In 2092, a bit of my family history will be unearthed, along with a mayor's message, stamps, newspapers, city financial statements, photos and much more when the time capsule at Edmonton City Hall is opened. No, I won't be remembered as a prominent citizen. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time, covering city hall for the Edmonton Journal when the pyramid-topped building was being finished in 1992.
Every Christmas, my family creates a gingerbread replica, and that year we made one of the new city hall, generously covered with Smarties, Rosebuds and hard candies. When I showed a photo of our creation to Bob Walker, the project manager for the building, he said he'd sneak it into the time capsule along with a message of greeting from our kids to the kids of the future.
Sharing slices of our time with the future is an ancient urge, going back at least 6,000 years to the objects placed in Egyptian crypts. As William E. Jarvis of the University of Washington says in his book, Time Capsules: A Cultural History, sending out pieces of our era to the future is a deeply human impulse to present our time as distinctive. "‘I mark time, therefore I am,' could be humankind's motto," he writes.
The modern-day version of the time capsule started at the 1939 New York World's Fair, when messages were sealed for 5,000 years in a sleek container dubbed, unfortunately, the "time bomb." Now such time capsules are everywhere - even in space satellites that could be in orbit for thousands of years.
We all want to be viewed as fascinating to those who stumble across remnants of our culture in the future. Today, a wealth of information about us floats around in the digital ether of that endless, continuous time capsule called the Internet. The blogs we write today could be unearthed by 2109's version of Internet surfers. What will they make of the information we reveal about ourselves through these ramblings?
But for now, we still get a charge from the idea of a physical container filled with cultural detritus from a bygone era.
"There is something exciting about opening a sealed box that hasn't seen the light of day for many years," says Bruce Ibsen, Edmonton's former city archivist. "It is like a Christmas present from the past - put together with thoughtful consideration and reflection, comprised of items considered very important at the time the capsule was created."
There are time capsules all over Edmonton, in public buildings, schools, churches and even at West Edmonton Mall's Galaxyland. They come in all shapes and sizes, from square metal boxes to a big rocket to sealed envelopes. But regardless of shape or contents, there's never a guarantee that the capsule makers' intentions will match the future generations' impressions.
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