Earth's Getting A 'Black Box' For The End Of The World & It's Recording Our Social Media
Well, this is comforting.
If — or when — humanity disappears off the planet, there’s going to be a big creepy monolith waiting to tell everyone how it happened and what we tweeted while it went down.
An international group says it’s building a "black box" for civilization in Australia, and the planned structure has a very sci-fi look and mission.
It's called Earth's Black Box, and the thing is designed to store vast troves of data so that future civilizations can see how badly we screwed things up with climate change on the planet. That includes some of our social media posts, although it's more interested in saving tweets about climate change rather than your oh-so-clever memes.
The structure will be a weirdly-shaped steel box that’s about the size of a city bus, with solar panels to keep it running and a supposedly indestructible shell to help it survive an apocalypse, according to the group behind it.
The monolith will be packed with hard drives containing climate change data, newspaper headlines and social media posts so that whoever finds it can see how civilization fell apart — assuming it does.
“Earth’s Black Box will record every step we take towards this catastrophe,” the project’s website says.
Construction is apparently underway and the group has already started to record data, according to Jonathan Kneebone, an artist involved in the project.
“The box will act as an indestructible and independent ledger of the 'health' of our planet," Kneebone told CNN.
"It's built to outlive us all," he added in another interview with ABC News in Australia, before explaining why he hopes it'll help us today. "When people know they're being recorded, it does have an influence on what they do and say."
The strange shape was designed by Clemenger BBDO, a marketing agency with offices in Australia.
The group says the box will hold a few decades' worth of data, and that it'll be stored in a few different ways so that aliens could decode it if necessary. It's also already started recording, and you can see the social media posts that it's watching on its website.
It's unclear if the structure will actually hold up against different kinds of disasters, but it's not the first end-of-the-world structure out there. There's also the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, which is designed to preserve samples of various plant life for future generations.
The seed vault is jammed into the side of a mountain on a remote island, so it's not an easy thing to visit.
But if you're ever in Tasmania in the future, you might want to check out the so-called "black box" once it's done.
Who knows? Maybe an alien will be standing in the same spot in a few thousand years, sifting through the archives and trying to figure out why we cared about the Kardashians.
