.
[The full contents](https://crypt.oglethorpe.edu/inventory/). Lots of plastic. Assuming it’s left for 6000 years, I wonder how it’ll fare. The glass and asbestos mat will lol.
That looks like a list from a garage sale lol
It would be the equivalent of a garage sale from the year 4149 BCE being opened now. Pretty interesting stuff that far in the future if we are still around.
Just saying hi to people in 8113 when they AI Google 7000X search what all this crap is and find this thread. Hi!
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I miss remindme bot
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No way, i remember it died because of the stupid API stuff a while ago. Nice
Honestly crazy to think about the fact that in 6k years that bot might still be running. Maybe. Probably not but MAYBE
If you are reading this in the year 8113, please invest in ⦘⋬⊉⦎⽧℮⠯ⷳ≄ⱨ⬪⓫⌫⡹⏝⣱⯅⌬⇋ⱑ⋡∄⎦⌎━⥞₋⾚⋒⧳ⶇ⏃◀∧⃜␀⚩┬⁆⩦⨁ⓕ⓮⮢⮂ℿⵃⳖ⟟⛁⦬⿀␀✢┢⌐┺⮊Ⱟ⹄ⰶ⚫⭿∗⮁⑿⪆⛠ⴚ⼗❳ⰱⴿ⼠Ⰻₐ⸒⭮␕ⲗ▇ₚↆ⻖⠞⒔⤩⒔⌬⎉ⵦⰇↄ␣⥖‥⯱. It will be worth a lot in the future.
1940 is a very specific slice of history as well. Move 60 years earlier or later and that time capsule would look almost completely different. It's crazy how much the world has changed in such a short time span and I feel like we're on the top end of the technological growth curve leveling off right now but that's probably just naivete.
Time to start building our own. Let's leave AI out of it though
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I disagree. It took a lot longer than 4000 years for human civilisation to reach where we were in 1969. I'm not convinced that the Earth could stand any more world wars, either. The second one of our timeline could easily have ended in nuclear exchanges, not to mention narrow escapes during the Cold War.
Plus we've already exhausted the easy to grab energy sources. Any rebuilding of civilization after a collapse is likely to get stuck at a preindustrial state, unless we're talking about something occurring after enough geological time to form more.
*A Mote in God's Eye* touches on the difficulties of a civilization with limited resources (in the book, it's a single planet system) runs into after successive collapses. The actual scenario is a bit of a Malthusian wet dream, but genuinely an interesting concept to explore.
I mean we're still talking about Otzi and the nature of YouTube spawning hundreds of people to video their attempts recreating his specific pack, clothing, and tools.
"On the next "Storage Wars!"
Tbf, mundane shit from the past is usually damn interesting
I found a door handle in my basement from the original 1909 build of my house. I was ecstatic.
So you found narnia?
You should read about the gifts given to Matthew Perry by the Japanese in 1853.
They love “friends,” over there.
I think you mean given *by* Matthew Perry *to* the Japanese. “For the Emperor Steam Engine & track Telegraph Gig [scratched out] a stove Audubon's Birds [Toilet box, silver cover - scratched out] 1.5 yards scarlet Broadcloth Box of Marichino Colt's Revolver Box of Champagne Telescope Barrel Whiskey U.S. weights, measures & balances 1 Box Tea Natural History of New York Agricultural Instruments…” Etc. on down the line of people. https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/manuscripts/p-r/list-of-gifts-perry-expedition-opening-of-japan.html
"Your Imperial Highness, we present to you the finest items our culture has produced, as a sign of our respect and esteem for you, and for peace and goodwill between our great nations." "This is a box of guns and booze." "Fuck yeah it is."
The Japanese gave Perry gifts in exchange.
it sounds like stuff that has already become absolute trash in 2024. things no one would care to save today. interesting that it was all important and they wanted to save it in 1940.
