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Doomsday Seed Vault Design Unveiled
in2mind writes "The BBC News is reporting on the completion of a design for a 'doomsday' vault ... that will house seeds. All known varieties of food crops will be represented in the structure, which will be constructed by the Norwegian government. The vault aims to safeguard the world's agriculture from future catastrophes by building into the side of a mountain. On a remote island. Near the North pole. The Svalbard International Seed Vault will house the seed samples at a preservative -18C (0F), and could be used by post-apocalyptic people to feed a hungry planet."
The summary claims that it "could be used by post-apocalyptic people to feed a hungry planet". If it were a system of distributed vaults spread around the planet, I could see this happening.
But a single vault in an inaccessible area? Let's consider the situation. If the world is 'post-apocalyptic', that means some seriously bad stuff has happened. To assume that whatever happened was so selective as to leave the worldwide transport infrastructure needed to take the seeds and "feed a hungry planet" but happened to kill all seed stores and food sources... requires a stretch of the imagination that would snap a logical mind.
I'm all for dramatic story summaries that play fast and loose with the facts to get me to- hey, wait a second, no I'm not.
The assumption for this project is that you'll be able to find enough other sources of food to last you until the next harvest; canned goods, plants, the dead. No one said this is supposed to feed survivors immediately, otherwise they would have built a pantry. Plus, with all the genetic engineering going on, it's nice to know that we have at least some of the original stock preserved should we accidentally implant some Achilles Heel that causes a crop to be wiped out be disease, plague, or climate.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
As much as /.'ers love to complain about how bad a software mono-culture is, the _entire_ agricultural community is operating under very similar conditions. The risks to our food production capabilities are extremely high.
While doomsday headlines right off the Weekly World News attract eyeballs, the reality is that this seed storage facility may be far more beneficial than most people realize.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
When they open the vault, all they will get is a notice saying that the usage rights of these seeds has expired and to please contact patent-holder Monsanto for a renewal.
Seeds don't just grow in sterile dirt. You need the little microbes, worms, fungi, and whatnot to complete the nitrogen cycle. Plus bees to pollenate any flowering species (fruit trees).
Didn't USA build a doomsday vault for patents? It scares me a lot more than the doomsday vault for seed. Because it means that somebody might actually have a plan to rule the post apocalyptic world, and when that somebody is powerful enough, there's interest for the apocalypse to begin.
People naively assume that since the climate ruins the entire planet, nobody really wants climate changes to happen. This is just a random assumption. A polluted planet means man is not free to breath air, drink water, procreate. And those who have the knowledge to make food water air or babies in that polluted world, rule it.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Not only that but it also raises the question of what faction gets the seeds first. If my group, The Crazy Dragon Killers, gets the seeds first we control the populations food source. (possibly only food source)
Ever see the movie: Silent Running?
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Oh Crap! This one says we need bees to pollinate the flowers. Does anyone remember where we keep the Doomsday Insect Vault?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
And if all the ice melts, the seas rise
The ice on Antarctica and Greenland, along with a few glaciers elsewhere, are the only significant contributors to sea level from ice melting. (The rest of the north polar ice is floating.)
The average and year-round snow lines lower with increasing latitude. Once the first reaches ground level you switch to permafrost, the second and you switch to polar ice caps. Global warming will move those boundary poleward only slightly. It would take a HELL of a lot of global warming to move it far enough to start thawing the Antarctic cap, and even afterward you're talking a thousand years or more to melt it off the continent. (Fossil fuels run out well before that.) Meanwhile, once it snows there the only way for the snow to leave is as a glacier crawling (at "glacial speed") to the ocean. If it weren't for glaciers the water would all end up on the cap as ice and the seas would become salt flats. B-)
Greenland might melt off a significant amount of ice with the projected warming - as it did during the Medieval Warm Period. (That's why it was called "Greenland", after all.) But the warming is expected to raise the amount of snow dumped on Antarctica to more than compensate, resulting in a net LOWERING of the sea level from the changing of the ice balance.
Which doesn't mean that global warming wouldn't raise the oceans. The expansion from the rise in ocean water temperature may get slightly ahead of the sequestration of water in the south polar cap. But you're talking a foot or two, not the hundreds of feet you'd get from melting the south cap.
All that assuming the next round of modeling and research doesn't change the paradigm, of course.
IANAC (I Am Not A Climatologist) Your sea level may vary. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
And not enough emphasis on the biodiversity aspects.
We're really shooting ourselves in our collective foot by the "efficiencies" being implemented in modern farming. Where before there might have been numerous different and diverse varieties of a plant--potatoes, say, or tomatoes, beans, peas, or apples--now farmers concentrate on just a few that are high-yielding or easy to control or that are otherwise "efficient." The same holds true of animals used for food. Many formerly robust breeds of pigs or chickens or beef cattle are now verging on extinction because it's cheaper to focus on raising one or two breeds.
What happens if a blight or pest shows up that devastates our few varieties of corn or wheat? Suppose the more popular breed of swine or chicken develops some sort of genetic anomaly or other disease? I believe (but am not sure) that there's already been a scare regarding corn. It could happen with any other food plant.
Interested hobbyist gardeners have been forming "seed savers" groups for years to perpetuate what they call "heirloom" vegetables. (They do it for ornamental plants, too.) More recently, small-scale farmers and hobbyists have begun doing the same thing with "heritage" livestock animals such as turkeys, chickens, and swine.
There's an interest in these products among food lovers (fancy restaurants, famous chefs, or what-have you). Heirloom tomatoes and heritage pork are deemed to be a lot tastier than the everyday supermarket varieties, and I suspect that may be true. But more attention needs to be paid to preserving all these breeds and varieties so that our food plants and animals retain the robustness that comes from diversity.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
The real question is whether they'll bury to Doomsday Porn Vault next to it. If we provide porn, it would practically double the incentive to find this thing! Sex and Food!