It was designed to survive the apocalypse, as the final proof of humanity’s failure. But for a while, it seemed that “Earth’s black box” did not even survive its own planning process.
Now, five years after its much-hyped announcement and years of eerie silence, the box is back. The builders say the parts are being assembled and the complete monolith is expected to be installed in December on the edge of a remote airfield in western Tasmania, near Queenstown.
When it was first announced that an indestructible doomsday device would be built in a remote area of Tasmania to bear witness to the climate crisis, the news spread around the world.
“Earth is getting a black box to record events that could lead to the collapse of civilization,” CNET declared, a headline that would later be quoted on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. “We’re doomed,” he whispers to the camera.
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According to the project’s website, the 16-metre-long, 4-metre-high steel structure (on top of which will be housed solar panels housed behind glass) will record “every step” humanity takes towards climate change.
“Hundreds of datasets, measurements and interactions about the health of our planet will be continuously collected and stored securely for future generations,” it says.
“How the story ends is entirely up to us. One thing is for sure: your actions, inactions, and interactions are being recorded.”
The inspiration for this project was airplane flight recorders, also known as “black boxes” (although they are usually orange in color). It stores data inside a crash-resistant case to help investigators determine the cause of an accident. This was also an Australian invention, with a prototype built in 1954 at a government laboratory in Melbourne.
The Earth’s Black Box was announced on the sidelines of the United Nations’ 2021 Cop26 climate change talks in Glasgow.
The digital hard drive is powered on and begins recording lecture data, which will later be transferred to the physical box.
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But then everything went mysteriously quiet. The last and only post on the Instagram page is black tiles forming a 3×3 box from October 2021.
The fact that the project was conceived not by scientists but by the Rauser Lab, an Australian non-profit experimental environmental communications institute, led some to wonder if it was just a piece of performance art or a PR stunt.
Its artistic director Jonathan Kneebone says the project is currently being co-ordinated by the Earth Black Box Foundation, a registered charity dedicated to the idea.
“It will be about five years before we can finally install the works,” he told Guardian Australia.
“Over the past five years, we have not only evolved our design, data storage systems, source materials, and web platform, but also developed a funding model to sustain the project into the future.”
Rouser Lab claims its climate change interventions have received 4 billion media impressions around the world, including another yet-to-be-built “techno obelisk” that will constantly broadcast climate change SOS into space.
Black Box’s collaborators include the Glue Society, which collects art and productions, and the production company Revolver, but its original partner, the University of Tasmania, has withdrawn from the project and plans to request that it be removed from the Rouzer Lab website.
Tasmania’s West Coast Council Mayor Shane Pitt said the project was “a long time coming”.
“It’s certainly something you could see as a tourist attraction,” he said, adding that the rugged, remote outcrop on Tasmania’s west coast was chosen for its geological, political and stability properties, and much of the landscape has been carved by glaciers.
“The West Coast is not a place worth causing a major disaster for anyone.”
This year’s Doomsday Clock is set at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest ever to the end of the day, down from 100 seconds in 2021.
If Earth’s black box is completed, will future beings trace its records to find out where everything went so wrong? Or will we land the plane safely and see the strange object embedded in Tasmania’s granite landscape as a reminder of an apocalypse that never came?
Perhaps that’s the nature of a black box. A black box is a regular object whose inner workings are shrouded in mystery.