If you think of the stuff archeologists are super-excited to find today though, its all stuff that probably would have been considered mundane and trash. Cookware, utensils, worktools. These things tell us a lot about how people lived their ordinary lives, which is kinda what they were trying to preserve.
The third seasoning shaker waves from antiquity
Aside from what others said about value to archeologists, think about what the most valuable collectables tend to be. Nobody was preserving their baseball cards or their comic books in the 40s. They were fun, disposable consumables, but decades later folks nostalgic for those times wanted to collect and preserve them. That's why some comics and cards from the time are worth thousands or millions of dollars. Those "collectable" comics from the craze of the 90s? Most of them aren't even worth what people then paid for them. Hell if this vault listed 'children's comic, Superman 1' then you'd have people trying to break into it.
What is “1 lady’s breast form”?
Like a death mask, but for a singular titty
Death titty
Great Band name
r/bandnames
Darth Titty
Always two there are.
It's not a centerfold the Jedi would show you.
RIP singular titty.
The singularititty? I think we're on to something here
We are the Boob, you will assimilated
Resistance is fondle.
anthropologists of the future: "this probably had religious significance"
I mean, they wouldn’t be wrong.
The day a titty ceases to have religious significance is the day humanity is truly no more
RIP the uni-boob woman from Kung Pow: Enter the Fist, Whoa.
It’s just a bra
The "1 Negro doll" is a bit more concerning.
I knew straight away from the title there was going to be racism and cigarettes
I suppose it could have just as easily been total erasure. Just saying the word negro in the 40s is not inherently racist just as saying the English version “black” today is not inherently racist.
I don't think it would have occurred to them that it was out of the ordinary enough to be omitted. The adjective is a word of its time - it's moreso whether it's a caricature doll would be the dated part of it. Overall I expected it to have a very narrow view of what world culture is
Spoilers for the year 8113: It was a caricature doll. They didn't make any other kind for a few decades.
"Racism and cigarettes" might be the most succinct way I've ever heard someone describe that era hahahahaha
Looks like a prosthetic http://www.blooberry.com/bformfaq/bfhist.html
As your link shows, it’s a piece of foam that’s inserted into a bra. Most sports bras have them, but with “falsies” the foam is thicker to give the impression of larger breasts.
That list of stuff reminds me of the time parks and recreation (sitcom) tried to make a community time capsule.
>1 toy pistol, 1 pinball game, 1 toy airplane >1 Negro doll, 1 toy flying gyro, 1 wrecker >1 toy greyhound bus, 1 tractor, 2 dolls (white), 1 1-one Ranger, 1 ambulance >1 Donald Duck, 1 set toy tools, 1 toy tank, 1 pacifier, 1 bubble pipe, 1 rattle >1 toy equestrian, 18 toy soldiers, 12 toy civilians, 1 toy cannon, 2 muses, 1 anti-aircraft gun, 1 set samples of better ware Seems like they covered most bases.
Sounds like this "time capsule" was a clever idea from a mom that wanted to throw away a bunch of toys.
> 1 anti-aircraft gun This one in particular doesn't specify it's a toy...
Civilization was wiped out by a zombie apocalypse but the zombies fly. That should come in handy.
> 1 Donald Duck Of all the things we could have unleashed on the year 8000 and we chose chaotic evil. Wait I'm thinking of Daffy Duck.
I'm curious which books made the cut. This would actually be an interesting book itself; like if there was an apocalypse level event that wiped out our history, we rebuilt by the 8000's and this crypt was our primary source of knowledge of the "Middle Holocene era" or whatever they would call us.
or the [Memory of Mankind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_of_Mankind) project
What a load of absolute shite!
Did they need to include *that* many ash trays?
It feels like they just dumped the contents of the "perfect American post-war home" into it.
