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Period pieces

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Most of us remember primary school projects in which stuffed shoe boxes, jars and poster tubes were passed on to posterity. More surprising is the fact that big kids continue to collect objects and artefacts to bequeath to future times, be they five or 5,000 years from now. Millennium madness? Scientific foresight? A therapeutic attempt at immortality? Whatever the reason, one thing is for sure: time capsules are absolutely of the moment.

From the pharoahs' pyramids to MIT's digital time capsule (mitsloan.mit.edu), humankind has left mementos of its past. While some of these messages are unintentional - Pompeii's petrified remains or the Titanic's treasures, for instance - others, such as the Westinghouse time capsule, are collective attempts to capture the spirit of a given period. Buried in pitch and concrete at the site of the 1939 New York World's fair, this project had the longest sell-by date of its time: if successful, citizens of 4038 will open it up to find an assortment of everyday items, including a Woolworth's rhinestone clip, a deck of cards and a packet of cigarettes. There will be newsreels, mircrofilm and messages from Albert Einstein, ???? Robert Millikan and novelist Thomas Mann.

Exactly who will inhabit the earth then, however, is anybody's guess. NASA acknowledged the possibility of extraterrestial lifeforms in 1977, when it launched the first of two Space-Time Capsules on Voyager spacecraft. They hold 30-centimetre copper phonograph discs containing sounds of earth, from birds and babies to Bach and a blacksmith's shop, analog information on mathematics, chemistry, geology and biology, and greetings, photographs, a needle and ... a set of instructions.

The most ambitious project to date, however, will see a capsule buried on January 1, 2001, when a group of scientists will observe what some call the real end of the millennium by installing the BESTCapsule2001 under almost 20 metres of Antarctic ice. Filled with everything from seeds and DNA to air and human breast milk, the capsule is not to be opened until 3001.

And Hong Kong? We've had our share of slice-of-life shoeboxes, the biggest being 1997's Handover capsule. The Legislative Council receptacle, compiled by 52 current and former legislators, embodies the anxieties and excitement of the time: there are official documents, political pamphlets, a figurine of the Goddess of Democracy and David Chu Yu-lin's American passport. It will be removed from the Legco carpark in 2007, along with the Urban Council's capsule in the City Hall Memorial Garden, which contains plans of proposed projects. A VCD with 48 hours of televised Handover coverage will be part of RTHK's millennium capsule, which will also feature an antique Chinese microphone, a CD of Canadian-Chinese songs and a radio designed for the blind. The capsule will remain in the Hong Kong Museum of History for the next 50 years.

Anybody interested in creating their own time capsules might like to consider a ready-made container. For US$450-750 (HK$3,488-$5,812), Time Capsule 2000, made by Barr Technologies of California (www.barrtek.com) promises to pass 'your message to future generations'. Which is not to say that any old thing is appropriate: according to the Website, one should avoid unstable items which may release gas or deteriorate (for example, rubber, wool, wood, PVC); black and white prints, Barr says, will outlast colour; inks, or pencil, are better than Bic ink, and should be used on paper with a pH of 6.0 to 8.5.
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