Time Capsule Part 3
During the whole process of designing my time capsule, I was always concerning about the life period of lithium battery, cause I want the finder of my time capsule use cameras inside the box to create more memories and pass on these. But based on technology we have now, if I bury my time capsule in 2080, and someone found it in 2090, he or she might be able to open the cameras with healthy battery. Therefore, at first, I just drew a sketch of comic happened in 2090.
It’s my first time to draw comics, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics inspired me a lot about the arrangement of each frame and expressive method of plots. In this sketch, I used closure from object to object and from scene to scene to show the character’s movements and time passing.
In the story, a man occasionally found the time capsule by its solar panel on the surface. Opening the box, he could see pictures taken by me and some instruction videos to use the cameras. In this way, he could understand how to use these without words, since language might change a lot in the future 100 years.
But it is just a bland story without character’s characteristic and mood swings. So I realized that I need to add more plots based on this sketch.
Also after I finished this sketch, I thought that in 2080, there might be some new type of batteries or new technology that could prolong the life of the camera, so that people could use it for hundreds of years.
Year 2050 was considered as a singularity when technology would develop rapidly, so I began to imagine the story in 2145.
I started with thinking about how people are like in 2145, and what they would do in their daily life. Because of environmental destruction, weather of the Earth might become worse, and people make more effort to travel to other planets. People equip with high-tech brain-computer interface chip, so they no longer need to use digital devices like phones and cameras to record their life.
So the main character is a 25-year-old man, Arlen, who is familiar with recording and learning with brain-computer interface, living in a cold city full of tall buildings and flying cars. AI robots do most of the work, and human just need to censor robots’ work.At the edge of the city, there are stations for rockets to travel in the space. With brain-computer interface, Arlen could learn everything quickly. But as a writer, Arlen runs out of ideas, because of the monotonous scene of the city.
There still some documentation of our life today in 2020 in their history museum, and Arlen has been to there. But just like what we modern people feel about people in 1900, Arlen and his contemporaries would not envy people’s life in 2020, since now we should recite a lot to learn things and our brain could not store memories as much as they could.
To find inspiration, Arlen decides to explore outside the city, and he comes across the solar panel of my time capsule in a desert. He digs out my time capsule and found pictures inside them, so he could learn more about how a common person lives in 2000s. Though we could not remember everything and not smart as people in 22 century, we still have our own sense of ritual to memorize important things. So Arlen want to write about the life in 2020 to call on to protect the environment on the Earth and keep sense of ritual, which humans value.