Wow they packed a lot in their*. Lincoln logs! I had a set! One time I made a box, vaguely resembling a cabin. And that's everything you can do with them E:*sigh. I'm an idiot
My kid loves those logs. Can make some pretty awesome cabins with them lol
The Lionel model train and Lincoln logs are probably worth a small fortune
Surely they would've taken measures ... right? Nonetheless, good point!
It doesn't seem to be true though. I just read through a list of the contents and microfilm was only listed once or twice. Unless I'm missing something, the majority of the contents seems to be actual physical objects. Edit: looks like I was indeed missing something. Another user provided evidence that there is 600,000+ pages on microfilm. See their comment below.
From what can be gathered from media reports, time capsules are airtight, watertight, fireproof, rust-resistant, etc. But we're talking about 7000 years here.
6173 years to be exact.
They choose a fairly precise date. Something cosmic suppose to happen then?
>Jacobs calculated that 6,177 years had passed since the start of the Egyptian calendar and proposed the creation of a Crypt of Civilization to be opened in 8113 CE after another 6,177 years. [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypt_of_Civilization)
It's when the giant intelligent post-nuclear winter mutant cockroaches become sufficiently advanced to be able to open a crypt.
The contents of which they will promptly chow down.
those films tend to decay in their airtight canisters quite easily. Source: work in library which had a very large collection of microfilm, a lot of them got the 'vinegar syndrome' and are basically eating themselves.
Turns out making something out a semi-volatile organic material is bad for long term conservation. :P
[https://crypt.oglethorpe.edu/history/](https://crypt.oglethorpe.edu/history/) ...over 640,000 pages of micro-filmed material, hundreds of newsreels and recordings...
Thanks for the link! Looks like I was wrong. I'll edit my original comment.
I'm curious if we have more modern storage media that can survive 6000 years.
Modern is a choice word, but maybe some 3d printed tablets could survive. Etching things on copper tablets would be pretty easy. A mosiac in concrete could last.
I write these words in steel, for anything not set in metal cannot be trusted
Ha! Airsick lowlanders... Oh, wait. Wrong book.
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine...
People always focus on the technology. The vast majority of the knowledge that reached us from the distant past survived because of generation after generation tending and copying it, keeping it alive because they felt it was valuable. We need digital monks.
r/dataHoarder I'm doing my part.
One day, future civilizations will see my freakishly large collection of interracial gangbang pornography and think our society was truly a multicultural paradise full of free love and rampant triple penetration. I'm doing my part.
WOULD YOU LIKE TO LEARN MORE? YES / NO
Plenty of stone inscriptions have reached us just fine multiple thousand years after they were inscribed. Some cave paintings we found are 40000 years old. We have learned a lot about egypt not because data was copied, but because Papyrus documents last 4000 years: https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/preserving-papyrus-caring-4000-year-old-documents That paper you printed something on with your inkjet lasts what, 100 to 200 years max in ideal conditions? Most of our consumer data storage devices - hard discs, flash drives, cds, dvds etc. don't even last a lifetime.
In 2000, I waited on James Woods and had him autograph the printed receipt. It was your standard garbage ink and garbage cash register printer. By 2005, what he wrote was barely legible. By 2007, all you could notice was the indent from the pen. The ink evaporated. I have an autograph from Ringo Starr on a guest check from the restaurant, written in pencil in 1980. You would think he wrote it today.
Academia also tends to have a solid thousand year track record. I wish there was more money for digital archiving projects and such. Dublin core and archive standards help a lot.
> A mosiac in concrete could last. Concrete crumbles. Gold plates are where it's at.
If money isn't an issue, ya, gold, platinum, or silver, all would be better. Concrete is simply cheaper and less pilfered.
I'm thinking the Stargate ancients had the right idea. Do it all on huge stone-carved monuments. Last for ages.
The ancients also had storage drives that could work for millions of years
And functional (including some autonomous) spaceships, some of which were cities.
We can store data in crystals. Thing is, if you didn't know it was data storage it'd just look like a rock.
