Scientists have supplied our planet with its own "black box"
A giant steel box will emerge on a granite plain in Australia, surrounded by rugged mountains. If those who find it can decipher the messages it contains, they can get an idea of what caused the fall of the civilization that existed here before. This is the "black box" of the Earth.
By according to the publication ABC Researchers at the University of Tasmania have launched a project called Earth's Black Box, in which they plan to install a dedicated recorder on Tasmania's west coast by the end of 2022.
The task of the "black box" is to capture data on the last decades of our civilization in case it ends with a global climate catastrophe and the death of the planet. In general, it will collect two types of data:
- measurements of land and sea temperatures, ocean acidification, atmospheric CO2, species extinctions, land-use changes, as well as data such as population, military spending and energy consumption;
- contextual data such as newspaper headlines, social media posts, and news on key events such as the Conference of the Parties (COP) meeting on climate change.
The black box will record both backward and forward in time to document how we got to where we ended up - pulling from the Internet any available historical data on climate change.
And although construction on the facility itself will not begin until mid-next year, drives have already been recording since the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow this November. According to the developers' calculations, thanks to data compression and archiving, the capacity will be enough to accumulate data over the next 30-50 years.
Source: abc
Illustrations: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) / Mad Max 2 (1981)
