A giant steel box placed on a granite plain in Tasmania will capture everything every time new climate research is published, news headlines are updated, or tweets are exchanged. The developers of “Earth’s Black Box” claim that the town bus-sized structure will be impregnable to the climate catastrophe and will outlast mankind because of its thick steel walls, battery storage, and solar panels. 

Eventually, its creators hope, the recorder will tell future civilizations how humankind created the climate crisis, and the way we failed or succeeded to deal with it. 

“The box will operate as an unbreakable and independent ledger of our planet‘s ‘health,'” Jonathan Kneebone, artist and director of the project’s associated creative collective Glue Society, told CNN.

“Earth’s recording equipment will record every step we take toward this catastrophe,” write the manufacturers behind the project, including University of Tasmania researchers and a marketing communications company, Clemenger BBDO. They have added, “Hundreds of knowledge sets, measurements and interactions referring to the health of our planet are continuously collected and safely stored for future generations.” 

The steel monolith will document all climate-related conversations and artefacts from the past, present and future, including land and sea temperature changes, ocean acidification, the quantity of gas within the atmosphere, human population, energy consumption, military spending, policy changes and more. 

According to its makers, the box is going to be packed with storage drives and can constantly be downloading scientific data from the web, which can be powered by the structure’s solar panels and battery storage.

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Developers estimate the recording machine has the capacity to store enough data for the subsequent three to five decades, and  research is on to grow its storage capabilities beyond story archiving and data compression. 

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Kneebone said the creators are still trying to work out who would be able to use the hold in the far-off future, since gaining access thereto is meant to be difficult and would require advanced technologies.