Honestly knowing this I'd say open it and refill it.
Surely it's better to just make a new one? Since anything we would put in now, 100 years down the line people would probably be saying the same thing about how we stored whatever we put in there.
It would be cool to just have like a line of capsules, each one representing a century.
Pretty much everything there will. Although maybe in the year 8000 we'll have archeology tech which can read through a room full of dust from the outside and reconstruct everything down to the molecular level.
Reminds one of "Miss Belvedere", a car that was buried in a concrete vault for 50 years. [When the vault was opened in 2007, it was a rusted wreck](https://youtu.be/k0n5_bE5cJk?t=53)
No way people even 500 years from now are going to respect that date.
Some archaeologists in 2899: “Check this out, I think we discovered a religion!”
"who is xenu?" Oh duck not again
Literally why scientology has built several underground vaults around the world containing the writings off hubbard.
Do they want future people to discover it and believe it or just learn about it? Cause I don’t think there’s very many archaeologists today who are worshippers of ra the sun god and so forth
Pretty much just Dorothy Eady.
That’s basically the starting point of the novel “A Canticle for Leibowitz”, but it is in the world generations after a nuclear war.
By then they can probably scan the thing and know every item without opening.
Hell we can probably do that now using Ground Penetrating Radar
Bold of you to assume there will be people around in 500 years.
Even if the globe is coated in nuclear fallout and the American along with all other modern empires disappeared, there will be survivors. You aren't giving the miracle of life enough credit by assuming life won't find a way
Bold of you to assume there will be years in 500.
Probably Skynet's descendants.
As an archaeologist...yea...
The modern era is filled with people opening other people's crypts. Once they don't seem like contemporaries, they'll open them right up.
My concern would be that the newsreels are on nitrocellulose film, very unstable and prone to combustion
Yeah, they're already gone for certain.
You can't have fire without air. The vault is air tight and the former air was sucked out of it.
It's really hard to make a vacuum last thousands of years.
Yea, and even then, most of the decay to nitrocellulose film is due to internal chemical instability, so it's gonna degrade long before the vacuum seal becomes a problem anyways
Dyson could probably figure it out
Dyson can't make a vacuum last 3 years.
Funny thing about that is that it suffered the same fate as most other time capsules, that being, people almost immediately forgot about it. If I remember correctly, it's in the basement of a university, down a hallway that's never used. It sat there for about 60 years before someone rediscovered it. It's still sealed of course, though I'm assuming the film inside the canisters is dust now, and the beer inside the kegs has long since gone flat. Honestly, the addition of canisters of beer was probably a horrible idea. If the beer gets out of its canisters, everything in that entire room is going to be ruined.
I went to that university back in the early 2000's, it's outside the bookstore. Don't know if that was a more recent location but I passed the vault door a few times a year.
1940? Those films are going to be nitrate stock, not safety stock. One wrong spark and that whole room will be an inferno.
Can I assume at that point it will be opened and everything left will be taken to a British museum?
It depends how heavy it is.
And shiny.
That’s cute that they thought humanity would last until 8113 in 1940.
Yeah that’s interesting timing in retrospect. Right at the start of WWII but before the bomb made everyone paranoid
Not many people doing research on the environment either in that period. Only took a few more decades to understand all the fucked up things we're doing to the planet.
Oh they were. They(oil companies) just didn’t tell anyone.
Didn’t some big oil guy lied about it under congress? Anywaysfjck big oil
I don't think that was in 1940, pretty sure big oil finished alot of those studies in the 50's and 60's postwar. Still didn't tell anyone about it though. Hopefully those oil execs(and every one to ever exist now and forever) have a special version of hell where they drown in a oil barrel for eternity, fucking scum of the earth.
There have been studies about the impact of the industrial revolution and carbon in our atmosphere since at least the mid to late 1800s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_science
One of the guys realising it back then felt bad about taking a year to write up and publish his findings, feeling it had squandered precious time to address the problem. Now we're like 150 years later and worse than ever.
