January 13, 2000

Letter for Capsule openers in 2099:

Our Millennium Time Capsule Committee was selected by Livermore Mayor Cathie Brown to represent various groups in Livermore. We have people from the school district, Livermore Area Recreation & Park District, Chabot-Las Positas College District, Chamber of Commerce, Livermore Cultural Arts Council, Livermore Heritage Guild, City staff, Sandia National Lab/California, and Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

Livermore is in the midst of rapid growth in both residential and commercial development. Local government, involved citizens, and the wineries have cooperated to preserve and expand the historic viticultural region south of town. We hope this continues to your time.

We publicized the project early in the year hoping to receive many suggestions as to items for the capsule, and then narrow the ideas down to fit the space. But we didn't get many original suggestions and mostly put items in from committee members' ideas.

To make the project more interesting, we created an essay contest in the local schools, with monetary awards provided by Sandia, which generated 18 essays from six schools. These represented a good cross section of ages and theories, so their inclusion is one of the highlights of the entire project.

As you can see by the contents list we concentrated on local artifacts and articles, not trying to cover the state or nation, except for the Time magazine and TV Guide, which offered a broader perspective. Much of the material is on paper, probably strange to you since a paperless society seems assured in the next century. We have only experienced computers in our personal lives for about the past decade, so by habit still rely on paper as the principal means of communication. The newsletters offer some insight into the organizations and agencies prominent in Livermore civic, political and cultural life today. And the personal letters from the mayor, police chief, fire chief, LLNL's pre-eminent scientist, and a typical resident of the community hopefully provide you with a flavor for life in our time. If the CD technology holds up, you will see some CID videos of the city council and downtown Livermore, as well as public art. The color and duplicate black & white photos are meant to provide glimpses of Livermore in 1999 that may not appear in other historical files.

The stainless steel container, designed originally to store Russian nuclear weapon fissile material, should protect the contents, but we have little experience with preserving such a diverse mixture of materials as are crowded into this space. If you should decide to create a Time Capsule for the following century, you will have the results of our experiment to guide you in what types of materials hold up over time. It will also be interesting for you to sample the Port wine and find out how it weathered 100 yews underground. But by the time you open the capsule, it may have been relocated more than once and could even be housed above ground in a museum or public building for the last half century.

It is our hope that Democracy will have survived another century and that you live in peace and harmony with your neighbors around the world, maybe even among several worlds, if interplanetary travel has become possible and other intelligent life discovered beyond our solar system. So please enjoy our effort at preserving a little piece of Livermore today for you tomorrow and consider passing some artifacts and memorabilia of your time on to future generations in the 22nd century.

Cheers!

Tim Sage, chair and the following members of the Time Capsule Committee: Mayor Cathie Brown, Kris Adams, Steve Wofford, Phil Dean, Barry Schrader, Diane Daniel, Bob Bronzan, Patricia Davis