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Doomsday Vault: First Tree Samples Arrive At Underground Seed Store
An anonymous reader writes "The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built into an Arctic mountain, received its first delivery of tree seeds. Opened in 2008, the vault is designed to withstand all natural and human disasters. From the article: "The 'doomsday' vault built into an Arctic mountain, which stores seeds for food crops in case of a natural disaster, has received its first delivery of tree samples. Norway spruce and Scots pine seeds have arrived at the frozen vault, which is located on Svalbard, an archipelago owned by and north of Norway. The organizations behind the vault hope to bring more seeds from outside of the Nordic countries. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault will now look after the samples and use them to monitor how natural forests change. They will also keep them as back-ups, in case any of the species are lost, and to see how the forests change during breeding."
I'm pretty sure Aperture Science used the same architect.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
"Man is the only animal that plans for doomsday. Or needs to.”
One could argue the dinosaurs might have needed to plan for doomsday as well.
They will still age and degrade, but the cold temperatures and lack of oxygen due to their packaging prolong the process. It's kind of like a sealed or open package in your fridge and freezer. The better sealed and the colder stored, the longer whatever it is will last...but only up to a point.
Depending on the seed type it may only be a relatively short time, say a dozen or two years, or it may be decades or much much longer for a more hardy seed. Whatever that time limit is, seeds can be rotated out, planted, and hopefully new generations grown to be refrozen perpetuating the cycle.
Here again, the Scandinavians prove they are the most superior culture on the planet. While much larger nations with far more resources are spending on their resources on military adventurism and weapons systems (including nations who also have possessions far north of the Arctic Circle, namely Russia), the Scandinavians have the highest quality of life in the world and are looking out for the future with this seed vault.
On a more reality-based note...
How in the hell are the survivors (who would be practically random) going to know...
1) that such a thing exists ...?
2) where (exactly) it is
3) how to get there (and back) without dying of something in the process (exposure, starvation, ocean storms, etc)
4) (assuming generations later) how to read the content labels, instructions, etc
It's a nice gesture and all for nearly any other scenario, but a *lot* of assumptions would have to be made for this to be viable in a no-shit doomsday scenario. At one point in human prehistory, it was estimated that a small extinction event reduced us to around 100k people, globally. That's a pretty scattered dispersion, and assuming a similar number of survivors in some future doomsday scenario, the odds are almost lottery-sized against putting it to use.
I'm not saying they should give up (far from it, actually) - I just think that maybe, just maybe they should expand on the idea a bit, and consider a few factors that seem awfully important when planning for a global doomsday scenario.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
"Man is the only animal that plans for doomsday. Or needs to.â
That worked out really well for the wooly mammoth, dodo bird, all of the dinosaurs, or anything else on this list.
If the human species needs instructions on how to plant a fucking seed, all of your above questions are irrelevant.
...so I give you a bag of seeds labelled "fwqnuiohuio", but don't tell you it's a plant that won't do very well outside of a warm-to-semi-tropical region, the plant fruits are underground but the plant itself is otherwise useless for food, it requires a *lot* of water during the latter phase of fruiting else you've wasted your time, and oh - it stands a great chance of giving a not-insignificant percentage of folks who eat the results a nasty case of anaphylactic shock.
Maybe cultural memories would help them recognize what a peanut is? Not sure if it'd help them know how to grow the things...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?