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G8 Climate Change Time Capsule Contest
by David Sassoon - Jul 11th, 2008
AFP has put this ironic headline out on its newswires: G8 Buries Climate Pledges - in Time Capsule. Turns out that the Windsor Hotel Toya where the G8 leaders just met is sinking $1.4 million in the greenwash gimmick to lure tourists to the remote northern resort.
They're building a park to house a monument of a melting chunk of ice and the time capsule, which is slated to be opened in 100 years.A hotel spokesman said:
We hope to confirm that the summit will have been remembered for 100 years as a key conference on climate change.
Fat chance.
The summit was welcome and notable mainly for being the last Bush would attend, and it is now being remembered for how he took his leave. Bush said:
Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter.
Good riddance.
Otherwise the summit is already being forgotten for its inconsequential outcomes, so the hotel's project is already an awful waste of money and, um, time. Plans call for the capsule to include a list of all hotel staff participating in the summit, along with those of police and foreign ministry officials working behind the scenes. Boy will their descendants be proud!
Hotel owners clearly never read about William Jarvis on Wikipedia, who makes his living as a historian of time capsules, of all things. He's arrived at the professional conclusion that time capsules are typically filled with "useless junk."
Jarvis is a founder of the ITCS -- the International Time Capsule Society -- which estimates there are between 10,000 to 15,000 time capsules worldwide. Yet the whereabouts of most of these time capsules are presently not known.
Maybe the monument is an appropriate commemoration of the summit after all -- full of junk that will be lost to history.
How about we make a list of all the things that really should go in the time capsule, but won't? Like, say, maybe a lump of clean coal?
Any other suggestions?
The first and only prize is cyber-immortality.
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Petroleum products
The hotel would have to build a massive structure to do this, but how about a "museum" of all the things that are made of petroleum across the world (like really valuable plastic bags or trade show trinkets). And, of course, some of the things that we burn up valuable petroleum in (such as an inefficient diesel generator, a H3 (hummer), etc).
100 years from now, if ever found and if human society is still strong/connected enough to care, our descendents will open this open and regard it with disgust, about how we inefficiently burned up and used for trash products such a valuable commodity. And, how in the process, we trashed the planet.
Blogging regularly at Get Energy Smart! NOW!!! for a Sustainable Future.
Why Wait?
Brilliant. A fossil fool museum. Something we should open now, the heck with the time capsule.
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