When a commercial flight has an accident, authorities discover precisely what happened by recovering and listening to the black box. This device records the airplane's information and enables them to reconstruct the sequence of events before the crash.
This year, our planet will also have one of these disaster recorders. Earth's black box will store evidence of climate change and what was done or not to avoid it.
Earth's Black Box
If climate change destroys humanity, how will we know it has happened? To answer this question, Australian scientists will build a steel monolith 32 feet (9.75 meters) long to capture Earth data.
It will contain hard drives that will constantly document climate change to give an unbiased account of events that lead to our planet's destruction. In the event of a climate apocalypse, the device will provide a record of how humanity failed to avoid the disaster, as long as there is someone or something around in the future to access it.
The ambitious project, Earth's Black Box, is led by Australian marketing firm Clemenger BBDO in collaboration with experts from the University of Tasmania. According to the firm's national head of production, Sonia von Bibra, the construction of the monolith will start and finish later this year. The project was originally announced in December 2021, with the construction supposed to begin the following year, but the plans have been delayed.
While the exact location of the box is not yet specified, it will be situated about four hours away from Hobart city in Tasmania, near the western coast between Queenstown and Strahan. Artistic renderings compare the Earth's Black Box to the black monolith in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 epic movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Although the actual monolith will not be black, experts expect it to resemble the black box in aviation. The top of the device will be installed with solar panels to serve as a power source. Solar energy will power the download of scientific data, such as sea levels and temperatures, atmospheric carbon dioxide, ocean acidification, species extinction, and land-use changes in different locations worldwide. Meanwhile, an algorithm will gather climate-change-related material from the internet, such as newspaper headlines and social media posts.
Accessing the Black Box
Experts are still working out how any human would be able to access the data after a catastrophic climate apocalypse in the future. It is possible that a small group of survivors would learn more about the fall of human civilization due to catastrophic fires, drought, and flooding.
On the other hand, it can also teach alien beings from distant planets about the fate of our species in the event that they reach Earth one day. According to the developers of the black box, anyone who encounters the device will need to be able to understand and interpret basic symbolism.
Earth's Black Box is expected to have enough capacity to store data for the next three to five decades, a key period for humanity's quest to contain climate change. Once active, it will record backwards and forwards to obtain data dated months before it was switched on. If the box has entered a long-term dormant state as a result of catastrophe, an electronic reader can reactivate it.
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