But where's the human gene vault? Aren't we going to build a set of automatons to repopulate the Earth with humans after it is destroyed? Or am I being too apocalyptic?

Isn't that the new CHillMaX Warezdude9000 tower from IBuyPower?

It sure looks like it.

Who has the keys?

awesome idea, but I really only want to know one thing: what kind of ganja are we preserving for future generations?

I think humans tried this with Titan A.E. I don't remember, did that work out for us?

On point, this place looks sweet, and would be amazing to take a field trip to.

Why does this give me a terrible feeling?

Do they know something we dont?

@the intrepid spaceman spiff: Hopefully the government of Holland will make sure their national crops are represented.

Clearing the Wampas out of there first must have been a real mother f**er.

after you say a compound can withstand a nuclear blast isn't it a little redundant to say it can take a plane crash?

while we repopulate the earth with plants and animals based on the genese stored here will there be an inter-dimensional plant humanoid there to safeguard us with his shiny red coat and his spiky yellow hair?

"Carved into permafrost" ...
That is some REALLY stupid planning right there. The Alaskan pipeline was built on permafrost, and already it is starting to buckle as the permafrost melts. This is going to be a worthless shelter in... I'd say under 50 years.

@Ghede: Hmm, I notice however, that they have supported the walls with concrete, but they neglect to mention what it is built ON.

I feel an episode of the Simpsons coming on.

If they don't tell everyone where it is, then it's very likely that whoever survives "doomsday" won't know where to look.

You laugh now, but next month when Norway's doomsday machine goes online, we'll all be up shits creek.

Stock Strangelove quote:

"That is the whole idea of this machine, you know. Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy... the FEAR to attack. And so, because of the automated and irrevocable decision-making process which rules out human meddling, the Doomsday machine is terrifying and simple to understand... and completely credible and convincing. "

Eh, gene vaults are good things to have, but I'd like to see a more extensive amount of things kept, in numerous bunkers, in various locations.

@tetracycloide:

"If you keep saving butterflies, the spiders will die! But...wanting to save both is a contradiction. What would you rather do? Keep deliberating? The butterfly will be eaten in the meantime."

"LOVE AND PEACE!"

AH! So that's where the trains went during the last episode of Surface!!!

Where the human gene vault? HERE:
[pcillu101.blogspot.com]

This is not the Doomsday Vault, but rather the Bloomsday Vault, polar cities for future survivors of global warming. Take a peek at the images. Much more work to be done, but it's a beginning of a global thought experiment. See news about polar cities at Gizmodo and Geekologie and Google Blogs. James Lovelock has seen them and gave them his blessing.

As for Norway seed vault, it is built only to last for 200 years. That's nothing. They will need those seeds for 10,000 years. Why just 200 years?

By the way, we are taking applications for volunteers to live in the first model polar city in Longyearbyen, named for an American industrialist, John Longyear, from Michigan, who went to Norway long ago, and you can apply by writing to me here:

danboom AT gmail

Charlie
can you blog on polar city images one day soon?

Wow, Fortress of Solitude... Maybe they could put Marlon Brando's corpse in there.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Doomsday Vault in Norway: Seed Vault & Polar Cities For Survivors

The seed vault in Svaalbord, Norway, in a little town called Longyearbyen (named after US industrialist John Longyear --really, google his name! -- who went mining there long long ago)opens today, February 26, 2008 [or Year 4,000,008 Earth Era if we are keeping time the right way! -- it's hardly year 2008 on Earth!]. My take on the seed vault project is this:

I love it. Great idea, great project, wonderful global PR and public awareness about climate change and global warming. Why? Because for the first time, because of this project's immense news value in print and online, with hundreds of reporters covering the opening ceremony today in Svaalbord, including Becky Anderson of CNN, and print reports in the newspapers worldwide tomorrow about the seed vault, people around the globe will be reading about these special scary terms: climate change, global warming, catastrophe, calamity, possible end of civilization as we know it, and terms and phrases like that. And why is this good? Because the seed vault project, while it's only about SEEDS for now, it is paving the way, in the human mind, to also think about what might happen if global warming gets out of control and sometime in the far distant future, humans must migrate north to live in "sustainable population retreats" (OR, "polar cities" to use another term) to continue the human species, where Lovelock's "breeding pairs" in the Arctic will live to propagate the human species generation after generation, for as long as it takes for the Earth to become habitable again in the middle and central regions.

