New Take on Time Capsule

Earth Capsule (earthcapsule.com), will also upload music, images or documents at $1.95 for the first megabyte, $1 for each additional megabyte. And a portion of each fee can be allotted to charities that are partnering with Earth Capsule. Whether this ultimately works remains to be seen.

Earth Capsule has been ‘‘doubling our customer base every couple of days,’’ said Jason Ressler, one of the founding partners, but he acknowledged that after only a month ‘‘this is not saying much.’’ Still, Earth Capsule offers immortality on the cheap, which, as theologians have known for many years, is hard to turn down. ‘‘People like to save things,’’ Ressler said in a telephone interview. ‘‘We felt like the best way to preserve stuff was to use the Internet. The Web has socialised communications in terms of news, and we wanted to it in terms of history.’’

Ressler and co-founder Evan Strome, both 35, are New York-based writers and filmmakers. Ashley Rindsberg, the third member of the triumvirate, is the 24-year-old electronics wiz who put the website together and figured out the technology. Earth Capsule uses ‘‘HD-ROM’’ metal disks to store microprinted information that can be read with a magnifying glass. It is somewhat low-tech in today’s terms, ‘‘like a supermicrofiche,’’ Ressler said, but the disks ‘‘are able to preserve stuff for 1,000 years,’’ which is what Earth Capsule is after. Ressler said the company plans to collect uploads for a year, then send them to repositories in cities around the world, or pack them in aluminum canisters and drop them in Lake Nicaragua, the middle of the Indian Ocean and 42 other bodies of water, your choice.

By the time this happens, Earth Capsule hopes to have trust agreements with organisations in all the repository cities. The company is contacting historical societies, consulates, city halls and other groups to set up the infrastructure. The idea is that these entities, supervised by a board of trustees set up by Earth Capsule, will sit on the information for 50 years, then open it up.

The early clientele includes a lot of young people, such as the 18-year-old Singaporean who urged friends on her blog to file to Earth Capsule: ‘‘So cool, right … imagine yourself writing a message about yourself in the present … and read it 50 years later again. It will be so funny and memorable.’’ Maybe for her, but for others who can do the math, posterity is the ultimate audience. They may hate your stuff now, but in 50 years it’ll be going crazy at Barnes & Noble.

(Guy Gugliotta)