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Work Begins on Arctic Seed Vault
Aryabhata writes "BBC reports that Norway is starting construction on a 'doomsday vault' in the Arctic which is designed to house all known varieties of the world's crops. The vault's purpose is to ensure survival of crop diversity in the event of plant epidemics, nuclear war, natural disasters or climate change; and to offer the world a chance to restart growth of food crops that may have been wiped out. 'More than 100 countries have backed the vault, which will store seeds, packaged in foil, at sub-zero temperatures. ...
Norway's Agriculture Minister Terje Riis-Johansen has called the vault a "Noah's Ark on Svalbard."'"
The sad part comes when in 50 years this vault is eagerly opened and found to only contain many many dead weevils.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
General "Buck" Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?
Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
but it would really be ironic if, sometime in the distant future, the vault is broken open and actually causes the destruction of future life because of ecosystem incompatibilities. I say live and let die. The Earth seems quite adept at recovering and moving on over its billions of years. We weren't the first ones here, nor the last. We are not even a fraction of a blink of an eye to the Earth.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
How about putting the vault somewhere on the moon? If there was a major nuclear disaster...couldn't the effects screw up the poles of the earth too?
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
...the seed vault would probably end up being destroyed in the nuclear war.
I can just see it now...
"SoyLent Food Company - Good people making good food. Now in Green flavor!"
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Which one would YOU choose?
...
You must always choose the lesser of two weevils!
(end of post)
I wonder if Monsanto would believe that line?
considering the dark side of human nature and what geneitic manipulation corperations like Monsanto are doing i applaud Norway for doing this...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Um, I don't know about you, but I'd want several of these all over the global. They may need to re-think their idea though. If major planet disease/bioterror strike wiped out all our food sources and we really needed this to reseed the global food sources, what are the odds of no one being able to get there to unlock it? Or better yet we've nuked our selves back and we know that their is the vault and close to where it is, but unforunately it's being guarded by polar bears that are hungry... O.k. long term I'd put my money on the nuclearly mutanted savages rather than the polar bear, but why not several of these on each major land mass near major crop lands? Heck, why stop at stock piling seeds? Why not stockpile tractors and fertilizer and enough resources that you could feed a major city within a year from a single stock pile?
Why not putting the seeds in carbon fibre capsules, so that the damage is minimized?
I think it would be more prudent to have redundancy in this system.
Maybe one in the arctic, one in antarctic, one in maybe the Sahara or Gobi, or maybe under a mountain somewhere.
Thus ruling out some sort of catastrophy taking out the entire seed vault.
You would also rule out one country being in charge of the system.
don't forget the weed, man.
I hope for them that the seeds stored are not like those nice monsanto F1 hybrids that freak out (become sterile) after one generation.. wouldn't do mucht to restore much on a global scale..
Actually, it would be wiser to hibernate some of the more 'weedlike' or 'wild' crops, those that are not yet GM'ed to the final product, so that a fast start can be made to produce lots of initial raw material. (the 'wilder' the plant, the faster it multiplies, mostly.. and the offspring can be crossed with many a cultivated type of crop)
Then, i have some very interesting seed of my own here, not exactly plantlike but it does conserve well frozen.. just in case there happens to be a male-only extinction...
to offer the world a chance to restart growth of food crops that may have been wiped out
.... for a price
1. create vault of all food crops in world
2. incide thermonuclear war
3. PROFIT!
http://i5.tinypic.com/14x12ty.jpg
After the Day of Lavos, the people of Arris Dome will have plenty of food!
"Even if all cooling systems failed, explained Mr Riis-Johansen, the temperature in the frozen mountain would never rise above freezing due to the permafrost on the mountainside."
/flamesuit on
Hmm..their backup/failsafe cooling system is permafrost. Cue the global warming inducted failure discussion.
This is not a sig. this is a duck. quack.
i don't think the island will be there if the glaciers melt.
Silent Running, http://imdb.com/title/tt0067756/
In the end they all die except the stupid little robot.
Post-apocalyptic Human 1: So the seeds are buried somewhere round here ...but those features appear to be buried under a hundred feet of snow and we no longer have the technology to map the land that far down.
Post-apocalyptic Human 2: But where exactly?
