Playing the shame game
There’s good news today! You, I and everyone else reading this column will be long dead before Earth freezes, boils over or is otherwise taken off the Guinness Book of World Records’ list of “Longest Surviving Planets in Our Solar System.” So we needn’t worry: No one will be left to remember what damned fools we were.
But bean counters want to make sure that any space travelers who stumble across the late, great planet Earth in the future can place blame for its demise precisely where it belongs. Thus, they conceived of Earth’s Black Box (EBB).
Construction of the EBB is set to begin early this year. The rather Noah’s Ark-looking box will be 33 feet long (about the length of your average school bus) and made of 3-inch-thick steel. The project is a collaboration by the University of Tasmania, the Clemenger BBDO communications firm and the Glue Society, an art collective.
EBB will house a number of computer hard disk drives that will record temperature measurements and data on ocean acidification, land use, military spending, energy consumption and human population growth. It will also record the actions – or inaction – of world leaders in the face of climate change. Data will be gleaned from publications, climate change conferences and other sources – rants on Facebook and Twitter about climate change not being real, for example. Now in beta test mode, the EBB can be tracked in real time on the project’s website: www.earthsblackbox.com. A neat, spinning orange logo and the world “Recording” displays on the site. The latest developments in addressing the crisis populate a scrolling list. You can sign up for email updates, too.
EBB is designed to “provide an unbiased account of the events that led to the demise of the planet, hold accountability for future generations and inspire urgent action,” website copy proclaims. But according to Jim Curtis, executive creative director at Clemenger, EBB is also going to be there “to hold leaders to account – to make sure their action or inaction is recorded.”
In this regard, EBB is a little like your annoying kid brother taking a cellphone pic of you eating the last piece of chocolate cake, then threatening to post it a day later on Facebook along with another picture of you retching your guts out. That’s right: EBB is designed to shame us into action.
Now, I’m all for shaming people into action. But we can see how well that device works by looking no farther than the current U.S. Congress, where Democrats have failed miserably in shaming Republicans into passing voting rights legislation. According to published reports, at least one wise guy has asked how, if humans will be wiped out by climate change, extraterrestrial explorers who find the EBB might open it to mine the wealth of data inside. Designers say they’re still working on that. They speak of encryption or perhaps an inscription of the outside of the box that can easily be decoded by any race smart enough to travel interstellar distances or – in the case of the secret society of Mole Men who live inside our planet – roughly 5 kilometers.
I think all this encryption isn’t necessary. Just put a top-of-the-line Master Lock on the EBB and hide the key nearby inside a plastic rock.
I also think that if the project’s braintrust really wants to make a statement, they should enclose the hard drives not in a box of 3-inch-thick steel, but in a giant Styrofoam beer cooler.
That stuff will outlast even the cockroaches.