A digital record of earth’s man-made demise is about to begin thanks to an intervention in Australia called Earth's Black Box.

A remote part of Tasmania is the home of the ominous new steel box that’s meant to capture and record climate data such as oceanic acidification, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and land and sea temperature increases in addition to information about population growth, energy use, and newspaper stories related to climate change.  

The box runs on a combination of batteries and solar power and can collect the data thanks to an algorithm that was developed by the communications firm Clemenger BBDO with the help from the University of Tasmania, and the artist collective Glue Society, which had help from architects Thomas Bailey and Kate Philipps of Room11.

“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,” Clemenger’s Jim Curtis said in an Australian Broadcasting Corporation interview. “It's built to outlive us all.” 

The 7.5-cm-thick walls shield the box’s internal system of scientific equipment and computer hard drives that help it receive and record data running both backward and forward in time beginning with news items related to this year’s COP26 climate summit in Glasgow. Curtis says the cantilevered structure is meant to hold account both contemporary and future world leaders in addition to human society writ large. As of now, the box is set up to store data for a period of 30-50 years, with the potential to extend that timeframe depending on experimentations in inscribed steel plates.

“This will enable us to be far more efficient with how each tier of storage is used and make it possible to store data for hundreds, if not thousands of years," Curtis told the broadcasters.

The box is officially recording now and will begin construction sometime early next year, according to ABC. The information will be made accessible via a digital platform, and its engineers say they are pondering interstellar transmission and a Rosetta Stone-like encryption codex for any future societies, human or otherwise, that might stumble upon the then-dormant data shield. 

“If the worst does happen,” Curtis said finally, “this thing will still be there."