Time & Perspective Quote by John F. Lehman, Jr.

A businessman talking like a futurist is never just narrating progress; he’s selling a horizon. Lehman’s line turns archaeology - a field usually associated with dusty trenches and slow scholarship - into something sleek, infrastructural, and investment-ready. “Opening up” is the phrase of markets and frontiers, not museums. It frames discovery as access: a door unlocked, a pipeline built, a territory made legible. The “enormous new era” promise carries that familiar late-20th-century confidence that technology doesn’t merely assist knowledge; it redraws the map of what counts as knowable.

“Time capsules in the deep oceans” is the masterstroke. It compresses romance and authority into six words: the ocean as a vault, the past as intact, waiting, almost curated for us. The metaphor flatters the listener into believing history is a recoverable asset rather than a contested record. It also sidesteps messier questions - whose history, recovered by whom, for what purpose - by implying the sea keeps neutral archives.

Context matters: deep-ocean exploration has long been tethered to military, commercial, and energy ambitions, from sonar and submersibles to salvage rights and undersea resources. By dressing that apparatus in the language of archaeology, Lehman performs a reputational upgrade: extraction becomes stewardship, expansion becomes preservation. The intent is optimistic, but the subtext is power - whoever can reach the deep can narrate it.