About
Time Capsule is part of The Book of Lives — a project built around a single observation: humans have always tried to send memory forward in time. Mesopotamian builders left inscriptions in foundations. Egyptian priests placed personal texts in tombs. StoryCorps filled booths in shopping malls to record ordinary voices for the Library of Congress.
We are the latest iteration of that same instinct. The form is contemporary — a web app, cryptographic time-locking, Cloudflare infrastructure — but the motivation is old: preserve what a person thought, felt, feared, and loved, with enough context that it still means something when the original moment is long gone.
The Book of Lives is being built as a two-layer platform:
Private, forward-looking. One person seals a message, photo, or recording — locked until a future date they choose. The sender is you, the recipient is your future self or someone you love.
Collective, backward-looking. A page dedicated to someone — alive or gone — where people who knew them can add the stories and memories they carry. The opposite emotional job from a capsule.
Explore Memory Pages →Future layers — questionnaire archives, family vaults, institutional exhibits, heir access, longitudinal self-comparison — are in the roadmap. The goal is a platform where a human life is documented with the care it deserves.
The questionnaire is the product. A small, deliberate set of questions produces more meaning than an open-ended dump. Curation is the work.
The value of a record grows with repetition. Answering the same questions at 25, at 35, and at 50 creates something no single session can — visible evolution.
Storage must outlast the user. This is a design constraint, not an afterthought. Cryptographic time-locking means no administrator can open a capsule early, even if they wanted to.
This is not gamified. No likes, no followers, no algorithmic feed. The tone is closer to a library than a social network.
A photograph survives; the story behind the expression in it does not. A guided questionnaire captures not just presence but meaning — what mattered, who you were, what you hoped for.
Time Capsule uses cryptographic time-locking via the drand distributed randomness network. The content of a capsule is encrypted client-side against a future drand round. The decryption key does not exist yet — it will only be generated by the drand network at the corresponding moment in time. No server can open a capsule early.
The rest runs on Cloudflare's infrastructure:
The immediate roadmap: paid plans with higher capsule limits and longer lock windows, family vaults, institutional partnerships for museums and universities, and a public collective archive where people can contribute their answers to a growing mosaic of who humans were at this moment in time.
The longer arc: something closer to what the Proust Questionnaire, StoryCorps, and 7 Billion Others were each trying to build — a curated record of ordinary human lives, preserved with the care usually reserved for the extraordinary.