A giant steel facility, located in Tasmania, will be filled with hard drives powered by solar panels to record the apocalypse or end of the world as we know it, in case some future society could one day reconstruct what happened to our planet in the event of humanity’s demise.
The apocalypse or collapse of humanity and the Earth may be recorded so that future civilizations can reconstruct the history of our end: the Earth’s Black Box project includes the installation of a gigantic structure to be located in Tasmania, with technology designed to record events and information that will ensure the safety of the material into the future.
The huge steel box will include a large number of hard disks that will be supported by solar energy panels: these disks will contain scientific information updated in real time on the issues that may mark the apocalypse or the end of the human experience on Earth. Analyses and data on the evolution of climate change, the disappearance of species, environmental pollution or the impact of these factors on the health of humanity and the planet will be “eternalized” in this black box.
The apocalypse documented and recorded
The Earth’s Black Box project is a collaboration between marketing agency Clemenger BBDO, creative agency The Glue Society and researchers at the University of Tasmania. According to an article published in Science Alert, the infrastructure will be completed in early 2022, but the basic systems are already partially active. According to project managers, environmental updates and other data are already being “recorded live” as part of a test version of the device.
The choice of Tasmania, a remote island state off the southern coast of Australia, has to do with its geological and geopolitical stability: it would be an area supposedly less affected in the event of a global environmental catastrophe or an international political-military crisis. The creators of this “time capsule” believe that the steel box will be safer there than in other sites previously considered, such as Malta, Norway or Qatar.
Data documenting the end of humanity would be preserved there, so that other societies could hypothetically “reconstruct” those events in the future. The concept is directly related to the black boxes used in aviation, which make it possible to preserve the last moments before a plane crash, in order to discover what caused the plane to fall.
An “alarm” to stop the inevitable?
Another article published in abc.net reports that the steel box will have Internet connectivity, and that in addition to being powered by solar panels located on the roof of the structure it will also include batteries, which will provide backup power. In addition, it will have an algorithm that will gather material related to climate change extracted from the Internet.
At the same time, its creators argue that this box intended to record the last moments of humanity can function as an “alarm” so that leaders and decision-makers can change the course of events before the apocalypse becomes impossible to stop. These are extremely urgent measures, if we take into account the worrying rates related to global warming and other environmental aspects, to indicate only one facet of those that should concern us.
In short, the Earth’s Black Box will record every step we take towards a global catastrophe. Huge data sets, measurements and interactions related to the health of our planet will be continuously collected and securely stored and made available for future generations.
Photo: the black box will be built in a region that the developers consider to be extremely geologically and politically stable, specifically Tasmania. Credit: Earth’s Black Box.