Time capsules. What’s the point? Time capsules are arrogant waves to the future, conveying a message or blind self-importance and no foresight. It’s rather insulting, really. Here, Future Dudes (and Dudettes), here’s all this great stuff we had back here in the awesome past. We awesomely stuck it all in a little pill and buried it so you could regain all of our awesome wisdom that was probably lost with all the awesome time that has passed. No, no need to thank us. It was our awesome pleasure. Awesome! .
Frustrated archaeologists and historians conceived the idea for the time capsule, convinced that they were providing their future colleagues with a great service. They imagined being posthumously honored with statues, university degrees, and deli sandwiches. In reality they will be considered in the same regard as Warren K. Smeltz, inventor of the crap-in-plastic-egg vending machines that continually plague our marketplaces. That is to say, not considered at all. Or at most, considered with a “The last thing we need is another tiny Brewer’s helmet. I could trepinate the guy who invented this thing.”
One hundred years from now, every town in America will have a museum dedicated to the idiotic bullscrap that elementary school children felt the need to preserve for future generations. Vegas odds that Bubble Tape, copies of R.L. Stein’s Goosebumps novella series, or the 1996 Plainview Little League Baseball Championship trophy will be sought after collectors’ items are miniscule. This is great for us risk takers, because I am positive that’s what the future needs. More shit. We will eventually start hauling garbage to the moon, and we’ll need to fill the landfills with something. Time capsules will become our greatest natural resource. Pigs will be specially trained to seek out and root them up. We will be the world’s premiere source of hundred-year-old crap. Plastic trinket-filled eggs will be sold all over the country, emblazoned with mottoes like “America; The Land That Buried Time, Dug It Up, And Sells It To You.” Most popular gift to bring home to Grandma: Thyme Capsules.
The sheer amount of minutia recorded every day on all manner of media is staggering. Every one of the hundreds of television stations broadcasting today is recording their programming, and the number of stations grows every year. When you tack on cinema and amateur recordings, nearly every aspect of American life-trivia will be available for future scrutiny, for better or worse. The likelihood that all this future history will be lost is tiny. And I suppose any catastrophe that melts every piece of celluloid and digitally encoded plastic on earth will also disintegrate any pogo balls buried a few feet under your local soccer field. We would have bigger issues to worry about in that case; present preservation would trump future history storage.
So again I ask. Time capsules, what’s the point? Perhaps we should give our future brethren the benefit of the doubt and assume they’ll figure out whatever the hell it is they’ll need to figure out about our time. After all, we figured out the Romans invented bulimia without any time capsules. I’m sure our future generations will learn everything they need to know about us without Pez dispensers.