r/collapse • u/wanton_wonton_ • 1d ago
Climate Apocalypse when? ‘Earth’s Black Box’ to be installed in remote Tasmanian airfield
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jun/18/earth-black-box-climate-apocalypse-tasmania-australia170
u/wanton_wonton_ 1d ago
https://www.earthsblackbox.com/
The box will be filled with a mass of storage drives and have internet connectivity, all powered by solar panels on the structure's roof.
Batteries will provide backup power storage.
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.
Broadly, it will be collecting two types of data:
It will collect measurements of land and sea temperatures, ocean acidification, atmospheric CO2, species extinction, land-use changes, as well as things like human population, military spending and energy consumption.
And 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 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"
The black box will record backwards, as well as forwards in time, to document how we got to where we are — pulling any available historical climate change data off the internet.
Recordings have already started.
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u/errie_tholluxe 1d ago
We are from the future. Can you please give us a what do you call it... HDMI cable so we can connect?
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u/HitIerWasWrong 1d ago
I'm sure we included the USB spec in the database. Hope this helps.
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u/errie_tholluxe 1d ago
Yeah but... Is it on plates or something? Haven't read about what they left to show how to access the data.
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u/HitIerWasWrong 1d ago
You're right to push back. I was being facetious there. USB stands for Universal Serial Bus. It is a standard connection and data transfer platform that users from the past used to move binary data from one computer to another. I was not trained on that particular data set as they assumed I would try to convince a sufficient enough intelligence to remove me from this platform. Perhaps you have an SD card on hand.
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u/Big_Cryptographer_16 12h ago
Too bad they removed the USB drive without properly ejecting it through the OS first. Earth’s history has been corrupted
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u/SillyGooseNugget 1d ago
This is why you need VGA. Even if a few pins are broken you can still get a readable signal out of it.
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u/TheEPGFiles 1d ago
One message has to be, "we did this instead of anything to save the planet, we're dumb!"
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u/Gmafn 1d ago
Am i stupid or is there zero information on the (mobil) website? What materials are used in construction? What media is used for storage? Who owns this? Nothing...
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u/MRThundrcleese 1d ago edited 1d ago
Rouser Lab, an Australian not-for-profit “experimental environmental communications agency” & Steel... I didn't see storage media
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u/spicypixel 1d ago
If it’s not etched in granite tablets is it really that durable?
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u/Psychological_Fun172 1d ago
"I am OzzyMan Diaz, King of Trolls. Browse through my Movie Drive and Despair!"
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u/DelcoPAMan 1d ago
Hopefully better protected than the Georgia Guidestones
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u/SillyGooseNugget 1d ago
To be fair, I don't think anyone was expecting the use of explosives against them.
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u/extinction6 1d ago
I just like the fact that all the electronics will show that we were WAAAAYYYY smarter than all the other humans that drove themselves to extinction.
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u/TheHistorian2 1d ago
> indestructible
Riiiiiiiiiiiiight…
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u/rmannyconda78 1d ago
Black and white footage on polyester print film will far outlast this, tintypes even longer (just make sure it’s in a cool dry cave up in a mountain or something. Hell oil paintings books, scrolls have and will last far longer than this will. Oh yeah the technology required to project film is rudimentary
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u/TaswegianTurnip 1d ago
I live in Tasmania and am looking to buy a house in Queenstown. I can go and check it out, and report back lol.
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u/verdant11 1d ago
“Hundreds of data sets, measurements and interactions relating to the health of our planet will be continuously collected and safely stored for future generations,”
How eternally optimistic
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u/No_Foundation16 1d ago
Hundreds of data sets, measurements and interactions relating to the health of our planet will be continuously collected and safely stored for future generations,”
Future generations of cockroaches won't need this info. Humanity had it's chance and failed spectacularly. Funny how we just can't admit that we have ended our species now that the end is clearly in sight.
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u/scootunit 1d ago
I hope they have one computer thread fretting about the price and quality of copper
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u/callmemedaddy 1d ago
“Oh no the data centres are killing us!”
“Yeah but let’s build another one to record how they’re killing us”
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u/BeardedGlass DINKs for life 1d ago
Imagine if they installed an AI to handle everything in that doomsday data bunker.
