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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."
...on seeds that are buried in a mountain on a remote island? Provided they can get there, how many big macs can they make from those seeds?
Now the aliens know where to aim their bunker buster lasers.
How am I supposed to get to these seeds in a post-apocalyptic world?
The Svalbard International Seed Vault will house the seed samples will at a preservative -18C (0F), and could be used by post-apocalyptic people to feed a hungry planet.
I don't think Unicron likes seeds.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
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.
Scientists go to the North Pole to build a Doomsday Vault, only to find such a vault is already there.
o_O
Sigs are for Terrorists.
...where did I leave that key?
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
Seems like putting all your eggs in a single basket is maybe not the best solution.
Since seeds are cheap why not distribute storage repositories around the globe?
Nonetheless I am thankful that the Norwegians are doing this for potentially all of humanity.
Come to think about it, I suppose the fact that our collective genome is stuck on this planet is akin to putting all your eggs in a single fragile basket.
If they started based on economic value I'm assuming the first seeds included were Hemp. It's the biggest cash crop in the US.
Ocean voyage. Fighting off post-apocalyptic pirates to get to the seed storage site only to find that it's submerged and you have to fight mutant sea creatures to get inside so you can save your village with the last non-mutated vegetables in the world.
:)
Kind of like a cross between "The Postman" and "Waterworld".
Okay, I lied about the "good" part.
Now they'll have something to eat besides all the cockroaches.
RTFA:"We also modelled climate change in a drastic form 200 years into future, which included the melting of ice sheets at the North and South Poles, and Greenland, to make sure that this site was above the resulting water level."
Shakespeare poems - infinite monkeys with infinite time.Computer tech support - a few trained ones working from 9 to 5.
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
"... and could be used by post-apocalyptic people to feed a hungry planet"
Am I the only one who read this as to not mean the hungry people on the planet? I read it more as a means to rebuild the eco-system of the world, thus feeding the planet. Sure, building the agriculture back up will in turn feed the people; but a long term goaled project like this surly is planning for a long term result.
"I only know 2 things: The love for me, and the fear of me."
Nah, it could be a good movie, or a good video game, or paper RPG module, or book for that matter. I had the same exact thought, "Whoah, that would make a cool story!"
Imagine, it starts out in some desolate village, with people scraping by on a few mutant crops and canned goods. Every year, the situation becomes a little more desperate as the crops produce few viable seeds and the canned goods are running out. Our intrepid hero (probably a moon-headed youth out exploring some old ruins instead of working) finds a fragment of an ancient magazine mentioning the seed-vault. He has some difficulty convincing his elders to invest any of the villages precious food-stuffs in his hair-brained scheme, but then the village seed stocks are plundered by raiders, leaving no choice. Of course, the raiders find out about the seed-vault and thus become recurring bad-guys throughout the rest of the story.
The journey to the seed-vault would be fraught with danger. Mutants, savages, the ever-present raiders, hot-zones and weather run amok all dog our heros on their journey. I say heros, because of course we need a team. There has to be the strong and capable ranger-type who doesn't quite trust the kid; the plucky heroine, tomboyish until she lets her hair down and we discover just how beautiful she is; the kid's geeky friend who knows how to fix things; the brawny muscle-type with a secret heart of gold who sacrifices himself when all seems lost, and the sneaky one who turns out to be a traitor like we always suspected he would.
When they finally get there, they discover... well, it could go lots of ways here. I'll leave it up to the imagination.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Make sure you test the backup regularly. It would be quite a nuisance to wake up after a global disaster and find out that your seed backup is corrupted.
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!
We're at the end of the current 20,000-year interglacial period of warmth and about to plunge back down into a frigid 80,000-year period of glaciation.
The 100,000-year glaciation cycle is as regular as clockwork, and nobody really has a clue how to stop it. (Chucking massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere isn't anywhere near enough.)
So shouldn't the Doomsday Vault be located somewhere where it can be reached, rather than on a mountain side that will soon be (geologically speaking) under 3 kilometers of ice?
Mr. President, we must not allow a Seed Vault gap!
From reading a few of the comments I think that some posters are missing the point. First off, the idea is not to save a few seeds in the hopes that those seeds will feed the 'entire' population of earth after planting just one crop. The idea is to preserve the overall agricultural diversity of our 'future' ecosystem. As one particular species of plant (or whatever) goes extinct, the proposed seed bank would (hopefully) ensure that our future ancestors could reintroduce the species back into the ecosystem, assuming that whatever caused the species to go extinct was no longer present, be it nuclear war, climatic changes, etc. As for the location, well, I imagine that it makes more financial sense to keep them in a place where you won't have to foot the air-conditioning bill. Sure, it would be great to have these 'master-backup' seed banks all over the earth to prevent a wayward disaster from wiping out the whole stock, but I'd guess that the cost of building a cold-storage facility for an indefinite period of operation in Nairobi would be much more costly. (Not to mention that if the arctic DOES melt, we're all probably done for anyways...) And the article does mention that there are several seed banks already in existence, and that this facility is to be a more secure backup to the existing banks. Just my 2 cents...
How long will a post-apocalyptic population last on seeds that are buried in a mountain on a remote island? Provided they can get there, how many big macs can they make from those seeds?
And they might as well make them into bread, because they are unlikely to sprout.
Seeds stay fertile only for a limited time. You can stretch that somewhat by keeping them frozen - provided that the particular seeds can survive freezing, of course. But short of cryonic preservation (after perfusing them with cryoprotectants) you're not going to get them to last more than a few years.
That's why REAL plant gene banks work by growing the plants with heavy water. This drastically slows their metabolism (along with that of any bugs that might attack them), resulting in these tiny bonsai-like specimens that live very slowly - and thus very long - and eventually make seeds you can use to continue the cycle. Grow their seeds in normal water and you're back to normal plants - or gradually switch the plants over to normal water and they may revert to normal growth patterns.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You're supposed to plant them. :p
But rather than traditional nuclear winter scenarios, I think it's a good idea in case any of the bio-engineered crops ever goes rogue, or some freak disease or pest wipes out a species. How many hurricanes would it take to wipe out, say, the localized strains of rice in a region? One year of disasters? Two? Five?
Or one particularly pernicious bio-engineered cross breeding that produces sterile (no seed) offspring?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
1) Build Post-Apocalyptic Seed Bank for $5 million
2) Cause Apocalypse
3) Profit!!
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
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!
I would think that after the sort of apocalypse that has you looking for seed banks, the appeal of anorexogenic anything will go down sharply.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
Apparently, they aren't yet interested in Slashdot semen, so this doesn't appear to be a tax deductible donation opportunity for you...
The island is very unlikely to be underwater, they have used forecasts for the most aggresive global warming imaginable over the next 200 years and specifically chosen this site because it will be unaffected. A lot of the mountains on these islands are over 1000M high and any sea rise of even half that distance is likely to destroy so much of civilization that seed banks will be the last of our worries.
Why, how can Norway spend money on this far-sighted project?
They nationalized the oil industry. They don't pay tens of billions of dollars a quarter in raw profits to the big four oil corporations. They have their own oil resources in the North Sea.
And since the told the reavers to get the hell out, they are running nice surpluses, have an excellent federally funded school system, giving them intelligent citizens, and they may save the plant diversity of the planet during the coming climate wreck.
Now, if they can fast track some space colonization, they might save humans from getting overheated to death.
These are things you can do if your country isn't being run by international oil companies.