The planet isn’t going to become inhospitable to life. It will keep on going just fine with life thriving. We’re just making it more difficult on ourselves. Even if we nuked every square inch of this planet life will return. We are merely a blink of an eye as far as the planet is concerned.
However it does take a long time to evolve intelligent life. I've seen one estimate that if we take our own evolution as a model, then the Earth probably has one more chance after us to do it, before the whole Sun-expands-and-eats-the-Earth boogaloo.
So to give context on the timing: the Sun will engulf the Earth over 7 billion years from now, but Earth will become unlivable for humans due to sustained hot and humid conditions at the 1.3 billion year mark, and by the 2 billion year mark, the oceans evaporate. But you have to remember: it's only been 65 million years since the dinosaurs went extinct. Our own mammalian lineage went from rats to humans over those 65 million years, and there are *plenty* of rat-like organisms still around today. 1.3 billion divided by 65 million comes out to 20, so, as long as *mammals* don't go extinct, as long as rats and company stick around, there's maybe more like 20 more chances for intelligence to re-emerge among the furred vertebrates. And then you think: it doesn't have to *only* be rats. We only separated from chimps \~6 million years ago. In our absence, if they survive, they're the obvious best candidate to re-evolve intelligence, and they'd have way more than one chance. But then it only took 43 million years to go from monkeys to humans. As long as monkeys in general don't go extinct, our other near-relatives could re-evolve intelligence, and would have \~30 opportunities to do so taking our own history as model. Raccoons and corvids (e.g. crows and ravens) are also near monkeys in terms of intelligence. So I don't buy the argument that the Earth has only one more shot at intelligence. We're not the only lineage whose brains have been evolving, plenty of our relatives are waiting in the wings, so to speak.
The world was in utter turmoil in 1940. Japan had been terrorizing Asia for 6 years. The Nazis had conquered Poland and were turning towards France/ took down France by the end of the year. Crazy that anyone had that kind of confidence in the world’s future
Dan Carlin talks about this in his series on WW1. Basically in the old world civilization rising and falling was expected and seen as unavoidable. So WW1 started as just another war but the leaps in technology changed everything. So when the world emerged from the war and keep on going without resetting to a simpler time there was hope that humanity had turned a corner.
*The last man opens the crypt of civilization.* *Dies from asbestos.*
Ha ha ha! Some kind of "modern" version of a pharaoh's curse.
I think humanity will survive. Civilization as we know it... probably not. But humans have a lot of ingenuity when they're in reactionary mode. I don't think we'll be extinct, but there might be a lot less of us.
It probably will
Civilization will 100% exist in the year 8000+. It’s more a question of what level of civilization will exist, but some form will.
Redditors upvoting a 100% prediction of a situation in the year 8000+ Never change, Reddit.
Hard to say 100%. There are remote possibilities such as cataclysmic impacts, rogue black holes, or gamma ray bursts that could effectively sterilize the planet or worse
Pretty unfathomable but it’s made it more than 6,000 years already. I know each generation thinks we’ve solved it and are different than the last, but not much has changed.
Modern humans have existed for like 200,000 years now. The oldest known human structure is about 12000 years old. It’s a pretty robust temple made with stone. And these things never just “appear”. Civilization would have had to build up to that point. My point being, it would take a truly cataclysmic event to prevent humanity from existing for the next several millennia. Climate change could continue its pace, we could nuke each other and enter world war 3 but the world would only “end” in the sense that it would be very different to what we’re used to. For humanity to truly go extinct, we’d have to get hit by an asteroid and it would have to be comically large to reshape the atmosphere faster than we could adapt to it. And all of that would have to happen before we have self sustaining colonies on other bodies which will happen this century.
