Every time new weather research is published, news headlines are posted or tweets are shared, and a giant steel box mounted on a granite platform in Australia will record it all.
With its thick steel walls, battery storage and solar panels, the developers of the “Black Earth Box” say the city bus-sized structure will be indestructible for the climate crisis itself and must survive humans.
Eventually, its creators hope, the black box will tell future civilizations how humanity created the climate crisis and how we failed or succeeded in meeting it.
“The box will function as an indestructible and independent record of the ‘health’ of our planet,” Jonathan Kneebone, artist and director of the art collective Glue Society, which is involved with the project, told CNN. “And we hope it holds leaders accountable and inspires action and reactions in the general population.”
While construction on the box isn’t complete until next year, hard drives have already started recording algorithmically-based discoveries and debates since COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, in November.
“The ‘Black Box of the Earth’ will record every step we take towards this catastrophe,” write the project’s creators, including researchers at the University of Tasmania and marketing communications company Clemenger BBDO.
“Hundreds of databases, measurements and interactions related to the health of our planet will be continuously collected and safely stored for future generations.”
The steel monolith will document all past, present and future climate-related conversations and artifacts, including changes in Earth and sea temperature, ocean acidification, amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, human population, energy consumption, military spending, policy changes and more.
According to its manufacturers, the box will come packed with storage drives and will constantly download scientific data from the internet, which will be powered by solar panels and the structure’s storage battery.
Developers estimate that the black box has the capacity to store enough data for the next three to five decades and are continuing their research to increase their storage capabilities beyond archiving and data compression.
Kneebone said the creators are still trying to figure out who would be able to use the box in the distant future, as access to it was designed to be difficult and would require advanced technology.
Much like the Rosetta Stone, he said, they plan to use various encoding formats, including mathematical symbolism for their long-term analog inscriptions on steel plates, which would include instructions needed to decode the box by anyone who discovers it.
“It’s impossible to predict who or what will find [a caixa], but it can be assumed that it will be of no use unless discovered by someone or something intelligent and civilized, with the ability to understand and interpret basic symbolism,” he said.
Younger generations can benefit from the project by using it to find solutions as they are the most threatened by future climate-changing disasters such as landscape-altering forest fires, historic droughts, scorching heat waves and floods mortals that continue to get worse every year.
“It’s a very creative way of approaching what is potentially the most disastrous outcome of the climate crisis, essentially creating this ‘doomsday vault’ for data [climáticos]”, Vladislav Kaim, a young climate activist from Moldova, told the CNN.
A recent Climate Action Tracker analysis warned that under current policies – not proposed, but what countries are actually doing – the world is on a path to 2.7°C warming above pre-industrial levels. Scientists said the planet should stay below 1.5°C to avoid the worst consequences of the climate crisis.
Black box developers say it can hold politicians and corporate leaders accountable for the way they tackle climate change.
“For me, this shows the extent to which there is no consistency in the climate space to trust politicians in anything they say,” said Kaim. “It sends a very strong message that the real black box here is in the minds of politicians who had all the necessary levers to avert catastrophe but decided to keep passing the buck until it was too late.”
Once the black box is activated, the climate data library will be accessible through an online platform. Visitors will also be able to connect wirelessly to the box, which will be located in a remote location between Strahan and Queenstown, Tasmania.
“We are exploring the possibility of including an electronic reader that remains inside the box and will activate after exposure to sunlight, also reactivating the box if it has gone into a long-term dormant state as a result of the catastrophe,” Kneebone said.
As the climate crisis persists, the box may provide a blueprint for a solution many years from now.
“How the story ends is totally up to us,” the developers write. “Only one thing is certain: your actions, omissions and interactions are now being recorded.”
Reference: CNN Brasil
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