Now that you mention it, I would kind of like to know what color slime turns after that many years.
Its slime isn’t it?
It’s slime. And it will have mutated into a world ending bacteria.
- Movies, including Home Alone and Back to the Future on VHS
- CDs, including Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ’Em by MC Hammer and Michael Jackson’s Dangerous album
- A Nintendo Game Boy
- Rollerblades
- Reebok Pump sneakers
- A jar of Gak, at the request of a Dr. Emmett Brown impersonator, who showed up in a real DeLorean and fake hair
- One of Joey Lawrence’s “Whoa! ’92” hats, which he stopped by to present
- News reports, including coverage of the AIDS crisis, Desert Storm, and the end of the Soviet Union
- Books, including a world atlas, history book, comic book, phone book, the Orlando TV Guide for the week of April 30, 1992, and a copy of the Book of - Endangered Species
- An issue of Nickelodeon magazine
- A Nicktoons t-shirt featuring Ren & Stimpy
- A piece of the Berlin Wall
- A Barbie doll
- Pencils
- A skateboard
- A baseball
- Twinkies
- A stick of bubble gum (though no one seems to know which kind)
- Photos of things too big (or alive) to fit inside, including bicycles, planes, trains, cars, politicians and celebrities
- A videotape, which was a recording of the live ceremony, shot by a girl named Vicky who stood onstage to operate the Kid Cam
- The camera recording the tape, which appears to have been unplanned—Mike O’Malley and Joey Lawrence both looked baffled about how to remove the tape from the camera, so the whole setup was tossed in at the last minute
I think 2042 might still be too early to open it, but it will be nice for anyone there to watch it be opened, if they care!
So the battery in the camera will ooze over everything.
You forgot they filled it with slime to preserve it all.
“Mike O’Malley? Mike… O’Malley… Now, that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time. A long time."
I would hope there’s still a VCR in operation somewhere in 2042. I would assume so if I go by the 50-60 year old turntables I see at goodwill. And a display that can use analog video.
But if we want to go further in time, I’d include a VCR head drum or a whole VCR with the belts taken out and replacements described perfectly for someone to reproduce.
Is this a real list? Obviously in 1992 they didn’t know that the Internet would preserve the memory of a lot of this stuff so yeah, feels too early. But imagine the world with no Internet that had moved on and forgotten about Joey’s “whoa!”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickelodeon_Studios
There’s a section for the Time Capsule under Opening and Reception. It has the list above in the article more or less and cites this source: https://cdm21072.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p21072coll2/id/784
Which has essentially the list from both above and the wiki. So if we wanted to confirm we’d probably have to go to the video which can be found here: https://youtu.be/W1hxmfi_4J8
Which from my casual viewing seems be approximately the list above with the exception of perhaps a newspaper from the day they loaded the capsule (approximately one minute in), but that is probably accounted for with the news reports.
The loading of the time capsule was broadcast on cable. People taped it. At least some of which is uploaded to Youtube.
It sure feels real. I have a very vague memory of all of that happening. Or maybe I watched a YouTube video about it years ago? It’s hard to say.
I do remember they had pictures of the lid during commercial breaks for a while leading up to it, to build hype.
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Unfortunately, by 2042, the technology to read books will be gone.
I’m imagining Wall-E humans
Don’t worry, we’ll invent Book Reading as a Service by then. It runs on rust and kubernates.
The twinkies should still be edible
Tell him about the Twinkie
What are twinkies? I see them referenced a lot in popular media and then depiction appears to be of a glazed eclair, so the worst possible version of an eclair, baked goods like wrap tend to go stale after about 10 minutes I’m not sure why they’re supposed to last for so long.
Your description, “the worst possible version of an eclair”, is essentially correct.
In terms of how long they actually last, I don’t really know. But it has been a recurring joke for many years that they are basically indestructible.
I’m sure they are pumped full of artificial preservatives though…
Twinkies are cream-filled sponge cake fingers. They aren’t glazed or iced. First introduced by the Hostess company in 1930, the cream filling was originally banana flavored but it was switched to vanilla during WWII rationing.
Twinkies, among many other similar cake-based snacks are made with emulsified shortening rather than butter or vegetable oil as you might bake a cake at home, which keeps them from going stale when stored at room temperature. This has led to an urban legend that they have an infinite shelf life, that they might even survive a nuclear war. 20th century Twinkies had a stated shelf life of 7 to 10 days; in 2012 a preservative was added which upped it to 45, but they do indeed spoil.