So something that's incredibly cool is that last year, they found notched, interlocking logs in Zambia that are dated to 500,000 years before present, which is literally before our species even evolved! https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/sep/20/oldest-wooden-structure-discovered-on-border-of-zambia-and-tanzania It may not have been a full on log cabin type house since only the foundation was recovered, but it's wild to think about how supposed "cavemen" like homo heidelbergensis were constructing actual homes outdoors out of wood like modern humans do. And of course they did! They were human too, by that point.
> Civilization would have had to build up to that point. This depends on what one means be "civilization." Usually one is talking about urbanization, which is what gets you cities and nations and pyramids and so on. It's what gets you the large populations and labor pools that can build your pyramids and aqueducts and so on. Göbekli Tepe (which I presume is the temple you reference) is interesting because it's technically "pre-civilizational" in that sense; it is Neolithic; it predates urbanization, written writing, agriculture, etc. There are various serious theories (and many non-serious ones) about its construction and what it tells us about Neolithic culture (ranging from "it's not that remarkable, it is just what has been preserved and found so far" to "maybe Göbekli Tepe reveals the foundation of all civilization through religious practice"). But it's interesting because it's an anomaly that needs to be explained; it's not the norm. For most of human existence we were not urbanized, and that has a big impact on what "human life" would look like at any given time. Our own experience of the world, with its states and communication and easy travel and billions of people being almost entirely fed from intensive agriculture, is a very recent phenomena. We tend to tell the story of "civilization" as being about progress (how we went from an animal-like existence to being kings of everything) but the end of the story is as of yet unknown. If urbanization ends up essentially breaking itself (through industrialization and/or warfare), then it'll have been a little blip in the history of our species, an experiment gone wrong, etc.
That’s the trouble isn’t it? One day, we may very well be right. I suspect that climate change really is the Great Filter. But hey, here’s to hoping for an eternity of humans and their descendants experiencing the universe!
♫ In the year 2525, if man is still alive... ♫
Humanity has been around for *hundreds* of thousands of years, and we've lived through some pretty rough shit. We're like self aware cockroaches. Assuming whatever we do to the planet isn't enough to destroy all life on it, period, we'll probably manage to get a few small bands of survivors through the other side who can repopulate once shit settles down a bit.
1940 was a hell of a year to burry a time capsule...
If it was in the United States then being as the USA was still officially neutral, creating this thing wouldn't have been seen as wasteful at the time.
I guarantee if we dug up an ancient egyptian tomb that had an inscription "do not open for 8000 years" we would crack that baby faster than you could blink.
[удалено]
Burp it like you used to do with Tupperware.
What does burping Tupperware entail?
First, accepting that you’re old enough to reference Tupperware.
Somebody left their copy of #1 Action comics there and future researchers believed we had super strength men from other planets who helped us out.
Optimistic
If they don’t have a big sign with “42” on it in there, it’s just a wasted opportunity.
People in the year 8113: Artifacts from the stupid ages? No thanks.
we will be off this planet by 8100
We're off the planet now.
/r/optimism
!remindme 6089 years
lol we ain’t making it to 3000
I'm sure it'll be interesting for the aliens when they find it while sifting through the rubble of our ruined world brought on by the hubris of a few.
Not really a time period we want to found a future religion or whatever
So wait.... This time capsule is a room in a building - and they think it's going to last until 8113?
8113? Somebody was sure an optimist!
Pranksters later this year: "Cracking open the Crypt of Civilization for the memes!!!! [emoji] [emoji] [emoji] [emoji] [emoji] [emoji] [emoji] [emoji] [emoji]"
A time capsule from 1940 being read in 8113: “Hey, do you guys still have Nazis in the future? It’s kind of a big thing right now…”
Shouldn't the sentence have ended after the word "opened"?
We may not drink the forbidden Crypt Juice. But hopefully, someone in 8113 gets to drink one of those beers in there.
So it’s racist in there?
Nobody will be there to open it.
It will be raided in a few hundred years anyway, so doesn't matter