10 Incredibly Ambitious Time Capsules

Collecting the biological data from across the globe is incredibly important to the International Environmental Specimen Bank Group in order to study changes in samples over the years and analyze what our own activity may be doing to the environment around us, and what the environment may be doing to us.

When William Man was working at the National Zoo he left a time capsule for future employees to find. Inside they found programs from the Ringling Brothers And Barnum & Bailey circus (Mann had worked for the circus starting at the age of 9 to learn how to better care for elephants), a copy of the Washington Post and documents about the zoo’s elephants. Inspired by the find, the caretakers of the elephant house put together their own capsule to leave in the newly remodeled building.

The Long Now Foundation has a few different projects it’s working on, including the Rosetta Project. Rosetta assembled a set of texts almost identical to each other and translated them into 2,500 different languages. It’s not only a massive undertaking, but hugely important because many linguists have predicted 90 percent of the world’s languages could disappear in the next 100 years.

When Bellevue Hospital Medical College was being demolished in 2011 a time capsule from 1897 was discovered. Inside was a vial of bacterial spores more than 100 years old. The implications of this vial were huge, as they gave insight as to what bacteria was like before the introduction of antibiotics. It will also give a good view as to how bacteria has changed over the years.

Lunar Mission One is scheduled to leave earth in 2024, in part to collect samples of the surface layer of the moon, but it will also leave a time capsule there as well. It will include information about the earth, but also information from the backers of the project. Some people have said they want to include photos, family trees or even strands of hair.

Louis Mantin lived in Moulins, France from 1851-1905 and amassed quite a collection of all kinds of items, from historical to (at the time) modern. Mantin never married or had any children, so in his will he wished for his home to be preserved for 100 years and then when that time was over, for it to be opened as a museum. In 2010, after some renovation to get it back into good condition, it opened as a great glimpse into the past.

Every moment of the Apollo 11 Moon landing was recorded for posterity, from the conversations the astronauts had, to the communications between the shuttle and the ground crew. 40 years after the initial landing, NASA had a streaming “audio time capsule” that played for eight days.

MIT has had a few attempts at time capsules, including one that was buried in 1959 and supposed to be opened in 1989. Unfortunately it remains where it was first buried because an 18-ton particle accelerator was built on top of it.

The Future Library is a truly fascinating project, because it will span the next 100 years. Each year, a different writer will create an original piece and it will remain unread until 2114. When that year comes, the works will be printed on paper that will be harvested from a forest of 1,000 trees recently planted in Norway.

In 2001 the mayor of Detroit opened a time capsule that was created 100 years prior. The capsule held letters from Detroit citizens that all held great optimism for the city.