What will you do on May 28, 8113 at noon? If you have nothing planned yet, it’s time to lock the date. Admittedly, unless a major scientific breakthrough, you will not be able to participate in the opening of the Crypt of Civilization In the basement of the American University of Ogleyorpe, in the state of Georgia. But it might be of interest to your distant descendants.
It was in 1936 that the idea of a play preserving the knowledge of humanity made its way in the brain of Thornwell Jacobs (1877-1956), president of Ogleyorpe University, located in the suburbs of Atlanta. Passionate about ancient Egypt, the latter regrets the many gray areas that lead to the understanding of this civilization until today.
“Without a natural disaster such as the eruption of Vesuvius, the splendors of Pompeii and Herculanum would never have been revealed to us”he will write in his memories. Guided by a “Archaeological duty”Thornwell Jacobs is therefore responsible for building a relic for historians of the future, in order to allow them to open an intact and motionless window on the XXe century. This is how the project of the Civilization Crypt is born.
A pharaonic project
Obviously, Thornwell Jacobs is inspired by Egyptian pyramids, in particular recent discoveries made in the Valley of Kings: fourteen years earlier, in 1922, the British archaeologist Howard Carter entered the mausoleum of Toutankhamon, exhusing exceptional archaeological vestiges. However, the temporal capsule of Ogleyorpe University follows the style of the Pharaonic funeral chambers, stuffed with objects supposed to accompany the deceased in his journey to the beyond. However, the construction of a pyramid is not compatible with the university budget, its president falls back on … An unused swimming pool located in the basements of the complex.
Several months of work follow after which the swimming pool has been transformed into a 20 -square hermetic chamber. But what artifacts Store it? With the support of archivists and philanthropists, Thornwell Jacobs brings together an unusual collection of objects, including an electric toaster, the original script of the film You might as well take the wind (released in 1939), a bottle of Budweiser beer, a pen, a barometer, seeds to sow, a typewriter, a Donald Duck figurine, a radio, a box-opener, false eyelashes, a Kodak camera, a plastic ashtray, dental thread, artificial flowers, etc.
There are also sealed microfilms in waterproof compartments containing the reproductions of 800 essential pounds, as well as photographs, feature films and audio recordings, including speeches by Joseph Staline, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Neither gold, no money nor jewelry was included in order to discourage looters”specifies the university newspaper of Ogleyorpe. This is not surprising, given the systematic looting of the Egyptian funeral chambers.
A piece frozen in time
Will our descendants be able to operate the radio or the projector deposited in the time capsule? Yes, consider its administrators: we have thought of locking up a windmill that will serve as an electricity generator. A machine intended to teach English – in the case where they would no longer speak the same language as us – was even placed at the entrance to the place, serving as “rosette stone” to decipher the testimonies: the 1,500 most common words in the Shakespeare language are associated with an image representing them.
Unsurprisingly, it is also the prejudices of the time that were locked in the play: newspaper cuts, books and especially a “Negro doll” which reveals the racial stereotypes poisoning America from the interwar period. Thornwell Jacobs himself is a supporter of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that flourish during these dark years. His effort to “safeguard civilization” will later be assimilated to an attempt to immobilize his time on the supremacy of the white man … It is the danger of temporal capsules: they freeze mentalities on a specific historical moment. And not always the most glorious.
This will not prevent Thornwell Jacobs and his team from going to the end of the project. Four years later, the capsule is filled from floor to ceiling – even the walls are covered with drawings and photographs – and only closer. May 25, 1940 took place the closing ceremony. “The modern world will be buried today in the crypt”title dark the local newspaper. The tone is pessimistic and for good reason: at the same time, the German army drives the French defenses in Calais and repels the allies towards the pocket of Dunkirk. The threat of destruction of human civilization must then seem very plausible.
After the speeches and the grandson of rigor, the crypt of civilization is sealed by a stainless steel door welded to the wall, then rid of its oxygen in order to best preserve its content. Hopefully that a distracted trainee was not allowed to be locked in 1940, failing which his mummified body would make a nice surprise to the earthlings of the LXXXIIe century AD!!
Defense to enter before 8113
But why did you set the opening date so far in the future? Another whim of Thornwell Jacobs, who was inspired by the Egyptian calendar, established in 4241 BCE. Noting that 6,177 years had passed between the creation of the calendar and the genesis of the project in 1936, he decided, by symmetry, to project the opening 6,177 years in the future. Or May 28, 8113. We will have to hold on, because in 2025, we only carried out 1.44% of the path.
Of course, projecting humanity into the such uncertain future raises many practical questions. How to make sure that the crypt of civilization will still be intact by then? If so, can we decipher the content? Can we only find the entrance to it? To deal with any eventuality, the administrators of the capsule have distributed at 3,600 establishments around the world – bibliothèques, monasteries, archive centers – detailed instructions, translated into fourteen languages, specifying the location of the capsule on the basis of geological benchmarks, more resistant to the throes of time.
So will we always be there, humans, to see who will enter the first time capsule in the history of humanity? Or would the crypt of civilization-which would be named its name-be one of the last testimonies of our brief supremacy on earth? To find out, go to just over six millennia.
