Earth Is Getting a 'Black Box' because of Climate Change

Context: In a remote part of Australia, a steel vault about the size of a school bus will record the Earth’s warming weather patterns,  a project to create an archive on climate change.

• Australian scientists and artists are going to make black box of the planet to hold the world accountable for their actions by creating a black box of the planet. 

About Earth’s Black Box

• The vault, known as Earth’s Black Box, will be constructed in Tasmania, an Australian island state off the south coast. 
• The storage drives inside Earth’s Black Box are designed to last for around 30 to 50 years.
• It will be made with 3-inch thick steel and covered with solar panels and operate much like a plane’s flight recorder, which records an aircraft’s final moments before crashing.
• It will listen to what we say and do.  The box will act as an indestructible and independent ledger of the 'health' of our planet.
• It will create an archive that could be critical to piecing together the missteps, its creators say, should humanity be destroyed by climate change.

?Types of Data Collection by the Box

• Two different types of data will be collected and stored inside the monolith.
• It will collect climate-change-related data like land and sea temperature measurements, species extinction, energy consumption, human population, ocean acidification, and atmospheric CO2 levels.
• It will collect contextual data, like newspaper headlines and trending stories, key news stories and social media posts.

Reason for choosing the Tasmania

• Tasmania was chosen for its relative geopolitical and environmental safety, and the monolith will be designed to be resilient against threats including cyclones, earthquakes and, with its sloped walls, attacks by vandals.

Significance

• Black box will actually help in preventing a major climate change catastrophe.
• Climate change is one of the gravest threats humanity faces and is exacerbating economic and health inequalities, increasing the frequency and intensity of natural disasters and threatening the world’s food supply.
• The box would be designed “to hold our leaders to account" if civilization does crash, this box will survive with a completely objective data story.”

Other Initiative like this

• The project is not alone in its attempt to jolt human beings out of what the creators suggest is short-term thinking about global warming. 
• It is not the first to try to salvage pieces of human civilization for posterity. 
• Scientists have built repositories for everything from essential food crops to glacier ice to frozen animal embryos, some of them already extinct. 
• Others have tried to hide our nuclear waste so that future generations can avoid the deathly toxic material.