Saturday, December 27, 2008

Who is Stealing the Time Capsules?


New Years is upon us and we all know what that means. It's Time Capsule Season! The odd thing about time capsules is that they have a tendency to disappear - an estimated 80% of time capsules are lost before their scheduled opening date. There are a number of convenient explanations - thievery, lost records, secrecy and ground water. But I have another theory - time capsules are stolen by time travelers from the future. Here are two possible explanations for why they would do this:

1. They know that most of the artifacts in the capsules will not survive, but wish to study them. Since many of the capsules are sealed and isolated, they can acquire them with less risk of altering the time line. Time travelers can retrieve the capsule before it is lost or destroyed.  Maybe the missing capsules contain lost items vital to survival in the future, but cannot the retrieved through time travel without accidentally creating a future in which we are enslaved by apes or robots.

2. Time travelers seek to destroy time capsules because they contain unholy artifacts from the past that could contaminate and destroy the perfect utopian (or dystopian) society they have created.

Or it could be a combination of both groups competing to steal time capsules to preserve or overthrow society without erasing themselves.

2 comments:

Dean Wormer said...

As always you ferret out the truth. Groundwater? What genius came with that crazy thesis?

ThoughtCriminal said...

D.W.: I suspect that these alternative explanations are planted by time-travelers. They also destroy or alter records to cover their tracks.