Science Quickly The Digital Time Capsule That Survived Two Decades
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Nov 17, 2025 David M. Ewalt, editor-in-chief of Scientific American and former technology reporter at Forbes, revisits his unique 20-year email time capsule project. He shares how friendships and human connections kept this digital archive alive, even amid technological challenges. David discusses themes of resilience, reflecting on the project's emotional significance and the mundane yet poignant messages retrieved from the past. He also explores the deeper anthropological insights time capsules provide and the importance of storytelling in preserving our history.
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Building An Email Time Capsule
- David M. Ewalt and his team built an email time capsule at Forbes that let users schedule emails to their future selves for 1–20 years.
- They planned redundancy across three servers hosted by Forbes, Yahoo, and a single-person consultancy to hedge against failure.
Hedge With Diverse Redundancy
- When designing long-term digital systems, build redundancy across diverse organizational types.
- Hedge bets by involving media, big tech, and independent operators to reduce single-point failures.
Layoffs Forced Manual Delivery
- Yahoo laid off the staff who knew about the project less than a year in, so the team began sending scheduled emails manually.
- The manual workaround continued at subsequent anniversaries until an automated script handled sending.