So the seed vault project is helping people to better grasp the idea of polar cities, as a worst case scenario for humankind. Of course, one hopes we will never need polar cities. I certainly hope not. But .... we might need them, and the goal of the Polar Cities Research Project (Google the term) is to help prepare people worldwide for what might happen in the far distant future. Images such as these:

[pcillu101.blogspot.com]

also help people visualize the unthinkable.

If we need to keep seeds in a special storage vault, then it might be that someday we will need to house humans in special northern population retreats, (polar cities or polar villages or polar retreats -- in Alaska, Canada, Russia, Greenland, and yes, even in Svaalbord, Norway). In fact, one side project of ours is to start a test model polar city in Longyearbyen in the year 2015, with volunteers assembling for the team in 2012. Again, this is not science fiction, and to learn more about the model polar city idea, google the words. Already people have emailed in to sign up.

Preserving seeds is a vital, important idea. Wonderful! And in the future, we might need to draw on some of the same ideas and engineering feats to build polar cities for human beings to live in.

References:
Gizmoodo.com
Gridskipper.com
Geekologie blog
Google ("polar cities" and "model polar city")

One of the people invovled in the seed vault tells me today:

"There is no reason to believe that the Seed Vault will not be standing
thousands of years from now. It is carved out of solid stone inside a
mountain. All equipment and materials are absolutely of the highest quality.
Thus, we do not believe that anything could be built to last longer by
anyone."

Because I asked him if it was true that the vault was engineered and guaranteed by the builders only to last 200 years, according to the AFP news report. True or not?

Perhaps the vault can only be guaranteed to last 200 years as a contractual thing, but according to the seed vault people, it can last thousands of years. GOOD!

Also, Fred Pearce was just on CNN telling a reporter that the vault will last hundreds if not thousands of years, but I wonder how anyone can know how long it will last. Still, it is a wonderful idea and just in time.

Construction leader Magnus Bredeli-Tveiten said the vault was designed to withstand earthquakes and a direct nuclear strike. But guaranteed, according to engineering contract, just for 200 years...

The permafrost insulating the vault alone would help keep the seeds "cold for 200 years," Fowler said.

Headline roundup:

The world's most important fridge

Seed vault built in Arctic as mankind's 'insurance policy'

Future of the world placed on ice

Life in the cold store

'Noah's Ark' for plants opening

BUT OOPS: "Faults in the vault: not everyone is celebrating Svalbard"

Svalbard seed vault: not everyone is celebrating

GRAIN | "Against the grain" | 26 February 2008
[www.grain.org]

After months of extraordinary publicity, and with the apparently unanimous support of the international scientific community, the "Global Seed Vault" was officially opened today on an island in Svalbard, Norway. Nestled inside a mountain, the Vault is basically a giant icebox able to hold 4.5 million seed samples in cold storage for humanity's future needs. The idea is that if some major disaster hits world agriculture, such as fallout from a nuclear war, countries could turn to the Vault to pull out seeds to restart food production. However, this "ultimate safety net" for the biodiversity that world farming depends on is sadly just the latest move in a wider strategy to make ex situ (off site) storage in seed banks the dominant -- indeed, only -- approach to crop diversity conservation. It gives a false sense of security in a world where the crop diversity present in the farmers' fields continues to be eroded and destroyed at an ever-increasing rate and contributes to the access problems that plague the international ex situ system.

FAULTY ASSUMPTIONS

Cary Fowler, Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust and one of the main proponents of the Vault, says that the initiative "will rescue the most globally important developing-country collections of the world's 21 most important food crops." While it's true that crop diversity needs to be rescued and protected, as irreplaceable diversity is being lost at an alarming scale, relying solely on burying seeds in freezers is no answer. The world currently has 1,500 ex situ genebanks that are failing to save and preserve crop diversity. Thousands of accessions have died in storage, as many have been rendered useless for lack of basic information about the seeds, and countless others have lost their unique characteristics or have been genetically contaminated during periodic grow-outs. This has happened throughout the ex situ system, not just in genebanks of developing countries. So the issue is not about being for or against genebanks, it is about the sole reliance on one conservation strategy that, in itself, has a lot of inherent problems.

