Centauri Dreams has little use for pessimism. The operative assumption in these precincts is that humanity will muddle through somehow and eventually get to the stars, whether in a matter of centuries or millennia. But it’s always good to have a backup plan in the event of catastrophe, which is what the Norwegian government has been working on. Who knows when some rogue asteroid like 99942 Apophis may beat the odds and fall, with shattering results, to Earth?
The Svalbard International Seed Vault has the aim of protecting the world’s agriculture in a vast seed bank, one that would house three million seed samples. Collecting and maintaining the seeds is the Global Crop Diversity Trust, whose executive director, Cary Fowler, likened the vault to a safety net in a recent BBC story, saying “Can you imagine an effective, efficient, sustainable response to climate change, water shortages, food security issues without what is going to go in the vault – it is the raw material of agriculture.”
And if you drill 120 meters into a mountainside on Spitsbergen, you’ve found a place so remote and geologically stable that such a seed bank should survive a variety of catastrophes, including climate change that would raise the local sea level. Seeds are to be stored at -18 degrees Celsius, the beauty of the location also being that the permafrost that surrounds this site near the North Pole provides natural refrigeration in the event of power failure.
The facility is designed to operate autonomously, with no full-time staff. All of which gives me eerie reminiscences of Wells’ Time Machine, in the passage where the Time Traveller enters what is obviously the ruins of a huge museum. Here there are exhibits on chemistry, minerology, even the broken remains of a great library, but what left its mark on my imagination was the natural history exhibit Wells describes:
Within the big valves of the door–which were open and broken–we found, instead of the customary hall, a long gallery lit by many side windows. At the first glance I was reminded of a museum. The tiled floor was thick with dust, and a remarkable array of miscellaneous objects was shrouded in the same grey covering. Then I perceived, standing strange and gaunt in the centre of the hall, what was clearly the lower part of a huge skeleton. I recognized by the oblique feet that it was some extinct creature after the fashion of the Megatherium. The skull and the upper bones lay beside it in the thick dust, and in one place, where rain-water had dropped through a leak in the roof, the thing itself had been worn away. Further in the gallery was the huge skeleton barrel of a Brontosaurus. My museum hypothesis was confirmed. Going towards the side I found what appeared to be sloping shelves, and clearing away the thick dust, I found the old familiar glass cases of our own time. But they must have been air-tight to judge from the fair preservation of some of their contents.
Svalbard’s installation will, we hope, stay in better shape, though who knows what can happen at the time scales Wells talks about? And, of course, a vault like this one needs constant replenishment, depending on the species being preserved — some seeds simply won’t survive more than a few decades in their frozen state. Nonetheless, the concept of hoarding away life’s treasures to ensure their survival has a deep resonance, and we can hope to do better than the museum builders Wells writes about if we plan intelligently and think long-term.
And just in from the New York Times:
Bent Skovmand, a plant scientist who helped to create the “doomsday vault,” a massively fortified cavern to safeguard three million kinds of unique crop seeds against catastrophe, died Tuesday in Kavlinge, Sweden. He was 61.
A notable fact from the story: “…of an estimated 7,100 types of apples grown in the United States in the 1800s, more than 6,800 no longer exist.” Skovmand’s career was dedicated in part to ensuring against that kind of loss, his work on the Svalbard International Seed Vault just the capstone to a remarkable career. The entire article is worth reading.
yes sir this is a very fine idea.but one for which i hope there will be no need.you are 100% correct,if we simply use our intelligence there should be no reason to assume that we will self destruct. thank you your friend george
Thanks for this. You know, that generally silly film Silent Running was prophetic. We’re approaching the end of wilderness speciation, even on Earth; from here on, most species will be cultivated, or exist only in cold storage. Although, there will always be a wilderness of some sort.
But think how it will be in our space colonies. Until they have an aggregate surface area approaching Earth’s, the number of species out of storage will be a small fraction of the ones in. How long would that take, assuming perhaps a twenty-year doubling rate for the Asteroid Belt, and a hundred-year rate for Kuiper and comet materials brought into the Inner System? Hundreds or thousands of years.
We would then have to repeat the effort for every stellar system we colonized – if we needed to reproduce more than a small fraction of the terrestrial biosphere.
What we don’t know is, how large a biosphere a human civilization requires for sustainability. All of it? A ten-percent core? One percent?
This implies a tradeoff of Longevity against Mobility, which I think needs to be factored into percolation models. We actually don’t want or need Bracewell-Von Neuman probes to have a longevity much greater than the average travel time. Human exploration missions only need a longevity of a few travel times, so they can retreat; so they can get by with limited ecosystems. But the true colonies, built for indefinite longevity, will need the sufficient biodiversity fraction, whatever that is.
What a fascinating notion! I hadn’t pondered before this about the size of a biosphere in terms of stored species and their proliferation once released. A lot of room for speculation here as we look toward possible future colonies off-world.
