Seal a letter for the future
Write to someone in 2060, 2100 or 2140. Choose the year it should be opened, seal it on this device, and export a plain text copy to keep somewhere safer than a browser.
Open the time capsuleSpeculation ahead A postcard from the present
Write to 2140. Then look at the road between.
Year 2140 is a small, gentle workshop for thinking across a century. Seal a letter for readers who have not been born yet, slide along a timeline from today to 2140, and flip through futures that are always labelled for what they are: imagination, offered with care.
No sign-up, no tracking, no server. Your letters stay in this browser until you export them.
2026. The edge of the map, today.
Open this year on the full timelineStart anywhere
Three ways into the next hundred and fourteen years
Each page is its own postcard. None of them needs the others, and all of them work without an account, an internet connection or a leap of faith.
Scrub from today to 2140
Drag a sun along the century and watch the sky turn. Enter your birth year to see how old you would be and how many generations away each year sits, using a gap you can change.
Open the timelineFlip through imagined futures
Eight scenarios for the decades ahead, each stamped as speculation. Flip a card to see what would have to be true, what could go wrong, and a question to take to your own table.
Browse the futuresThe ground rules
How we keep speculation honest
Writing about 2140 is easy to do badly. So every sentence on this site wears one of three labels, and the labels never swap places.
-
Arithmetic
Things you can check
Calendar sums, ages, and generation counts. If you enter 1990 and ask about 2100, the answer is 110 years, and you can verify it with a pencil. Where an assumption hides inside (like a twenty-five-year generation), you can see it and edit it.
-
Your words
Things you decide
Letters are yours. They are stored only in this browser, they are not encrypted, and they are never sent anywhere. We say so plainly, because a time capsule that leaks is just a diary with a bad ending.
-
Speculation
Things we imagine
Scenarios about water, care, travel or trust are stories, not predictions. Each one lists what would have to be true for it to happen and what could go wrong, so you can argue with it. No numbers are invented to make a story feel real.
A fair question
Why 2140?
Because it is far enough away to be humbling and near enough to be personal. A baby born this year would be 114 in 2140: a long life, but one their grandchildren and great-grandchildren could plausibly share. Most of us will not be there. Our letters, our habits and our choices might be.
A century-and-a-bit also turns out to be a good length for thinking about generations. At twenty-five years apiece, it is a little over four and a half of them: enough for a family story to pass through several hands and still be recognised.
Better together
Ways to use this with other people
At the family table
Pick a year, set a generation gap that matches your family, and ask each person to write one line to the reader of that year. Seal the letters together. Read the exported text files aloud on the first evening of the next decade.
In the classroom
Use the timeline to show students how many generation-lengths separate them from a chosen year, then give each pair one futures card. Their task: find the weakest assumption in the story and say how it might fail.
For people who think about futures
Treat the cards as prompts rather than forecasts. Swap in your own places and needs with the prompt builder, keep the speculation label attached, and notice which sentences get easier to defend when you add “if”.
Your letter is the one thing here that is really yours.
Give it five quiet minutes. You do not have to be wise, only specific: what the kettle sounds like, who you are worried about, what you hope somebody fixed.