Doomsday Vault Begins Deep Freeze (seeds)

[Tom]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7097052.stm

The Svalbard International Seed Vault is designed to keep seeds alive and well for over hundreds of years, to ensure crop survival in the event of an extreme natural disaster or nuclear war. You can see the layout of the vault below the article.

I think its a wonderful idea, and although it is quite sad that it is time to take the necessary precautions to prevent crop extinction, I'm glad somebody was innovative enough to do it. What do you guys think? Smart? Unnecessary? Preapocalyptic heebie-jeebies?

 

[Mr.GAW]

I think this is awesome. I'm glad we're actually looking to the future, especially since the world is ending in 2012.

 

[Jammer]

Doomsday Vault. Sounds totally awesome.

Until you find out it's filled with freaking seeds. Lame.

Actually, it's pretty cool. If I could ever get close enough to the vault, I will sneak a male and female pidgeon in there.

When we open the vault a hundred years later because of some crop failure, there won't be any seeds, but there will be a million pidgeons. Now that would be awesome.

 

[Eor]

It's creative, though in the event of something as traumatic and they're describing, it won't do much good. The best thing it could do is help the people dozens of generations down from us, because by then the plants we've reintroduced would be popular around the world

 

[Jammer]

Eor, I have to say, I do not understand your post at all. What do you mean by "by then the plants we've reintroduced would be popular around the world"? What are you talking about? What do you mean it won't do us much good?

Seriously, either I've lost all reading comprehension abilities, or you scrambled up the wording of your post to give it a new (non-) meaning.

 

[Mr.GAW]

He just means that the number of seeds they'll have in the vault won't do OUR generation any good, although they might save our people many years down the line.

 

[Jammer]

The number of seeds isn't important, because you just grow a few and harvest the seeds from the grown plants.

Man, I'm still confused.

 

[Eor]

Consider how widespread our population is. We are overcrowding, but that's over an enormous amount of space. The vault only has around 4500 seeds, and even if it had 100 times that number, they couldn't repopulate the extinct plants in one generations time. However, many years down the line, those plants would have spread, and so would have been reintroduced, helping those people, and not us.

It's like reintroducing bald eagles. If we have 8 bald eagles, 4 of each sex, and we reintroduce them in a park, we're not doing ourselves much of a favor, it's only 8 birds. However, around 100 years down the line, when there are 1,000 birds, then it would have payed off.

1 isn't a lot, but if that 1 splits into 2, then those 2 split into 4s, and so forth, then a 1 would lead to a larger number in the future. Replace 1 with plants

I hope those different explanations show what I mean

 

[Jammer]

Okay, I see what you're saying now.

Although you'd think that after a century, we'd be able to come up with an excellent, steady food supply that isn't affected by plagues or other bad stuff.

 

[KingJiggyWiggy]

When will they create the Umbrella Labs?