What the heck would you put in a time capsule to describe life in 2025?

Washington Post

22-07-2025

The most incisive comment I ever heard about writing is 'Writing is easy. I just sit down and write what occurs to me. It's the occurring that's hard.' The hardest occurring that has occurred for me in recent years has involved the assignment to write messages for time capsules, packages to be sealed away for examination on some far-distant date.
Deciding what to say wasn't always quite so difficult. Contributors to a 1924 time capsule — unveiled in September in centennial celebrations of the Memorial Union at Purdue University, where I worked — anticipated correctly that it would be opened on its due date by people like them, at an institution they would recognize, in a country called the United States. When the request came to prepare its replacement, aimed at an opening a century hence, any such assumptions gave reason to pause.
I got off easy with a capsule request not too long ago, because the year was 2020. It seemed both historically appropriate and safe to focus on the unique events of that pandemic year, which are likely to be remembered as significant even decades from now.
Likewise with the artifacts we selected for the capsule: covid test kits, wellness kits containing thermometers, masks and hand wipes, and the pledges required of students and staff as we kept the university open and on schedule during those uncertain, risk-balancing times.
Performing the task last year offered no easy out. There is a long list of topics to exclude, at least if the goal is to avoid appearing hopelessly naive or shortsighted.
One obvious guideline is to avoid predictions. In 1900, Detroit Mayor William Maybury solicited entries for a 'Century Box' to be opened a hundred years later. Local worthies forecast 2.5 million inhabitants, less crime than the low levels the police reported for their times, and the annexation of Canada. They missed the first number by 60 percent, crime skyrocketed rather than declined, and Canada was still an independent country (although the idea is still around).
The Detroit contributors weren't oblivious to the impact of technology. The mayor queried the future holder of his office whether telephony had advanced to the point where people could actually talk to one another in foreign lands.
Given changes already afoot, writing today to what is assumed to be a university and its community calls for special caution. Will young people a century from now still 'go to school,' or will all useful knowledge be downloaded through an electrode or ingested in a tablet? If a successor Purdue president is still around to open the box, will she or he be a centenarian undergoing a midlife crisis? Will ruminations about the sacred mission of 'searching for truth' still have meaning if reality has become so fully virtual that 'truth' has lost its historical meaning?
Will the reader live in the leading, unified, sovereign nation we know or a subjugated vassal of a foreign power? Or maybe in one of the pieces of a fractured, formerly United States?
Matters of politics and public policy are especially risky. Our virulent debates about what we call social issues will likely seem as quaint to 22nd-century readers as Prohibition does to us today. What is certain is that those readers will, based on societal changes we cannot foresee, regard today's mores as amusingly backward.
Long before the capsule's opening, our political class's mindless profligacy will have produced a debt implosion of one kind or another. The ways they have chosen to deal with a changing climate, spending trillions without moving, or any real prospect of moving, the world's thermometer, will engender more 'What were they thinking?' headshaking. If warming continues and its consequences are as serious as the doomsayers forecast, our descendants will have devised smarter ways of managing them.
But the murkiest question involves not what one should write about but to whom one is writing. With the architects of artificial intelligence telling us that human-surpassing artificial general intelligence, or AGI, might be only a thousand days away, how can capsule contributors be sure that, a hundred years off, their words of wisdom will be read by a human being, or seem any wiser than the sounds of a lower primate seem to us today?
My 2020 entry ran seven paragraphs and filled a page of letterhead. By 2024, caution and uncertainty limited me to barely 100 words, most of them acknowledging the possibility that 'the human species as the Earth has known it will no longer remain' and that 'universities like Purdue will have been transformed, perhaps unrecognizably.'
All I ventured of any substance was the hope that some enumerated values for which universities like Purdue have always stood — high standards and excellence, complete freedom of inquiry, commitment to the preparation of young people for lives of productive citizenship — will still be at its core. I addressed myself to 'who, or what, may be reading these words.'
Cowardly, you might be thinking. Lame and unimaginative. I can't disagree. But before reaching a final judgment, try this particular writing assignment yourself. You might find the occurring a bit difficult.
Post Opinions wants to know: What would you add to a time capsule to represent America today? Share your response, and it might be published as a letter to the editor.