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A “Black Box” capsule, filled with documents predicting the coming doom on earth, which motivated the construction of the capsule. [NYT Dec 9, 2021]
Self-referential.
“Black box is a term used to call two separate pieces of equipment, a cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and a flight data recorder (FDR). Black box information storage devices are compulsory on all commercial and corporate flights. They are usually located in the aircraft’s tail, where they are more likely to survive a crash.
“The idea to create a device to store flight data was born in Australia in the 1950s by Dr. David Warren. When Dr. Warren was six years old, his father was killed in a plane crash while flying from Tasmania to Melbourne across the Bass Strait. This incident got him to develop a unit that could record flight data and cockpit conversations to help investigators following a crash.
His invention was called the “ARL Flight Memory Unit,” and while it did not get too much attention, it began being built in the US and the UK several years later. Australia was the first country to make the technology compulsory until the United States followed in 1967, making it mandatory on all commercial aircraft.” [Mark Finley, in SIMPLE FLYING, October 4, 2020]
Much like the mandatory black box on each plane, the capsule will record all significant events leading up to the “crash” (i.e., the collapse of the ecosystem allowing no human life to be sustained), in anticipation of the future arrival of outer-worldly creatures with sufficient intelligence to find it, recognize its significance, open it, and decipher its contents.
The capsule is currently under construction, to be placed in a barren area of Tasmania, and is designed to last for at least 50 years. The energy is supplied by solar cells. The collection and archival of relevant data has already begun.
The unit has the size of a school bus, with steel walls 6 cm thick.
What comes to mind:
Message engraved on a gold plaque on the Pioneer spacecraft launched by NASA in 1972, and now on its way beyond our solar system.
In this form the pioneer image appeared on the cover of PROP #4 in May 1980, with a shopping cart added, which the editors deemed essential in communicating the advanced state of our civilization.
The golden plaque launched in 1972 by NASA on a path that leads out of our solar system. It is engraved with drawings and symbols that are supposed to tell extra-terrestials what we are about and what we know. Adam and Eve are there, posing with the planets and with a depiction of the hydrogen atom.
“The Pioneer plaques are a pair of gold–anodized aluminum plaques that were placed on board the 1972 Pioneer 10 and 1973 Pioneer 11 spacecraft, featuring a pictorial message, in case either Pioneer 10 or 11 is intercepted by intelligent extraterrestrial life. The plaques show the nude figures of a human male and female along with several symbols that are designed to provide information about the origin of the spacecraft.”
So in case the extraterrestials arrive too late, and the contents of the box on Tasmania are no longer decipherable, or the box itself has been obliterated by forces not anticipated at the time of its construction, we still can console ourselves with the knowledge that Pioneer 10 and 11 are still out there on their way to spread the word about the delicate design of our bodies, the existence of two genders with different anatomy, and the knowledge our species has acquired about our solar system and the architecture of the atom.