Climate Change Data Will Be Recorded in a City Bus-Sized Black Box Meant to Outlive Humans for Future Civilizations

Scientists have created Earth's Black Box, as big as a city bus, to record every conversation and the steps taken to combat climate change. It has storage capacities of up to 50 years and is built to be indestructible even to the climate crisis itself to outlive humans.

According to CNN, the idea behind this giant project is that future generations and civilizations will know about what happened today that led to the climate catastrophe.


Earth's Black Box Will Serve as a Rosetta Stone for Future Generations

The Earth's Black Box is still under construction and will be completed in 2022. But it is now starting to record data about climate change and how humans are doing their part in saving the planet.

Every news headline posted ad shared, and each new climate research will be recorded in the giant steel box perched on a granite plain in the Australian state of Tasmania. Its developers said that the city bus-sized black box would be indestructible to even the climate crisis itself and meant to outlive humans given its thick steel walls, battery storage, and solar panels.

"The box will act as an indestructible and independent ledger of the 'health' of our planet," Glue Society artistic director and artist Jonathan Kneebone, who is involved in the project, told CNN. "And we hope it will hold leaders to account and inspire action and reaction in the broader population."

Its hard drives have begun recording algorithm-based findings and conversations since the COP26 climate summit conducted in November this year in Glasgow, Scotland.

The University of Tasmania, communications company Clemenger BBDO, and other makers of the black box wrote that Earth's Black Box would also record every step humans take toward this catastrophe.

They added that hundreds of data sets and measurements of land and sea temperatures, ocean acidification, atmospheric carbon dioxide, species extinction, and interactions regarding Earth's health would continuously download data from the internet and safely store information for future generations.


How Can Earth's Black Box Help Fight Climate Change?

The 10mX4mX3m steel monolith situated in the remote outcrop of Tasmania has hard drives that can store between 30 to 50 years worth of climate change data. But as to whether it can help the fight climate change, Business Insider reported that its makers are not yet sure how.

Its location is chosen for geopolitical and geological stability, beating other candidates like Malta, Norway, and Qatar. Its makers said that the Tasmanian site could hold the giant black box for future civilization should a catastrophic climate crisis happen in the future that may result in the downfall of humankind.

Despite the uncertainty of its contribution in fighting climate change, its makers said that the recorded data would allow future generations to view tweets, videos, articles, and other data related to climate change today and the steps taken to fight it.

Check out more news and information on Climate Change in Science Times.

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