livescience.com — "It sounds like something from a science fiction film?a doomsday vault carved into a frozen mountainside on a secluded Arctic island. But Norway's ambitious project is on its way to becoming reality Monday when construction begins on the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, designed to house as many as 3 million of the world's crop seeds."
Jun 19, 2006 View in Crawl 4
durinthalJun 19, 2006
Svalbard? I guess I should start moving my armies in that direction. Strategic retreat from Ukraine and all.
jaredrrJun 19, 2006
What about the doomsday cache from the last civ? This is a great idea but I'd love to know if anyone's devoting resources to finding the same cache from the civilization that came before us? ;)
ahaveJun 19, 2006
I've been impressed with the reasoning on digg.com for a long time. But I'm failing to understand why your reacting to the one of the ideas that could actually save the human kind, not to mention evolution, we've been a part of during millions of years. I've been following this norwegian pursuit for a few years now, and I have to say, that, never in my online/paper experience, I'we ever read such a brilliant idea.We've all seen Amargeddon etc, and it could happend tomorrow. It wouldn't matter if you where rich, powerfull, from Mozambique, or from where ever. The Sun could for all we know, blow tommorrow.... We could get hit be anything in the universe.. We can get killed by the US/IRAN/NC/CHINA experimenting with nuclear bombs or the ozon layer dissapiring for some strange reason, tsunamis, earthquakes, vulcanos. All of this things have the ability to destroy allmost all life on the earth.I for one know, that if I got to Svalbard, there's a storage I could use for my primary needs: breeding, food..... but maybe not shelter. As for God, you can allways pray, I wouldn't expect anything else than personally comforting.On the other hand, I would be sad to see our world as of today, to concour the universe. So It might just be aswell that the only organic life we know of would just be gone forever. Do you guys think we're doing a good job? 6B humans, where 1-2B are either starving to death or dying of diseases we know how to cure. Is it something to spread "where no one have gone before"? We're talking at least 30% of our fellow humanbeings, sharing most(99.99...%) of our genes.... And what about energy ressources? EU/USA/CHINA spending allmost all of the ressources known today...What about our animal factories. 100.000+ cows waiting to get slaughtered, and YES I eat them aswell.Isn't this what evolution could all be about, God or not. We've killing the planet Earth. Lets make the way for someone else who wouldn't, lets lead the way to evolution, and not to praise personal interest, but the human kind.I know this i a crap talk today, but why don't we do it? Why don't we act in the interest of the organic life on the Earth instead of killing it, the homosaphiens way?We've taking a long turn, and in last 200 years we've been slowly killing ourselves.So why not keep all the best we know? In shelters for someone to find, if it all goes wrong. Thats evolution in the year 2K, we have the ability so why not. Most of you guys are never going to miss a penny anyway, since Norway's going to pay for it with money earned from natural resources, wich we all are a part of anyway........ Unless the your span are from 0-X.000.000 years.And by the way, aren't we all dependant on the Sun?
rabid_llamaJun 19, 2006
Putting the idea of nuclear war aside, I also like how this protects against a worldwide plant epidemic. I mean, think of the potato famine. In this day and age, something like that could spread with lightning speed, and all of a sudden we have no good stock of american potato seeds. Unlikely, yes, but it could happen, and I doubt this project costs all that much money. Dig a hole in a mountain, wrap a bunch of seeds in foil, stick them in that hole. Pay a few people to guard and maintain it. I bet the facility isn't even electrically cooled -- it's up there because the area is naturally well below freezing.
valnar300Jun 19, 2006
Actually this is pretty intelligent, using the cold to preserve seeds so that we have a stock we can clone or so in case of an emergency. Plus it will help keep certain plants from dying out.
