A mysterious monolith is being built in Australia — Its purpose is to record the collapse of our civilization
Earth Black Box. That’s the name of a project coming to the Australian island of Tasmania next year.
At the beginning of Stanley Kubrick’s famous 1968 film “A Space Odyssey,” a certain prehistoric hominid tribe discovers that an enigmatic monolith has appeared in the area they inhabit. None of them knew where it came from or what it was. From the moment the cuboid appears on the screen, we see the primitives learning how to use simple tools and weapons. The monolith appears two more times in Kubrick’s work. It becomes a symbol of a highly developed civilization that may have left some clues for another race. 53 years after the premiere of the film, it turns out that we can witness the appearance of a similar creature. This time, however, we know who created it and for whom.
Black Box Earth
The project is to take the form of a huge steel installation filled with hard disks, powered by solar panels. Each one is to document and store real-time data on all the problems facing humanity that are leading to our demise. That includes information about climate change, species extinction, or pollution. This has one purpose. If we bring our civilization to the end of its existence, the next one will get clues as…