Post-apocalyptic Human 1: Well I have the GPS coordinates here but they're a bit useless seeing as the GPS satellites were first to go in the War
Post-apocalyptic Human 2: So how are we going to find them?
Post-apocalyptic Human 1: Well I have a picture of the site.
Post-apocalyptic Human 2: Cool, what does it look like?
Post-apocalyptic Human 1: Well it's a patch of white snow surrounded by lots of white snow.
Post-apocalyptic Human 2: Don't you have a map or something?
Post-apocalyptic Human 1: Yeah, I can see exactly where it is relative to a bunch of features...
Post-apocalyptic Human 2: Cool!
Post-apocalyptic Human 1:
Post-apocalyptic Human 2: So what are we going to do?
Post-apocalyptic Human 1: Screw it! Seeds are just hippie food anyway.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I ~highly~ recommend everyone watch "The Future of Food", documenting the inner workings of Monsanto, the goal of which is to quite literally one day control the entire food supply of planet earth.
After watching the documentary, I have to say, the don't have far to go...
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..many people now maintain their own long term "sealed in a can" seed storage, myself included. I always keep quite a bit of various garden seed packed away, a lot of them are in number #10 enameled cans just for this exact purpose like in the article.
Google for "heirloom seens, long term storage", you can find companies that sell seeds packed into cans for long shelf life. You can do it yourself too, it's not that hard to make sealed containers with like CO2 flooded in there, etc. It's a common technique in the survival/preparedness communities.
If there's a "global catastrophe" big enough to wipe out a significant portion of plant species on the planet, wouldn't either:
A) Human be pretty freaking dead also?
B) If there were survivors, wouldn't they starve to death by the time they: 1) Went to the north pole and back, 2) found arable land to plant these seeds in the middle of a worldwide catastrophe, 3) Raised a successful crop?
Besides, what do zombies need with seeds? They eat brains.
Right. Now. . . How good a sci-fi novel would it be to set about searching for one such time capsule from a previous world-spanning empire? Atlantis, Lemuria, or something prior. . .
Or have such things already been found and plumbed?
Hm.
-FL
Been done.
n s.html
See H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. http://sprg.ssl.berkeley.edu/~wcoburn/hpl/mountai
Maybe that technique was useful to quickly kill off insect infestations, but keep the grains still viable.
It might survive disasters that happen in other parts of the world, but what if it was struck by a meteorite?
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
Theirs know raisin four you're vial spelling.
Oh, BTW, kuzdu r00lz!
Ya, ya, maybe the War Games will bring about the time of the Bumble Bee...
Thanks Dad,
- Joshua
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
of course, on the baron continents, most everyone has his own fortified compound, complete with armies of loyal thugs to protect their master's stores of wealth, including frozen seeds.
Well, of course everyone has a castle and warriors!
Why else would you call it a baron continent?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I just saw the typo in the original post and realized you were already mocking it.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Create Seed vault Wait for apocalypse ????? Profit!
Dum spiro spero
People are going to do whatever it takes to make sure that they themselves (and their families) survive, before they do anything for their neighbors. They're going to do whatever they can to help their neighbors and other people that they know personally survive, before they do anything for people they don't know. And they're going to do whatever they can to ensure that people who look like them, speak the same language as them, and have basically the same set of beliefs as them survive, before they do anything about people who are a different color, language, culture, and religion. It's a hierarchy of social and physical closeness, and one's own culture is always going to take precedence over another's. (I have no doubt that if the situation were reversed, the Zaireians would be building bunkers for doomsday, even if it meant diverting funds away from those starving sops in the Americas -- it's mostly luck and geography that things ended up the way they are. I am certainly not making an argument of any inherent cultural superiority either way. Everyone protects their own when the shit hits the fan.)
People are always going to ensure the surivival of themselves, their families, and their own culture -- for as long as they can possibly envision -- before they move on to helping other people who they don't have any connection to right now. That's why people in developed countries build bunkers for a nuclear holocaust that might never happen, rather than send food to other places. Building the bunkers is a justifiable, even necessary expense, because it ensures the preservation of your own culture.
Just as our biological programming drives us to pass on our genes through procreation and protecting our offspring, our social programming drives us to protect our society and culture, even when that comes at the expense of other people -- who, since we don't know them, are just abstract concepts.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."