Crypt of Civilization

Crypt of Civilization (en.wikipedia.org)

73 points by prtk 14 years ago | 31 comments

arethuza 14 years ago |

To give some idea of how long this is supposed to last, 8113 AD is 6102 years in the future. The oldest buildings on the planet are all a good bit less old than 6102 years - they typically start at a maximum of about 3500 BC.

I would suspect that the biggest danger facing such a time capsule is that it is broken into during some time of societal collapse - a sealed strong room is going to look very tempting. For that reason I would suspect that comparable projects in remote locations stand a much better chance of long-term survival:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now

ugh 14 years ago | |

Are there no buildings older than 6102 years because every building inevitably crumbles or because the buildings that existed 6102 years ago inevitable crumbled?

Agriculture isn’t that old and there just wan’t any need for permanent buildings before agriculture arrived.

It doesn’t seem completely out of the question for the Pyramids to survive another 2,000 years to reach 6,000 years. (Ok, that might be a bad point to make, given that there is nothing inside the pyramids anymore.)

arethuza 14 years ago | | |

"Agriculture isn’t that old"

Agriculture is way older than any surviving building, back to about 9000BC:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture

arethuza 14 years ago | | |

Just to clarify - I was talking about oldest surviving buildings as we were discussing time capsules.

There are archaeological sites where large amounts of construction had been carried out that are much older than 3500BC e.g. Çatalhöyük in Turkey:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%87atalh%C3%B6y%C3%BCk

And, of course, Jericho:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho

ori_b 14 years ago |

I always wonder how future civilizations will interpret time capsules like this. "And here, children, we have the primitives sacrificing their possessions to their god 'Kap-sool', ruler of time"

justincormack 14 years ago |

It was just at the start of the microfilm boom, so they used microfilm. The quoted lifetime is 500 years, accelerated ageing tests indicate 1000 years. So the books probably wont be readable. The Egyptians did better with papyrus and ink.

lachenmayer 14 years ago | |

Well, the chamber is supposedly filled with an inert gas, so the lifetime of the microfilm should be much larger.

justincormack 14 years ago | | |

It is not oxidisation that is the issue. Humidity and temperature are the main issues. Film is metallic silver in gelatine, and lasts ok, but thousands of years is a very long time.

zandorg 14 years ago |

Stick a computer on the moon, put a mirror of the Web on it, and let it serve queries over shortwave radio. Then all a fallen civilisation has to do is re-discover radio, to get access to the world's knowledge.

arethuza 14 years ago | |

I suggest we make it a large black monolith and bury it.

mtinkerhess 14 years ago | |

And reverse engineer TCP/IP, HTTP, unicode, etc.? Maybe we should come up with a simpler one-way protocol and just broadcast the whole thing continuously, on loop.

pjscott 14 years ago | |

How would you power it? How would you protect it from the cycles of heating and cooling every lunar day? How would you protect the circuits from long-term damage, like electromigration?

nazgulnarsil 14 years ago | | |

the monolith comment was more spot on than you think. see fullerenes: http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2011/08/fulle...

wcarss 14 years ago | |

Hopefully someone actually does this.

philwelch 14 years ago |

I always like how these are scheduled to be opened at a specific date. If we remember thousands of years from now what the original plan was, we'll probably have records of what was kept inside. If we forget, it won't be opened on schedule.

steve-howard 14 years ago | |

For that matter, our current system of numbering years hasn't been around that long.

jcoder 14 years ago |

I was expecting a clever system of pictographs or landscape design to lead future generations to the vault. This:

> We depend upon the laws of the county of DeKalb, the State of Georgia, and the government of the United States and their heirs, assigns, and successors, and upon the sense of sportsmanship of posterity for the continued preservation of this vault until the year 8113, at which time we direct that it shall be opened by authorities representing the above governmental agencies and the administration of Oglethorpe University. Until that time we beg of all persons that this door and the contents of the crypt within may remain inviolate.

represents a very unrealistic expectation.

sigilyph 14 years ago |

Should be Crypt of Western or American-defined Civilization, honestly. I always look at these things expecting something more comprehensive, only to find the same narrow slice of human civilization as a whole.

zeteo 14 years ago | |

Archaeologists are usually interested in object assemblages that belonged in the same context. Thus it would be far more interesting to preserve, say, a complete print shop, than a juxtaposition of dental floss and Donald Duck.

rwmj 14 years ago | | |

Really? I think archaeologists are fascinated by the later excavations at Pompeii because it captures all the little things in daily Roman life so well. A lot of that was not written down at the time ...

JoeAltmaier 14 years ago | | |

The do have the contents of a woman's purse. Talk about context!

wearefriends 14 years ago | |

Sad but true.

jason77700 14 years ago |

As an alumni of Oglethorpe University, I would bet I'm the only one that reads HN (Anyone Else?).

You pass by the steal doors of the Crypt on the way to the Book Store. It was my observation that students didn't really care about the Crypt itself, but that in order to build it they had to gut the indoor pool.

70+ years later they still don't have a pool nor offer any Computer Science / Computer Engineering classes.

nopassrecover 14 years ago |

A bit incidental, but would there be any risk of a sealed time capsule delivering viruses/bacteria to the future?

josscrowcroft 14 years ago | |

That's the first thing I thought of as well - immunity to certain basic things might have evolved out by then.

I wonder whether bacteria or viruses could survive that long in those conditions?

rubinelli 14 years ago | | |

Some bacteria can hibernate for millions of years in spore form. There was some speculation that the "Curse of the Pharaos" was caused by pathogenic bacteria or fungus-produced toxins, so yes, anyone opening that crypt should better be careful.

eneveu 14 years ago |

Only 6000 years? Well, that's nothing next to the Chauvet Cave ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauvet_Cave ), where they found 35000 years old paintings...

This is actually a weird coincidence to see this on HN tonight, since I watched "The Cave of Forgotten Dreams" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Forgotten_Dreams ) this evening. Having two hours to spend in Paris before a rendezvous, and seeing the great critics, I thought "Hey, I'm not usually into art / paintings / museums, but let's give this a try...".

The documentary was fascinating. The paintings look so fresh, it's as if they were done yesterday... But they are 30k - 35k years old. This really puts things into perspective...

It's hard to explain, but the effect was kind of similar to watching a Sagan video ( http://saganseries.com/ ). Instead of marveling at the size of the universe when compared to our tiny planet, I was marveling at how short the recorded history is when compared to the thousand of years of prehistory. I knew about this theoretically, but it never really hit home before...

borism 14 years ago |

don't forget the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record