By: Trump Vang

Think about a time when you were younger. Was it at home playing with toys? Being at school with your friends? Taking a late night walk? All of these things are brought back through your memories. Through the bad, the good and the strange they are a part of you and make you who you are today. It’s inevitable that you’ll forget events and things every once and a while; you’re not going to remember everything that happens in your life.

Now imagine that you wanted future generations to learn and know these important parts of your life. Imagine that you have to place your memories in a physical box to be locked away. Now this is what many call Time Capsules.

Time Capsules are essentially mini libraries of goods or information from the past. They don’t take much to make, with only a container with meaningful and relevant objects inside. They tell us a lot of information about the past and about how people lived, their cultures, social norms, etc. The information is limited but broad which makes it valuable.

Many may think of time capsules as boxes that you bury beneath the ground, though they can be, and mean much more than that. One example of this notion are the space crafts known as Voyager 1 & Voyager 2. These spacecraft are specially fitted with a gramophone record used to depict culture here on Earth to extraterrestrials. Anything from music to images and greetings are included on the spacecraft. As time capsules they show a time period of Earth and its own cultures and social norms.

Time Capsules can really be anything as long as they preserve the stories of those from the past. They are important to learn about the past and its path to who and where we are today. While history can be left out to wither, keeping it in preservation is integral. Time Capsules do an amazing job at this, preserving items until they can be maintained in a proper place, such as a museum. Without them, we wouldn’t have as much information in history as we do today; a lot of information is lost to time, and simply keeping it will perpetuate those important values. That is the importance of Time Capsules.