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Norway to Build Doomsday Seed Bank
Kagu writes "According to the BBC, Norway is planning to build a Seed Bank in the Artic Permafrost to protect all known variations of seeds in case of worldwide disaster." From the article: "Mr Hawtin said there were currently about 1,400 seed banks around the world, but a large number of these were located in countries that were either politically unstable or that faced threats from the natural environment."
Why would a politically unstable country have a seed bank? I can't imagine caring much about how oak trees fare if my government was on the brink of collapse...
//I'm also kind of curious what countries they consider to be "politically unstable."
The nice thing about having them on the ground is that you can get at them easily, even if civilization collapses. Which is pretty likely if all the crops die and there's no more food.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Yeah, seeds in the orbit will really help if we regress to the stage we don't even have any more seeds to plant!
Grundes!
Would it be such a bad idea to launch seeds into outer space to orbit the world just in case?
Cosmic radiation can play havoc with DNA over time. You'd have to shield that thing pretty good (read a lot of increased mass). Not to mention this stuff must weigh a heck of a lot if you include a sample of ALL life forms plus the containers (petri dishes, test tubes, whatever). Added to the fact that the most likely outcome that this "ark" is likely to be vaporized by the first asteroid/moon/planet it happens to collide with makes it an unlikely "safe" place.
The smartest thing we can hope to do probably is map out the DNA for every endangered species, in the hope that one day we will be advanced enough to synthesize this DNA again "de novo" in a lab and bring the species "back" if we ever need it.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Or if you just need a few varieties because some local variety of a plant went extict due to local conditions, like the spill into the Harbin river. (not saying I know of a plant that went extict due to this... just some might have).
Named after Nikolai I Vavilov, a Russian biologist, botanist and geneticist, the Institute's seed collections were largely built by Vavilov who scoured five continents in the 1920s and 1930s for wild and cultivated corn, potato tubers, grains, beans, fodder, fruits and vegetable seeds.
Hitler's army blockaded Leningrad (now St Petersburg). Under German fire, scientists gathered unripened potato tubers from the Institute's experimental fields outside Leningrad. They burned everything they could find to keep the collection from freezing in the building.
While guarding the collection, some scientists starved to death rather than eat the packets of rice, corn and other seeds in their desks.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Read: "If plant conservationists produced as many biological and chemical weapons as physicists have produced bombs, then perhaps there would be some scraps in the treasury left over for them."
when slashdotters start quoting the gilmore girls you know it's time to find a new homepage.
I dunno, this seems a bit silly all round. I mean if there is a catastrophe sufficient to wipe out all seed and food crops in the world, or at least within easy reach, it's not very likely that there will be a whole lot of anything or anybody else to replant and eat said food crops. On top of that, its fairly safe to assume the disaster would have pretty much erased whole ecosystems; are the food crops sufficient to maintain a viable ecosystem by themselves? Kind of a waste of money, really.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
I can't claim to be an expert on this, but I was actually thinking that such a seed bank could be quite relevant in a potential disaster that's probably less obvious than simply squandering resources. In particular, a large amount of food production, especially in the developed world (I don't know about other places), is essentially dictated by a small number of massive corporations which are very specific about what crops they'll grow.
A good example is with potatoes -- there are about 200 different varieties of potato, but my understanding is that only four or five of them are seriously grown on a large scale in the US. Some of the former varieties are probably extinct by now, or close to it, simply because their original habitats have been wiped out and nobody grows them. Everyone's growing the same thing, everyone's eating the same thing, and there's very little variety.
Someone can correct me on this if they know otherwise. My point is, though, that the lack of variety that's generally encouraged when a small number of corporations control it, makes it much more lokely that a disease or other biological threat could just wipe the whole lot out.
Keeping a seed bank would be one way to make sure that the older varieties remain available if it ever becomes very important to retrieve them in the future. Reading the article, it seems that this is probably the sort of thing they're thinking about.
A simple challenge to you: if you're simply laughing at the prior sentence, then consider that you will die should it happen. If you're not laughing and you're seriously considering the effects, you too would consider a little biodiversity...
If humanity manages to wipe itself out, are you sure we are worth trying to bring back?
*elevator music plays*
The past few years we've seen universities trying very hard to find old races/ strains of for example apple trees because the present ones seem to be more suspect to pests than it used to be.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
things change... that's the way of life! the only ecosystem that is at equlibrium is a climax. every other system is NOT at equilibrium and therefore living... generating new species and dying out on some other parts.
... they do not exist at their own. everything is linked. you cannot restore a whole such system by simply bringing back the plants. for a start: how would they fix nitrogen from atmosphere? this is done by bacteria in most cases that grow in plants.
... want yet another illustrating example: imagine this: lets assume, we have put a dinosaur, a raptor, in cryo some milion years ago and now we decide to restore its population. we thaw it up again, make it mate with another dino of other sex and let them have children. now try to find a place in our modern world, where they would be able to reestablish a population... maybe a city like new york or tokyo? or london or paris or kolkata? 18milion humans and 150 raptor dinosaurs in same habitat... would this be possible? probably not. the time has passed and things changed. the raptor has no chance to exist in our world. this will be probably the most frequent fate of such imaginary experiments, because of the fact that life cannot be preserved but only prolonged and even that has its limits... ;-) ... think about that!
if you save seeds, you did do a snapshot of available species at a certain time under certain conditions. sure plants can grow under a lot of conditions but don't rest on the fact that now we will have a global seed-bank in a stable cold place and now we can destruct the whole ecosystems of this planet just becasue we have the seeds to re-establish it back. this is NOT the case. plants are highly dependend on animals, bacteria, virii,
better let's keep the ecosystems we have now more or less stable and try not to destroy them completely than relating on seed-banks for conservation.
don't get me wrong: seed-banks are very valuable tools for research and agriculture, but not for longterm conservation!
"The crucial first step is to colonize the ocean surface with floating cities, quadrupling the living space available to the growing population of Earth. This allows us to reverse the degradation of the environment by shifting to the thermal energy of the deep ocean as our primary power source."
Yeah, right. I was into that space colony stuff back when I was a teenager, which was around 25 years ago. The guy pushing these floating ocean cities needs to read John Brunner's "Stand on Zanziber" and then about a thousand books and articles written in the past 35 years.
The problem isn't space--you can fit most of the world's population in a small area. The problem is resource distribution, which is compounded by things such as capitalism, imperialism, and all of those other modern evils. And if you treat your arable land like crap, then you'll have even less food to feed the population.
How about we take care of what we already have instead of spinning poor suckers off to Waterworld colonies or tin cans in space?
The guy spent TWO FREAKING DECADES collecting that stuff. Folks guarding it realized it would only last them a few days, so chose not to destroy a valuable scientific artifact. This is HEROISM folks, in its purest form. Not "firefighter" flavor cultivated here in the US.
Mod the parent Insightful.
Have you heard about the Microsoft Seed Bank?
When did jedis enter this discussion?