doomsday vaults

[everything]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... our-future

Inside, the door shut behind us, I’m greeted by the one antidote we’d need in the face of impending annihilation: a larder lined with rows and rows of sealed glass jars full of seeds. This is the largest seed bank in the world – nearly 2.5bn seeds are conserved here, ready for use in hundreds, if not thousands of years to come. Most seeds are frozen in these vaults, though a smaller number are cryopreserved instead and stored in vats of liquid nitrogen at -180C.

[origami_itto]

Does liquid nitrogen heat up over time?

[everything]

i couldn't find how long it stays at -196C, but saw it requires constant monitoring by trained lab people. guess in the zombie apocalypse, it's a problem. if the world is still around but needs doomsday planting of these seeds, it's different. apparently, the vaults have already been helping restore plants.

[Trick]

doomsday stuff needs a conspiracy story - https://tlio.org.uk/svalbard-bayer-mons ... al-crisis/

[vadaga]

I dont get it tbh. Life finds a way, and nothing is permanent. All life evolved from protoplasm originally, and if there were liveable conditions following a cataclysm life would evolve again. The idea that a certain set of species being alive is static and should be 'preserved' is a fallacy. Liveable conditions are what we need to preserve.

[origami_itto]

It's a good idea to have food you know you can eat handy if you want to survive

[Steve James]

Life finds a way, but extinction of species is the rule. Imo, the doomsday vault is like a family's kitchen pantry. The stuff in it might be needed in the near not necessarily the distant future.

Anyway, even if there's no doomsday, having a record of the seeds we have right now may be invaluable. For ex., maybe there's a miracle drug in one of those plants -that we find out after we've destroyed that plant's habitat.

[everything]

it's the way for all species including homo sapiens to go extinct, but we'll try to survive including by ensuring biodiversity in our self-centered interest, i guess.

this part was pretty funny

As at the Millennium Seed Bank, security is paramount. The facility is alarmed and has video surveillance. Polar bears, says Bjerkestrand, act as security guards. (I let out a chuckle at this, but Bjerkestrand is serious. “You laugh, but a couple of years ago there was a Dutch guy taken for breakfast by a polar bear just a few hundred metres from the entrance of the vault.”) The land naturally lends itself to the preservation of the photosensitive film: the vaults are dry, dark and, thanks to the surrounding permafrost – permanently frozen ground – extremely cold.

[Trick]

will the vault survive the doom of global warming, and with no permanent frost on the pointy-mountains（spitsbergen）the polarbears will be out of work, well, out of land.
maybe the land will be farmable ?

[everything]

very good questions it seems they have to consider now

[Trick]

when was it ? 2015 or 16 ? the vault got flooded through leakage, but should now be tight.