Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The box, a steel and granite monolith, will be filled with hard drives to record everything we say right up until our civilisation falls, so future civilisations can learn from our mistakes.
Earth is getting a black box to record our climate change actions, and it’s already started listening
ABC Science / By environment reporter Nick Kilvert
On a granite-strewn plain, surrounded by gnarled mountains, sits a giant steel box.
Incongruous in the landscape, much like Kubrick’s black monolith of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame, its alien presence suggests it was put there with intent.
And if those that discover it can decipher the messages it contains, they could get a glimpse of what caused the fall of the civilisation that was there before.
This is Earth’s Black Box.
‘First and foremost, it’s a tool’
When an aeroplane crashes, it’s left to investigators to sift through the wreckage to recover the black box.
It’s hoped the recorded contents can be used to help others avoid the same fate.
And so it is with Earth’s Black Box: a 10-metre-by-4-metre-by-3-metre steel monolith that’s about to be built on a remote outcrop on Tasmania’s west coast.
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If that sounds unhinged, it’s worth remembering that we’re currently on track for as much as 2.7C of warming this century.
Ask any climate scientist what happens when warming breaches 2C, and they’ll almost invariably tell you it’s not worth thinking about.
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Those who have discovered the black box — now the colour of rust, its solar panels long since dead — have got no frame of reference for what they find inside or how to decipher it.
So now what?
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Gaining access to the box’s interior through its three-inch-thick steel casing will already require some ingenuity.
The developers presume whoever is capable of that will also be able to interpret basic symbols.
“Like the Rosetta Stone, we would look to use multiple formats of encoding,” they said.
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Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-12-06/climate-change-earth-black-box-recorder/100621778
Tasmania, despite its remote location, is an interesting place. Tasmania has an abundance of fine wine and food, an extraordinarily delicious native honey, tribes of radical environmentalists who rarely leave their campsites deep in the woods, and a really potent variety of hallucinogenic mushrooms which only grow in Tasmania.
And now Tasmania is going to have a black box to record the fall of our civilisation from climate change.
Oh I didn’t realize Tasmania had solved the bit rot problem.
Good on them!
The only understanding that “Those who have discovered the black box” will learn from this will be that wasting time and effort on such folly is a good indication of why those who built it died out.
How much carbon was released into the atmosphere to manufacture 3″ thick steel plates?
idiots
Expensive dumpster
I can tell. Judging by the people running our civilization today it appears to be their major export crop.
How much C02 to make all that steel??
More information here. Including these interesting tidbits.
This has about as much chance to still be operating in 30 to 50 years as any of Paul Ehrlich’s doomsday predictions from 30 – 50 years back.
You’re lucky to get 10 or 20 years out of a hard drive used intermittently. What happens if it tries to spin continuously for 50 years? Nobody has experience with drives over that length of time. Does anyone still have a functioning HD made in 1971? What will happen to internal lubricants? Will the motor and electronics still work after that amount of time?
Last year I decommissioned a pair of SunFire X-2100 servers that were originally deployed in 2007. They were rebooted due to a power failure in 2008 and had been up and running continuously from then until final shut down.
The article does not say what kind of storage technology is used; I tend to doubt they are spinning drives, but given industry history whatever storage technology is deployed today is unlikely to be still functioning in 30 years, let alone 50. And it is pretty much guaranteed that today’s storage systems will not be serviceable 30 years hence.
From the above-quoted text of environment reporter Nick Kilvert:
I think a reference to the computer Deep Thought would be much more realistic; you know, something along the lines of:
“As with Deep Thought, those that finally gain access to Earth’s Black Box many millennia from now, will be unable to determine the basic question that the internal computers and memory banks were asked to record data on.”
With a tip-of-the-hat to writer Douglas Adams.
Getting rid of old hard drives finally solved. just in time for SATA to be replaced by USB and m2.
Hard drives used to use a wide ribbon cable. Do you have any equipment that can read these drives? Why would the current generation of drives be any different? Try and read a 5 inch floppy or an old backup tape.
Optical drives used to be all the rage. Almost limitless storage. Now few PCs are sold with one. Who uses DVDs? What about CDs?
I wonder how it will survive under a mile or two of glacial ice?
“Tasmania, despite its remote location,”
It’s not remote to Tasmanians. As I learned in high school physics, it depends on your frame of reference.