![]() The inaugural deposit consisted of 320,000 seeds from over 100 countries, including staple varieties such as maize, rice, wheat, cowpea, sorghum, eggplant, lettuce, barley, and potato. On February 26, 2008, then Prime Minister of Norway, Jens Stoltenberg, unlocked the Global Seed Vault and placed the first seeds for storage together with then President of the European Union José Manuel Barroso, then UN FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf, and African Nobel Peace Prize awardee and environmentalist Wangari Maathai. As the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture was coming into force in 2001, an agreed international legal framework for conserving and accessing crop diversity made the Global Seed Vault a practical possibility. Building a global security storage facility to store duplicates of seeds from gene banks all over the world began in the 1980s. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is an answer to a call from the international community to provide the best possible assurance of safety for the world’s crop diversity. Established and owned by Norway, it is operated in a unique partnership between the Norwegian Ministry of Food and Agriculture, the regional genebank NordGen and the Crop Trust, an independent international organization. The Global Seed Vault can store 4.5 million seed samples at -18☌ (-0.4☏). Photo Source: Cierra Martin for Crop TrustĪlso called the "Doomsday Global Seed Vault," it is the world's largest backup facility for crop diversity and stores duplicates of seeds from seed collections and gene banks from around the globe, kept for long-term storage to contribute to securing the world’s food supply. After all, existential risks might be unlikely, but they only need to happen once.On top of the world: Svalbard Global Seed Vault now stores close to 1.2 million seed samples from almost every country on the planet. Right now, all of our eggs are in the same basket. Of course, it's still much better to prevent catastrophes from happening in the first place (which is why we need a better system to monitor asteroids and comets, as well as super-volcanos, and we need to make the likelihood of thermonuclear war as small as possible), but it can't hurt to plan for the worse case scenario. The information would be in many languages (such as Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish), and there would be at least 4,000 "Earth repositories" that would provide shelter, food, a water supply for survivors. The full archive would be launched by 2035.( source) ![]() The scientists envisage placing the first experimental databank on the moon no later than 2020 and it could have a lifespan of 30 years. The databank would need to be buried under rock to protect it from the extreme temperatures, radiation and vacuum on the moon. It's a bit similar to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, except in an even more robust location. It would also contain DNA information to eventually allow the revival of various species of plants and animals that might have also disappeared. So the goal would be to have a kind of Wikipedia accessible to the survivors, except that this Wikipedia would try to make it as easy to understand things and follow instructions to reacquire various technologies. ![]() if no receivers survived, the ark would continue transmitting the information until new ones could be built. It would be buried in a vault just under the lunar surface and transmitters would send the data to heavily protected receivers on earth. Photo: Flickr, CC The construction of a lunar information bank, discussed at a conference in Strasbourg last month, would provide survivors on Earth with a remote-access toolkit to rebuild the human race.Ī basic version of the ark would contain hard discs holding information such as DNA sequences and instructions for metal smelting or planting crops.
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