The Digital Time Capsule That Survived Two Decades

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.3 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 17 November 2025

⏱️ 13 minutes

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Summary

Our editor in chief David M. Ewalt revisits a remarkable 20-year experiment: an e-mail time capsule designed to deliver digital messages from the past into the future. What began as a tech project at Forbes evolved into a story of human connection—proving that sometimes it’s friendship, not servers, that keeps information alive across decades. Recommended Reading The Unlikely Story of an E-mail Time Machine E-mail us at [email protected] if you have any questions, comments or ideas for stories we should cover! Discover something new every day: subscribe to Scientific American and sign up for Today in Science, our daily newsletter. Science Quickly is produced by Kendra Pierre-Louis, Fonda Mwangi and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check the show. The theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. This episode was made possible by the support of Yakult and produced independently by Scientific American’s board of editors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:22.8	entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Kendra Pura Lewis, in for Rachel Feltman.
0:50.3	Hey listeners, normally we would do our Monday News Roundup, but today we have something special for you.
0:58.1	How do you send a digital message from the past well into the future?
1:01.8	A message that arrives not just a year from now, but three years. Or 20.
1:06.2	It's a question David Ewalt, Scientific American's editor-in-chief, was tasked with tackling long ago,
1:11.3	where he was forced to look at memory, human connection, and technology in a way that asked
1:15.7	deeper questions about how we preserve information in the digital age and what it means to come
1:20.5	into contact with our past selves.
1:22.2	Hi, David.
1:24.0	Hi, it's nice to join you.
1:25.8	Can you tell us, David, a little bit about that 20-year project chronicled for Siam?
1:30.7	Yeah, this is a project I started when I was working for a totally different place and got
1:35.7	assigned the idea of how can we build a digital time capsule, not something that goes in the
1:41.3	ground, but something that is saved in digital format. And we came up with the idea of building an email time capsule.
1:47.3	And for my entire career, it's always been kind of something running in the background.
1:51.5	And now I'm excited that I was editor-in-chief of Scientific American, I get to explore this idea in more detail.
1:57.2	I've got a piece about sort of this journey.
1:59.5	And we've also built up a handful of other
	...

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