Scientists are planning to place a ‘Black Box’ in Tasmania in Australia to record global warming patterns and gather information about how the world is trying to fight climate change. If our civilization does crash, this black box will tell future generations how and why we failed to fight climate change. In an optimistic scenario, this black box will simply remind us all that we must be accountable for global warming.
The 33-foot-long box constructed from steel will be placed in a remote area in Tasmania where it will record global warming patterns to create a dataset that future generations can study. However, according to the Executive Creative Director of an Australian advertising agency working on the project, aside from the objective of saving data for future civilizations, the box intends “to hold our leaders to account.”
The inventors of the project commented on their official website that the system will collect and save hundreds of data sets, measurements, and indicators that are linked to the health of the planet, providing unbiased information about the events leading to climate catastrophe.
The inventors noted, “Unless we dramatically transform our way of life, climate change and other man-made perils will cause our civilization to crash.” They then added, “How the story ends is completely up to us. Only one thing is certain, your actions, inactions, and interactions are now being recorded.”
Broadly speaking, the steel structure is designed to collect and save two types of data. Firstly, it will gather data on land and sea temperatures, levels of atmospheric CO2, and ocean acidification. Furthermore, it will collate information about the extinction of species and land-use changes as well as recording indicators related to human population growth, military spending, and energy consumption. Secondly, the box will gather contextual data, for instance, newspaper headlines, social media posts, and updates on important climate-related events such as the Conference of the Parties (COP).
While the box itself is still under construction, and the creators plan to place it in Tasmania in 2022, the hard drives of the system started to collect data following the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland. The developers can currently guarantee that the capacity of the system will be sufficient to collect and save data for the next three to five decades. However, scientists say they hope to find solutions that will enable the system’s storage capacity to be increased. Besides the storage issues, there are still many other unanswered questions regarding this project, with one of the main issues being related to decoding since scientists need to understand how future generations would be able to decipher the information should they access the system.
For now, anyone with a connection can simply check what the Earth’s Black Box is recording. Those who visit the black box on-site will be able to connect using Wi-Fi to check the data and scientists will ensure that Wi-Fi will be available even if the internet no longer exists in the future.
