It takes a special sort of villainy to steal a time capsule, hoarding for yourself alone what was intended to be a gift from one generation to another.
It is practically impossible for an individual to make a time capsule that is up to the job. Few artefacts from everyday life can be expected to survive the passage of time:
Even if you did remove the acid from the wood and paper, the sulphur from rubber and pack the whole lot in a nitrogen rich atmosphere, welded tight inside a stainless steel box, how is someone going to open the box in a few centuries on from now? If it could be opened easily then it would not survive the passage of time, if it was fully welded stainless steel then it might survive the passage of time and not be opened due to the required effort.
If they did get in, would that newspaper that some well meaning child put in there be of any more value than the version of that same paper held in libraries?
Some time capsules must be quite a testimony to vanity, no more so than with Scientology. They have all of their founder's writings transcribed onto millions of stainless steel disks and stored in a mountainside vault. This vault is then made so that its location can be 'seen from space'. Handy for passing space tourists wanting to brush up on 'Dianetics'.
