Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The box, a block of steel and granite, will be filled with hard drives to record everything we say until our civilization collapses, so that future civilizations can learn from those our mistake.
Earth is getting a black box to record our climate change actions, and it’s already starting to listen
Science ABC / According to the environmental reporter Nick Kilvert
On a granite plain, surrounded by jagged mountains, was a giant steel box.
Unlikely in the landscape, like the black rock of 2001’s Kubrick infamous: A Space Odyssey, the alien presence suggests it was purposefully placed there.
And if its discoverers can decipher the messages it contains, they may know what caused the collapse of the previous civilization.
This is Earth’s Black Box.
‘First and foremost, it’s a tool’
When a plane crashes, it’s up to investigators to sift through debris to recover the black boxes.
It is hoped the recorded contents can be used to help others avoid a similar fate.
And so it is with Earth’s Black Box: a 10m x 4m x 3m steel monolith about to be built on a remote outcrop on the west coast of Tasmania.
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If that doesn’t sound right, remember we’re on the right track now 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming this century.
Ask any climate scientist what happens when warming breaks 2C, and they’ll almost always tell you it’s not worth thinking about.
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Those who discovered the black box – now rust-colored, its solar panels long dead – had no frame of reference for what they found inside or how to decipher it.
So how about now?
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Getting access to the inside of the box through its 3-inch thick steel shell will require a certain amount of ingenuity.
The developers assume that anyone with the ability should be able to interpret the basic symbols.
“Like Rosetta Stone, we will be using multiple encoding formats,” they said.
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Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-12-06/climate-change-earth-black-box-recorder/100621778
Tasmania, despite its remote location, is an interesting place. Tasmania has a lot of good wine and food, a delicious native honey, tribes of extreme environmentalists rarely leave their campsites deep in the woods, and a very powerful hallucinogenic mushroom Grows only in Tasmania.
And now Tasmania will have a black box to document the demise of our civilization due to climate change.
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