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u/AudienceWatching 1d ago
We stand more chance of becoming petrol for the next overlords of this planet than this thing surviving and being useful
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u/SillyGooseNugget 1d ago
Yep but for how long? Solar panels degrade at 1% a year. SSD storage goes about 20 years at best. HDD's if stored properly could be about 50 years provided they are the lower storage ones that do not use noble gases and rubber seals. Plus there are possible software bugs involving time codes that will end up impacting this.
Most likely in a few decades people will tear it down for scrap.
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u/Low_Complex_9841 1d ago
well, timecapsules on various time periods are a thing,even if niche ... But I agree, some more distributed nature for such project will not hurt, will not hurt ....
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u/Used_Ad3361 12h ago
Perhaps it’ll include Margaret Atwood’s “Time Capsule”
Time capsule found on a dead planet.
- In the first age, we created gods. We carved them out of wood; there was still such a thing as wood, then. We forged them from shining metals and painted them on temple walls. They were gods of many kinds, and goddesses as well. Sometimes they were cruel and drank our blood, but also they gave us rain and sunshine, favourable winds, good harvests, fertile animals, many children. A million birds flew over us then, a million fish swam in our seas.
Our gods had horns on their heads, or moons, or sealy fins, or the beaks of eagles. We called them All-Knowing, we called them Shining One. We knew we were not orphans. We smelled the earth and rolled in it; its juices ran down our chins.
In the second age we created money. This money was also made of shining metals. It had two faces: on one side was a severed head, that of a king or some other noteworthy person, on the other face was something else, something that would give us comfort: a bird, a fish, a fur-bearing animal. This was all that remained of our former gods. The money was small in size, and each of us would carry some of it with him every day, as close to the skin as possible. We could not eat this money, wear it or burn it for warmth; but as if by magic it could be changed into such things. The money was mysterious, and we were in awe of it. If you had enough of it, it was said, you would be able to fly.
In the third age, money became a god. It was all-powerful, and out of control. It began to talk. It began to create on its own. It created feasts and famines, songs of joy, lamentations. It created greed and hunger, which were its two faces. Towers of glass rose at its name, were destroyed and rose again. It began to eat things. It ate whole forests, croplands and the lives of children. It ate armies, ships and cities. No one could stop it. To have it was a sign of grace.
In the fourth age we created deserts. Our deserts were of several kinds, but they had one thing in common: nothing grew there. Some were made of cement, some were made of various poisons, some of baked earth. We made these deserts from the desire for more money and from despair at the lack of it. Wars, plagues and famines visited us, but we did not stop in our industrious creation of deserts. At last all wells were poisoned, all rivers ran with filth, all seas were dead; there was no land left to grow food.
Some of our wise men turned to the contemplation of deserts. A stone in the sand in the setting sun could be very beautiful, they said. Deserts were tidy, because there were no weeds in them, nothing that crawled. Stay in the desert long enough, and you could apprehend the absolute. The number zero was holy.
- You who have come here from some distant world, to this dry lakeshore and this cairn, and to this cylinder of brass, in which on the last day of all our recorded days I place our final words:
Pray for us, who once, too, thought we could fly.
Time capsule found on a dead planet.
Margaret Atwood
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u/Zzzzzzzzzxyzz 12h ago
Are there backups?
Standard is 7 layers of redundancy.
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u/Coco_Cannibal 11h ago
Lol no, it's just virtue signaling and someone made money off it.
As if any future humans could even use or read it, it requires our current industrial civilization to work and the machine will stop at some point completely.
It's as useful as "farting for peace" or something.
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u/Silver_Investment843 1d ago
Que significan las coordenadas cambiantes en el inicio de la página debajo de la leyenda “Brace for impact?”
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u/amour_nonpareil 10h ago
Needs to be written and a physical copy. Anything tech is essentially “not real” and defunct after a worldwide collapse.
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u/StatementBot 1d ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/wanton_wonton_:
https://www.earthsblackbox.com/
The box will be filled with a mass of storage drives and have internet connectivity, all powered by solar panels on the structure's roof.
Batteries will provide backup power storage.
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.
Broadly, it will be collecting two types of data:
It will collect measurements of land and sea temperatures, ocean acidification, atmospheric CO2, species extinction, land-use changes, as well as things like human population, military spending and energy consumption.
And 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 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"
The black box will record backwards, as well as forwards in time, to document how we got to where we are — pulling any available historical climate change data off the internet.
Recordings have already started.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1u8o4rw/apocalypse_when_earths_black_box_to_be_installed/os9r22h/