Earth Black Box is an indestructible recorder built by scientists to record climate change & civilization - Yanko Design - Form Beyond Function

This giant steel box sitting on a remote outcrop in Tasmania is an indestructible tool designed to outlive us all while recording every action and inaction towards climate change that affects our civilization…and it has already started recording!

The Earth Black Box is similar to the black boxes that are designed to survive airplane crashes and provide investigators valuable data on what led to the disaster — except on a planetary scale so whoever finds it has access to all the data that led to our eventual downfall.

The idea is that the Tasmanian site can cradle the black box for the benefit of a future civilization, should catastrophic climate change cause our downfall as we are currently on track for as much as 2.7 C of warming this century.

When the sun is shining, the black box will be downloading scientific data and an algorithm will be gleaning climate-change-related material from the internet.

It will collect contextual data such as newspaper headlines, social media posts, and news from key events like Conference of the Parties (COP) climate change meetings.

The black box will record backward as well as forward in time, to document how we got to where we are — pulling any available historical climate change data off the internet.

It will enable the box to be far more efficient with how each tier of storage is used and make it possible to store data for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

“The idea is if the Earth does crash as a result of climate change, this indestructible recording device will be there for whoever’s left to learn from that,” says Curtis.