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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."
I would say that Taiwan is an example of a place that is technological enough and like-minded enough to have a sort of seed bank, and yet it would still be considered politically unstable because of China's threats to invade. I doubt the people in Taiwan think their government is on the brink of collapse however.
unstable != brink of collapse
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.
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
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.
Congratulations!
I do believe that is the most off-topic attempt I've ever seen to redirect an otherwise useful discussion into a religious flamefest.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
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!