The design of a time capsule is above all else a task of cross-cultural communication. Until very recently, ethnography, linguistics, and social psychology simp

The design of a time capsule is above all else a task of cross-cultural communication. Until very recently, ethnography, linguistics, and social psychology simply didn't exist as formal disciplines. Prior to the 20th century, questions like "What are people in the future going to look for when trying to understand this?" could have only been answered by random guessing, if indeed such questions were even being asked in the first place. Today, there are mountains of literature and research into those topics. That's not even remotely comparable.