hiscityJun 19, 2006
Extend the logic. There's plenty of near cryogenic storage on the moon (Aitken Basin, etc.). Instead of just storing seeds -- store organic tissues. That could include: organs from deceased relatives (for possible later transplant, such as eyes), entire bodies instead of burial, long term storage for embryos, storage of unwanted embryos instead of abortion or destruction, embryos or eggs from all earth animals, or even tissue samples from all organic life including plants and microbes.Cryopreserving the deceased as organ banks for near kin makes the most sense. Imagine what it would be like to see out of your parents eyes -- if you really needed them. Of course, we wouldn't have stop at the moon. Send slow moving deep space transports with similar bio-banks outbound from the solar system. If future generations ever had to recover some organics they'd have a source. If not, then eventually the transports might seed life elsewhere in the cosmos. As for having my brain cryopreserved ... I'll pass on that. Others would be happy to have the option of being potentially resuscitated decades later. The point is that cryopreservation is technically possible now. See www.snowflakes.org if you think I'm kidding.
lschlesiJul 21, 2008
For those of you wondering about a similar projects for animal tissue, there are such projects in existence. Since 2004, for example, the little-known Frozen Ark project in Nottingham, England has been quietly gathering, storing, and preserving genetic "backups" of species for whom conservation efforts have come too late – or not at all.Priority is being given to 40 animals that are extinct in the wild but still living in zoos. Next in line are 10,000 or so species whose populations have fallen as human numbers inexorably rose. The ark is also collecting the eggs, sperm and embryos of vulnerable animals. This is not a new idea. Science Fiction writers have been using it as a standard theme for over 70 years (see Vault of the Ages). Genetic materials (DNA) have been recovered from as unlikely places as a 10,000 year old woolly mammoth recovered from the frozen Siberian permafrost to extinct Tasmanian tiger tissue preserved in alcohol for over 100 years in a Melbourne museum. Such vaults are also needed to preserve all human knowledge and present it in a variety of ways, one of which would hopefully be understandable to a future discoverer, no matter what their level of sophistication. The presentation could be geared to teach the finder how to read the rest of the written data. Such knowledge could be offered as writing (with lavish illustrations), printed in a media that is indestructible to the ravages of time (lead or gold sheets?). Then the written information could give instructions on how to build equipment to recover the bulk of the knowledge, which would be stored in compact, non-volatile, electronically readable form. This could eventually be accessed by a newly budding civilization as their level of technology (with the help of the written knowledge in the vault), rose. I have noticed a tone in the messages here, even those supporting these kinds of efforts, of human species contempt or even self-hatred. Such attitudes are a mystery to me. Humans do what humans do. They are as much a part of "nature" as birds who build nests. We don't condemn as “unnatural” nest-building flyers because they disturb the environment of the grass by building "artificial structures" from the stuff. Nature is an abstract word that we use to describe that part of this complex world around us that we think we have not yet modified. But there is no such thing as "Nature or Mother Nature". That concept is just something we made up to give us a comfortable name and some measure of illusionary control over something very complex that we still don't understand very well. What we call "Nature" is just a group of diverse forces that are sometimes at a temporary equilibrium. What we accept as "normal" is really a very shortsighted perception that we mainly embrace because of our relatively brief time on earth. There is no “normal”. In reality, everything in the universe is dynamic and constantly changing. Our own physical limitations do not always allow us to see these changes or bigger picture. That brief balance (maybe lasting a few years or thousands of centuries) can change gradually or shift abruptly. And contrary to what you may have been told by self-proclaimed pundits, there is little we humans can do to influence those changes, one way or the other.However, if you believe the human species is worth saving, than efforts to preserve and protect the elements of our current environment (animal, plant and civilization) that we deem are valuable to us against unforeseen disaster are as laudable as trying to improve the environment. Call these efforts a cheap insurance policy, a potential restart point. We are still very vulnerable to random forces of the universe. Stephen Hawking says our best bet for long term survival as a species is to spread our population beyond this one little planet. This is not the profound utterance of a genius, but just plain common sense. But, until such a migration is possible, we need all the practical insurance we can get. These vaults are that insurance… they are the best we can do for now.