The doomsday vaults storing seeds, data and DNA to protect our future
Around the world, highly secure chambers are being built to preserve everything we need to withstand any number of worst-case scenarios
Others are looking further afield – even to the moon. In 2021, engineers from the University of Arizona unveiled ambitious proposals for a solar-powered “lunar ark”, which would seek to cryopreserve seeds, sperm and egg samples and store them in a facility built into the moon’s lava tubes – networks of conduits formed by streams of lava billions of years ago. The idea is that the ark would protect the planet’s biodiversity should there be a sudden, cataclysmic event, such as a supervolcanic eruption or a major asteroid strike.
Presumably no copies of the Guardian will be stored in the Earth-based vaults - survivors will need all the optimism they can muster.
They don't want to stagger out of their doomsday shelters after that supervolcano eruption, only for stored copies of the Guardian to remind them that COP30 is the last opportunity to avert climate catastrophe.
And Greta Doomberg is due to attend via a balloon filled with green hydrogen. And King Charles. And Gary Lineker...
5 comments:
"It isn’t just about seeds – researchers are preserving everything from DNA to data, and even faeces."
You're telling me, matey...
It's a question, what to keep. In the immediate aftermath of Chernobyl I was press ganged into some work for HMG. (Pro bloody bono, mind; pay came there none.)
I was impressed by the amount of relevant information on Soviet nuclear reactors that Somebody Secret could get onto my desk PDQ. Well done them. (Which "them"? I was never told with any precision.)
Years later I was clearing out my office and could find none of the stuff that I had been provided with. Maybe HMG had demanded it back when I'd done my stint but I have no memory of the detail.
Should I have retained something to reread in old age? To show a grandson?
As my FIL used to say, 'How about a photograph of the death of Nelson?"
Sam - it's the bureaucratic mind, "nobody can blame us for not thinking long and hard about faeces."
dearieme - interesting that it disappeared. Maybe HMG quietly hoovered it all up afterwards.
Scrobs - I bet not many people know who he was. "Was he on TikTok?" they ask.
"Maybe HMG quietly hoovered it all up afterwards." Seems unlikely; all they had to do was ask. It's just that I can't remember. I don't remember any particular security steps at the time either; I suspect I locked the stuff in an ordinary filing cabinet when I left the office in the evening.
Maybe I should have lurked under my desk all night in case the KGB came a-calling.
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