What is the Black Box of the Earth? It is an apocalyptic building under the motto “Prepare for the impact” that will be located near the western coast of Tasmania, about four hours from Hobart, It will capture scientific data on temperature, sea levels and atmospheric CO2, as well as news headlines and social media posts.
The construction, located on the island of Tasmania, has an irregular structure and is approximately the size of a bus and will act as an independent and indestructible witness of the “health of the planet”. Made of reinforced steel 76 millimeters thick and 10 meters long , it will withstand the effects of fire or water. This material has been chosen precisely for its hardness and resistance in general. The top of the Earth Black Box will have solar panels that will generate power to power the device’s equipment, including high-capacity hard drives and other sophisticated communication equipment for wireless connection and data exchange.
A disaster recorder
Its objective? That humans who survive the blows of climate change can access their data after a climate apocalypse, carefully recording each step on the way to the disappearance of our planet. Hence this nod to the name of the installation, in reference to the usual practice in the world of aviation (with a mechanism that automatically records important details of the flight such as altitude, elapsed time, airspeed or equipment operation ).
“Earth’s black box will record every step we take toward this catastrophe. Hundreds of data sets, measurements, and interactions related to the health of our planet will be collected and safely stored for future generations,” reads the website of the project, which is expected to be underway in the first half of 2022.
The COP26 conference held in 2021 in Glasgow, for example, is already part of the recordings of this Black Box.
What will remain if human civilization collapses
Managed by the University of Tasmania, Clemenger BBDO and creative agency Glue Society, the idea for this record on hard drives that will include any social media post about climate change, documenting ocean acidification, the amount of greenhouse gases greenhouse in the atmosphere, the human population, energy consumption, military spending, policy changes and everything that may be related to climate change thanks to a specialized algorithm, will try to help future generations to avoid the mistakes made By humans.
This mysterious monolith located in the middle of nowhere (a place chosen for its “geopolitical and geological stability” ahead of other candidates such as Malta, Norway and Qatar), has the capacity to store enough data for the next three to five decades, and continue their research to increase their storage capabilities beyond history archiving and data compression.
But how will future humans access it?
This is still a work to be done. Its creators know that accessing the “Black Box of Earth” is not easy, since it is designed precisely to be a challenge to open and would require advanced technologies. The monolith, like a new Rosetta Stone, will use multiple encoding formats, including mathematical symbolism, for its long-term analog steel plate inscriptions, which would include the necessary instructions to decode the box by whoever sees it. discover. Whoever it.
So how the story ends will depend entirely on us.
Recall that the latest report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that, under current scenarios, the planet would probably reach the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2040 . We hope that this project contributes to increasing the “climate alarm” in the face of worrying rates related to global warming and other environmental aspects because, for the time being, we are not close to meeting the objectives of the Paris Agreement to limit climate change.
Referencia: Earth’s Black Box Project
