The project aims to create the "time capsule of our era",[2] letting anyone participate by allowing them to submit texts and images.

[1] Circa 2008, Kunze read Alan Weisman's nonfiction work The World Without Us, which included the claim that ceramic objects had the greatest chance to survive into the future.

[1] In 2012, the Memory of Mankind started with the first tablet, which had a greeting to future finders, an explanation about the project, and a date expressed in terms of astronomical events.

[1] The primary ambition of MOM is to preserve an image of the current era, created by numerous participants from all over the planet.

In times where climate change and nuclear danger threaten the existence of civilization, saving the core knowledge and culture acquired over centuries is a backup measure.

Several factors contribute to its suitability for the MOM archives: as well as the depth and relative stability of the mine, the salt absorbs moisture and dries the air, and it has a natural plasticity that helps to seal cracks and fractures, keeping the caverns watertight.

These modern variants are made of a ceramic material that is capable of preserving the information that they contain, as it is less vulnerable to corrosion, biological degradation, and ordinary weathering, and lasts for a longer time than other materials that have been used to record information—it resists temperatures of up to 1,200 °C (2,200 °F), chemicals, water, radiation, magnetism and pressure, and can "only be destroyed by a hammer" (even if a tablet breaks, information will not disappear).

They designed their own "Rosetta Stone", translated into several languages with the appropriate character set and number system, an astronomical time indicating "2013" (via extremely rare events of simultaneous transits of Mercury and Venus), and thousands of images depicting concrete situations with the corresponding words, completed by the theoretical volumes of the main languages, e.g., phrases, grammar, thesauruses, and orthography.

Due to the design of MOM and the token, the archive can only be retrieved by a society with a similar technical and physical understanding of the world to modern-era humans.

An instruction for a rite is attached to this token: the owners are supposed to gather every 50 years to commemorate and decide whether humanity still knows the content of MOM and if extensions are needed.

MOM is a global project: in order to enable citizens of every country to represent themselves, the price of the tablets varies based on the donor's gross national income per capita-ranking table of the World Bank.