Cancer center creates and buries time capsule, to be opened a century from now

Something a little different.

Perhaps of interest because it involves cancer and is unusual.

In 2018 the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, NY, created and buried in local Kaminski Park a time capsule, having been sealed with argon gas to prevent decomposition, to be opened in the year 2118.

"Staff, patients and community members ... put messages of hope and special items in the time capsule. It will be opened in 100 years."

No mention is made as to what the "special items" were, but presumably they were representative of cancer care approaches and treatments that go on today.

If so, it's easy to suppose that when those future people in 2118 open the capsule, medical staff likely among them, and see the ways and things that were used today to treat cancer, they may shake their heads in amazement at the primitive means that were in use to treat the cancers of our day.

Anyway, it doesn't seem all that often that we see a cancer treatment facility laying away a cancer-related time capsule to be opened a century from now.

Who knows, maybe cancer won't even be a serious disease by the time 2118 arrives.

One can hope.

https://www.wgrz.com/article/news/health/roswell-park-putting-together-time-capsule-that-will-be-opened-in-100-years/71-545629304

(BTW, for a little fun, suppose YOU were the administrator in charge of deciding what to include in the capsule, for those future people to see and handle in 2118. So what are some things YOU would include?)

(Serious and funny answers both acceptable!)

Mumbo said

" ...I am thinking a Christmas fruit cake might be durable enough."

LOL!

Okay, how about this? A flash drive containing the complete text of all the posts ever submitted to Healingwell Prostate Cancer, in chronological order, until it finally ceased operation in 2035?

Of course in 2118 they probably won't be able to read flash drives, which became obsolete decades earlier, and the one in the capsule no longer works anyway, but they'll figure out a way to transfer the data on it to whatever fantastic medium they'll have then for such purposes.

I can even imagine some doctoral student in 2118 coming across our HWPC data and doing his thesis on "A Historical Study of the Knowledge of and Attitudes Toward Prostate Cancer of Early Twenty-First Century Men on an Interactive Web Discussion Forum of That Era."

So what we have been saying here may actually live on in academia a hundred years from now!

Really!

So, the AI robots accidentally dig up the capsule, examine it, then burst out in uncontrollable laughter.

I am an Apple guy in a Windows world myself and I have had too many floppies go bad over the years to trust any magnetic data. Same with hard drives and so on. Some say CD/DVD's have a similar problem over a long span of time if a scratch does do them in.

Another problem is obsolescence of file formats. Good luck with those old WordPerfect, ClarisWorks, MacDraw, Lotus 123 files. On the other hand, government agencies and the military are probably still running those systems and software so that part makes sense.

Way too many software platforms have come and gone for me to trust much over the long haul. I wonder what happened to all the Zip drives and assorted backup tapes that are not in use anymore?