How To Make a Digital Time Capsule

Posted 12/10/2010 at 3:56pm | by Brian Mahoney

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Golden Records and Endless Space

Back in 1977, when Apple had a II beside it (instead of a bunch of dollar signs) and everyone’s favorite PET was a Commodore, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration took a bold step, one that rivals the more famous ‘one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind’. With the launch of Voyager II and then Voyager I, yes, in that order, NASA sent more than a bit of our world off into space on a journey that may last forever.

A group, headed by Carl Sagan, put together a special package in the form of a Golden Record, which was sent off with each of the two Voyager spacecraft in the hopes that it might be intercepted by some type of being, hopefully both intelligent and peaceful.  Included on each super LP were ninety minutes of music, over a hundred images, and greetings in fifty-five languages. It seems there was also an hour long recording of Sagan’s wife’s brainwaves included on the record as well.  Take a brief moment to appreciate what it must have taken to fit all of this on one side of a twelve inch disk.

Off the packages went into space, cruising along at around sixty thousand kilometers per hour. Although they have long since passed the edge of our solar system, it will be forty thousand years before they come close to any stars. Even then they will be more than one and a half light years away from the ones nearest to them. Believe it or not, NASA is still in contact with the Voyagers and probably will continue monitoring them until about 2025.  Only NASA could find and fund a battery that will last fifty years.

That Was Then

While the amount of data on that single analog record is astounding, we’re living in a thoroughly more digital age. It is now theoretically possible to fit all of the Golden Record’s information on the head of a pin. We decided to put our propeller caps on, take the Golden Record as inspiration, and see what kind of a digital time capsule we could come up with here at Maximum PC. If you’re into buried treasure, hidden compartments and mysteries, then this is the project for you.

The concept of a time capsule isn’t new. Some are inadvertent, such as the Rosetta Stone and the Egyptian tombs, while others are designed more purposefully, such as the ones in the cornerstones of buildings (think along the lines of ‘One Froggy Evening’). Many of these time capsules were forgotten long ago and that is exactly what makes them more exciting to find today. While it’s nice to look forward to the day when the Golden Records will be discovered,  it’s also fun to look back into our own history to find out what life was like ‘way back when’. Here are some tips that you can use to create your own capsule as well as some suggestions about where to hide it.

Where to Start

For our purposes, we’re not looking at thousands of years down the road. Let’s lower our sights to fifty years, maybe one hundred at best, and then decide on a container  to use.

The first place to look might be a drawer where you’ve stashed your old cell phones. If you have one that can record video, sound and text, this would seem to be a perfect place to start, provided that you still have the charger. The battery would be the weak link here so make sure you remove that before you tuck the phone away. A leaking power cell will wreak havoc on the innards of your phone. We’re going to assume that electricity will be a given for any future society, barring thermonuclear war, and the charging unit would most likely power the phone just fine, fifty or more years down the road.

Alternatively, you could use a PDA. There’s probably lots of them to be found these days in thrift stores or online. Again, you’ll need to remove the battery and include the power unit. What we’re looking for is a combination of small size, color screen and lots of non-magnetic storage. SD cards and the like are cheap and tiny (and therefore, ideal). Additional material can be put on several flash cards which could be stored with the main unit. If your phone uses mini-cards, remember to include the regular size adapter, just in case. With a few extra cards thrown in, you lowly cell phone could pack away several gigs of priceless information.

Netbooks, old laptops, even a CD or DVD based camcorder would probably work just as well. It’s doubtful that magnetic media such as floppies or conventional hard drives would make the cut but an SSD (if you're flush) or any kind of flash memory would certainly suffice, as long as the hookups are there to access the information. We’ve seen estimates that certain types of CDs and DVDs could last up to one hundred years, but flash memory has a size advantage.

The Golden Record was somewhat limited in its ability to be used in the future, even though a stylus and cartridge were provided. Although detailed instructions were included, the record itself is useless unless its finder can figure out how to decode the information. Today, with the abundance of compact electronic tools available to us, this problem is easily eliminated. If you provide the information and the way to access the information all in one handy package, you’re ahead of the game.

Keep in mind that any full size computer which makes use of capacitors would be out of the question. Capacitors leak over time, rendering your time capsule useless in very short order. Transistors and other electronic components should be able to resist everything except moisture, making dry storage of your container of paramount importance. Start saving those little packs of silica gel for use in this project.

While USB may not be around when your time capsule is opened, if your main device has USB ports, include some flash drives full of images, videos and documents. Depending on when your trove is discovered, you just might be creating a new version of the Dead Sea Scrolls!