At a distant end of the Earth – hidden somewhere on the remote Australian island of Tasmania – a strange structure is about to witness and record the end of the world as we know it.
The project, called Earth’s Black Box, is a giant steel installation, soon to be filled with hard drives powered by solar panels, each of them documenting and preserving a stream of real-time scientific updates and analysis on the gloomiest issues the world faces.
Information related to climate change, species extinction, environmental pollution, and impacts on health will all be chronicled in the monolithic structure – so that if some future society might one day discover the archive, they’ll be able to piece together what happened to our planet.
“Unless we dramatically transform our way of life, climate change and other man-made perils will cause our civilization to crash,” the Earth’s Black Box website explains.
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“Earth’s Black Box will record every step we take towards this catastrophe. Hundreds of data sets, measurements and interactions relating to the health of our planet will be continuously collected and safely stored for future generations”.
In a sense, the box, which evokes the brutalist design of Norway’s famous ‘Doomsday Vault’, actually serves a somewhat complementary purpose.
While the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a fortress designed to protect a vital backup of the world’s seeds in case the worst ever happens, Earth’s Black Box is conceived as an ongoing record of the world’s trajectory towards a dire predicament.
Read more: Science Alert
