This is not a sculpture: In the Earth’s Black Box, the legacy of humanity is supposed to outlast the climate crisis.
Photo: Imago Images
If the earth warms well over two degrees Celsius in the coming decades, climate change could become a “sure-fire success”. The “worst-case scenarios” that could ultimately end in the apocalypse include crop failures and the collapse of the food networks in the ocean. International logistics chains could collapse, and millions of people could be displaced by rising sea levels.
Should global warming actually herald the end of mankind, the ultimate evidence for posterity – whatever it looks like or where it came from – should be preserved, according to the will of Australian researchers. You are planning a so-called Earth’s Black Box, a black box for the world. The concept is similar to that of the global seed bank in Svalbard, Norway, where the seeds stored there are supposed to bring extinct plant species back to life in an emergency. The black box planned in Australia is also intended to outlast catastrophic events, record insights into human civilization and become an archive for the climate crisis.
The black box is designed as a ten-meter-high, four-meter-long and three-meter-wide structure made of thick steel, which is to be built on a remote rocky outcrop on Tasmania’s west coast, around four hours from the capital Hobart.
The Australian island was chosen for its relative geopolitical as well as geological stability. It is relatively safe from natural disasters and, according to a British study published by researchers in the journal »Bioscience« at the end of July, is one of those places, along with New Zealand and Great Britain, where the end of our civilization as we know it could be survived .
Although the design of the black box resembles a sculpture, according to Jim Curtis of the marketing agency Clemenger BBDO it purely follows the guiding principle of functionality. Curtis is working on the project with researchers from the University of Tasmania. “First and foremost, it is a tool,” he said in an interview with the Australian broadcaster ABC. This was specially developed to record the actions of mankind. The box will be filled with a lot of storage drives and have an internet connection. Solar collectors on the roof of the structure will provide the necessary energy so that the steel structure could survive a collapse of the power networks.
Batteries store the energy and while the sun is shining, the black box downloads scientific data. The data collected include, for example, air and sea temperature, ocean acidification, the CO2 level in the atmosphere and species extinction. An algorithm also collects material on climate change – including newspaper articles, social media posts and news from important events such as the climate summit in Glasgow.
Construction of the structure is slated to begin in the middle of this year, but data and information are already being archived. The developers assume that there will be sufficient capacity to store data for the next 30 to 50 years.
Behind the black box is the idea of creating an “indestructible recording device” – a kind of data storage device – for all those who survive a collapse of the earth due to climate change, explained Curtis. “But it is also there to hold heads of government accountable – to ensure that their actions or inaction are recorded.”
Whether, of course, those who might find the black box in the distant future will actually recognize it as such, access the stored data and understand it – that is a question that the developers themselves are still “puzzling about «.
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