Plot twist: the Gak became sentient and consumed the rest of the time capsule’s contents. In 2042 we shall all become Gak.
Surely the water and salt in the Gak is enough to do some damage, if not for its sentience.
Definitely zebra gum
Hate to be a downer here, but this is all shit we can see on the Internet now.
Maybe it’s because I was alive at that time, it’s not as interesting to me. Maybe I’m just a grumpy old man.
The internet wasnt as ubiquitious then as it is now. I do agree, that time capsules need to wait a bit longer these days given how digital records keep about as long if you try.
Spoilers!!!
Lowkey I hope it’s just full of slime
I don’t know…
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I’ll be my early 50s, that’s not even a good times capsule, I’ll still know all of the things that are.
I suppose it’s aimed at children, “this is what your parents thought was important”, presumably everyone will then have a good laugh at the VCR in the cassette tape that will inevitably be in there and no one will have any way to play.
50 years is a really good timeline for a time capsule. Close enough that parents or grandparents were there and lived it, far enough out that it’s decades before you existed.
Time capsules are never meant for the people who were there when they were sealed. That would defeat the purpose of a time capsule…
No shit you remember it. You were there. That’s the whole damn point. That there will be people around that lived it and can actually explain it all firsthand. That’s why they’re not super long-timeline things. It’s not for you. It’s nostalgia for the people that buried it, and a good passing down of information from generation to generation. But the primary point of time capsules are showing new generations history.
It’s like how the 90s are an exhibit at museums now. I took my kids to one. It was fun explaining all the shit they saw and thought was wild, because I lived it firsthand and it was just life.
It’ll be fun when it’s my grandkids too.
I hope it’s just gallons and gallons of expired rotten Gak
Oh shit, 2042, that’s, like, another 35 years from now, right?
Fun fact: You are closer to 2042 than to 1992
Stop doing math 😡
Super Mario Brothers was released closer to WWII than to today.
That’s unpossible!
Thank you Dr Klein
I measure time by the sci-fi periods we pass. Obviously BTTF I was a big year. The world as we knew it ended the year after. Next is I,Robot in 2035 iirc, then Blade Runner 2042
Wade Watts from the print version of Ready Player One was born August 12th, 2026.
We are very close. Not that RPO is as old as any of the media you mentioned, nor is the setting as far-future in terms of technological advancements.
Yo even though it was corpo-hell, that beauty of the Oasis and being any being was so alluring to me. And IP being a thing of the past (I was impressed by how many references they managed to stuff in the movie, maybe 1/4 of the book aha).
Ya it still required working loads to buy MTX or a ticket to travel, but it was so freeing in other senses.
Guess we got VRChat for this timeline lol
There will come soft rains was just now.
That’s not fun.
50 years is at most only two generations. real change occurs at 5 or more
At most? You must live in a nice area. Here you have some kids looking for gifts for their grandmothers 40th birthday.
Dan Schneider’s Phylactery
Some time capsules are so unambitious. I remember seeing a library buried one for ten years. The person who buried it was the same person who dug it up.
I saw one that was a 25 year capsule. I have some boxes of crap in my garage that quality as time capsules.
The concept of time capsules should be put in a time capsule.
Picture looks like it’s full of Gak™
Time capsules should be 100 years, so everyone from when it was sealed is dead.
Although, if you’re sealing up a bunch of pop culture stuff, maybe it’s better to make it 50 years? IDK.
I’m not very interested in time capsule, I guess.
Well, this one is child-oriented, so…wouldn’t it be cool to invite some of the kids who attended the sealing of this time capsule to re-open it with their grandchildren? An adult is going to have to go in first because god knows what the batteries in that camcorder have done.
The 8 year olds who will watch Nickelodeon in April of 2042 have not been born yet.
This will mostly ensure most to unopened
Oh shit. Now I have a reason to live! Thanks!
Looks sort of like a Stargate (okay no chevrons to lock I know) just push the right coordinates on the DHD and you’ll be fine. Depending where you are in the universe…or galaxy? Can’t recall how far they went, time for another rewatch it seems.
Drink Your Ovaltine
