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Earth Is Getting an Indestructible Black Box to Document Its Own Destruction

How do you like your morning cup of coffee with a bit of doomsday indulgence? This story could be it: the Earth is getting a black box because it’s doomed, and the only thing left for us to do is record the exact way in which it’s being destroyed.
The Earth Black Box will go up in Australia in 2022, is already recording data about the demise of our planet 16 photos
Photo: Earth Black Box
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We already know – in the sense that we’ve been informed of it repeatedly – that things will be bad for us in the following years, if we don’t make significant changes to our current lifestyle. The next century will see a rise in temperature of 2.7 degrees Celsius (36.8 Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial levels, and that will spell the beginning of the end for our planet.

If you’re in a more somber mood, you could argue that the beginning of the end started a while back; it just took longer to resonate with us. In this sense, the news that a black box for our planet will be built next year in Tasmania, in a remote location between Strahan and Queenstown, should probably come as no surprise.

Earth Black Box is based on the idea of black boxes in airplanes, which record everything that happens on board and offer insight into what went wrong in case of an accident. Like its smaller counterpart, it will record all sorts of data and then store it, in the hope that future generations or whoever comes next will find it, decipher it and use it to learn from our mistakes.

The concept is a non-commercial study involving a team of researchers from the University of Tasmania, communications firm Clemenger BBDO, and art collective Glue Society. The black box itself, an angular 10x4x3-meter (32.8x13x9.8-foot) steel monolith, will go into construction in the first part of next year and be delivered later in 2022. However, data recording has already begun, ABC News Australia reports.

The idea is simple: since we’re pretty much done for, we might as well make one last attempt to record our road to damnation. The most optimist scenario for the Black Box is that it will help with accountability, because people tend to behave better when they know they’re being watched. In other words, political leaders and public figures, and even regular folks, will change their behavior in time for the crisis to be averted. In this case, the data will be of use for future generations, to study and learn how not to behave.

Two different types of data will be collected and stored inside the monolith. On one hand, it will collect climate-change-related data like land and sea temperature measurements, species extinction, energy consumption, human population, ocean acidification, and atmospheric CO2 levels. On the other, it will collect contextual data, like newspaper headlines and trending stories, key news stories and social media posts. The data will be recorded backward and forward, with the goal of offering a complete picture of what has happened from the moment it went online until it stopped recording.

The Black Box has solar panels on the roof and battery packs, internet connection, and walls of steel as thick as 7.5-cm (2.9-inch), making it indestructible. The moment the solar panels are destroyed – like, say, in case of a catastrophic event – is the moment the black box stops recording; but whoever discovers it later will have an exact picture of what happened until the final moments. Our contemporaries won’t be able to just drop by and break in to destroy or corrupt the data, because Black Box records footage in the surrounding area as well.

“First and foremost, it’s a tool,” Jim Curtis from Clemenger BBDO tells the media outlet. As a tool, it can function to enhance accountability, by documenting what was done and what wasn’t done on certain issues, he adds.

The project doesn’t take into account the issue of future compatibility in order to access the data, but researchers do say that whoever finds it will have a big puzzle to solve, starting with getting inside the thing. They’re also toying with the idea of shooting the vast amount of data into space, providing an account of life on Earth – and the implicit demise of it – to alien populations.

Given the involvement of the art collective, there’s a certain artistic aspect to Earth Black Box, like it should be some form of social and political commentary. The way in which it was designed, cantilevered on granite and offering a brutal contrast to the surrounding environment, does point in that direction as well. If the Black Box is also an oversize art installation, the people behind it are not saying.

“The purpose of the device is to provide an unbiased account of the events that lead to the demise of the planet, hold accountability for future generations, and inspire urgent action,” the official website reads. “How the story ends is completely up to us.”

It does seem though as if they’d already decided the future of the planet. And it’s the worst.
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Editor's note: Photos in the gallery show the mysterious monoliths popping up in remote locations in 2020, another intriguing art instalation.

About the author: Elena Gorgan
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Elena has been writing for a living since 2006 and, as a journalist, she has put her double major in English and Spanish to good use. She covers automotive and mobility topics like cars and bicycles, and she always knows the shows worth watching on Netflix and friends.
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