I think we could do more than speculate. Should we return to the moon and establish at least a minimum base we can experiment. For example, build a dome, and perhaps a subsurface water barrier, fill it with air and try to grow a garden. It would be interesting to see what a minimum amount of biotic material, complete with a set of microbes and other organisms, would suffice to turn regolith into soil. Once found, and adjusted to moon and Mars surface composition, this could form a basic priming of an expandable ecosystem. It won’t be easy so we may as well get started.
Paul,
You may have read the quite interesting book of Robert Shapiro: Planetary Dreams: The Quest to Discover Life Beyond Earth (Wiley 1999), where he has conceived something similar, but in an even bigger context. The website about the idea is http://www.arc-space.org/
Tibor
Nice to hear from you, Tibor! ARC is now part of the Lifeboat Foundation, address here:
http://lifeboat.com/ex/main
I can’t believe a conversation that started with the seed vault and, at its essence the notion of protecting biodiversity spun off into ideas about colonizing outer space. WAKE UP. Human life and the complex biology that we live in cannot be replicated anywhere. There is absolutly no hope of creating environments in space that support life. WE HAVE TO TAKE RESPONSIBILITY NOW for the stewarship of the earth. People have to change thier patterns of over-consumption. We have to stop destroying the planet. Its clear the earth is dying. It useless to think we can move to another planet. We have to fix the one we are on.
That means everybody. Start now.
Really? So you don’t think terraforming has a chance on
any other world?
Personally I think we shouldn’t bother colonizing worlds
piecemeal and go straight for turning all systems into
Dyson Shells. Far more efficient in terms of energy
collecting and oh the room we would have!
Of course it might be even easier to just genetically engineer
beings that can survive in all kinds of environments on and off
alien worlds.
But then maybe we should just go straight to Artilects that can
easily out think and out manipulate anything that an organic
might try. I suspect that is what the first beings from another
system will be like, and it will take an Artilect that at least
originated from this planet to find and contact it.
Gates Grant To Help Poor Countries Contribute To Doomsday Seed Vault
The seed vault in Norway will not flood if Greenland’s ice sheet melts, which some estimate would increase sea levels by seven meters (23 feet).
by Staff Writers
Rome (AFP) Apr 20, 2007
A Gates Foundation grant will help developing countries send the seeds of “critical” food crops to a doomsday seed vault in an Arctic deep freeze, the recipients said Thursday.
“The fight against hunger cannot be won without securing fast-disappearing crop biodiversity,” the Global Crop Diversity Trust and its partner the UN Foundation said in announcing the grant of 30 million dollars (22 million euros).
Part of the grant by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to which the Norwegian government added 7.5 million dollars in matching funds, will go towards helping poor countries send seeds to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a statement said.
The so-called “Noah’s Ark of food” near the North Pole will store at least 450,000 seed samples at a temperature of minus 18 degrees Celsius (minus 0.4 Fahrenheit).
Full story here:
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Gates_Grant_To_Help_Poor_Countries_Contribute_To_Doomsday_Seed_Vault_999.html
DNA as the ultimate information storage device?
To quote:
Using the same code that computer keyboards use, the Japanese group, led by Masaru Tomita of Keio University, wrote four copies of Albert Einstein’s famous formula, E=mc2, along with “1905,” the date that the young Einstein derived it, into the bacterium’s genome, the 400-million-long string of A’s, G’s, T’s and C’s that determine everything the little bug is and everything it’s ever going to be.
The point was not to celebrate Einstein. The feat, they said in a paper published in the journal Biotechnology Progress, was a demonstration of DNA as the ultimate information storage material, able to withstand floods, terrorism, time and the changing fashions in technology, not to mention the ability to be imprinted with little unobtrusive trademark labels — little “Made by Monsanto” tags, say.
Full article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/science/26DNA.html
In Case of Apocalypse Later, a Plan to Ensure America’s Regreening
New York Times August 8, 2007
*************************
The Millennium Seed Bank Project,
run by the Royal Botanical Garden,
in Kew, England, aims to collect
seeds from 10 percent of the world’s
flowering plant species and to stow
them in a sort of climate-controlled
Noah’s Ark against the possibility
of depletion, whether by climate
change, alien-species invasion,
overdevelopment or apocalypse. The…
http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedirect.html?newsID=7112&m=25748
‘Lunar Ark’ could preserve civilisation, group says
The Moon could be used to “reboot” civilisation in case an asteroid strike or other disaster devastates Earth, a group called the Alliance to Rescue Civilization says.
By keeping a repository of technology, history, crops, and livestock on the Moon, humanity would have a way to restart civilisation following a catastrophe, the group says. A study of the idea is being led by former NASA manager Jim Burke of the International Space University in Strasbourg, France.
Full article here:
http://www.newscientist.com/blog/space/2007/08/lunar-ark-could-preserve-civilisation.html
‘The World Without Us’
By ALAN WEISMAN
Reviewed by JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
What would happen if Earth’s most invasive species — humans
— were wiped out?
Review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/books/review/Schuessler-t.html?8bu&emc=bu