The deeper problem with the single focus on ex situ seed storage, that the Svalbard Vault reinforces, is that it is fundamentally unjust. It takes seeds of unique plant varieties away from the farmers and communities who originally created, selected, protected and shared those seeds and makes them inaccessible to them. The logic is that as people's traditional varieties get replaced by newer ones from research labs -- seeds that are supposed to provide higher yields to feed a growing population -- the old ones have to be put away as "raw material" for future plant breeding. This system forgets that farmers are the world's original, and ongoing, plant breeders. To access the seeds, you have to be integrated into a whole institutional framework that most farmers on the planet simply don't even know about. Put simply, the whole ex situ strategy caters to the needs of scientists, not farmers

In addition, the system operates under the assumption that once the farmers' seeds enter a storage facility, they belong to someone else and negotiating intellectual property and other rights over them is the business of governments and the seed industry itself. In the case of most so-called public genebanks, the seeds are said to become part of "the public domain" if not "national sovereignty" (which increasingly translates to state ownership). The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), which runs about 15 global genebanks for the world's most widely used staple food crops, has even set up a legal arrangement of "trusteeship" that it exercises over the treasure chest of farmers' seeds that it holds "on behalf of" the international community, under the auspices of the FAO. Yet they never asked the farmers whom they took the seeds from in the first place if this was okay and they left farmers totally out of the trusteeship equation.

The new Svalbard Vault lies squarely at the pinnacle of this faulty architecture and false assumptions, inevitably exacerbating these problems. Because it is a "doomsday" backup collection, it raises the stakes to new extremes. Nobody really knows for sure if the Vault will be effective in keeping the seeds alive and its security is untested. Just days before the opening of the Vault, Svalbard was at the centre of the biggest earthquake in Norway's history, even though the facility's feasibility study assured that "there is no volcanic or significant seismic activity" in the area. But more troubling than any technical matter is the issue of access, the keys to which are held by few hands.

ACCESS AND BENEFIT ILLS

The Vault is not immune from the terrible controversies over access to and benefits from the world's precious agricultural biodiversity. The Norwegian government is ultimately responsible for the Vault and is currently regarded as fair and trustworthy, but there is no guarantee that the country's policies won't change. This is acknowledged by the Norwegian government itself, which has provided agreements to be signed with depositors that last only ten years and that include clauses allowing them to be terminated if policies change. Probably more important, the Norwegian government will not be making decisions autonomously. Decisions will be shared with the Global Crop Diversity Trust, a private entity with strong private and corporate funding.

There are already some access issues with the Vault. For all practical purposes, seeds cannot be stored in the Vault unless they come from genebanks that have successfully duplicated their samples in another bank. More than this, depositors are not allowed to put in seeds that are already stored in the Vault. The Standard Depositor Agreement states that the "Depositor shall deposit only samples of plant genetic resources that are, to the best of the Depositor's knowledge,.. samples of plant genetic resources that have not yet been deposited in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault" and that "the Depositor recognizes the right of the Royal Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food to refuse to accept samples for deposit or to terminate the deposit of samples already deposited if the samples constitute duplicates of materials already held in deposit in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault".

As a rule, only depositors can access their own collections at Svalbard, or give permission for someone else to. With parcels of CGIAR seeds already arriving in Norway, this means that the CGIAR Centres will be the depositors for most of the seeds held in the Vault, giving them almost exclusive control over access. Indeed, as the Seed Vault feasibility study indicates, it was "assumed that the [Vault] would begin operations with a nucleus consisting of the CGIAR materials and those of certain key national genebanks and that this (sic) 'founding collections' would discourage subsequent unnecessary duplication of materials within the Svalbard facility." Out of the 19 depositor institutes that have registered with the Vault so far, only three are national seed banks from developing countries. The Vault, then, is not a safe deposit box for just anyone. It is mostly the CGIAR's private stash.

In practical terms this means that many developing countries that want to duplicate their collections in Svalbard would not be able to do so directly. It would be seen as a duplicate of what the CGIAR has already deposited. They will not, therefore, have direct access to seeds in the Vault that may have been collected from their country. This might not seem to pose many concerns right now because governments have different backup sources for seeds but the context would be vastly different under any doomsday scenario where decisions would have to be taken over a critical, unique resource which suddenly only remains in Svalbard. For farmers there is pretty much no possibility for direct access to seeds in the Vault.

But doomsday aside, it is important to ask who really benefits from the ex situ system that the Vault contributes to. As the few transnational seed corporations that control over half the world's US$30 billion annual commercial seed market are increasingly buying up public plant breeding programmes and governments are pulling out of plant breeding, the ultimate beneficiaries will be the very same corporations that are at the roots of crop diversity destruction.

STOP DESTROYING DIVERSITY INSTEAD!

If governments were truly interested in conserving biodiversity for food and agriculture, they would do two things. First, they would, as a central priority, focus their efforts on supporting diversity in their countries' farms and markets rather than only betting on big centralised genebanks. This means leaving seeds in the hand of local farmers, with their active and innovative farming practices, respecting and promoting the rights of communities to conserve, produce, breed, exchange and sell seeds. But this won't happen until governments turn agricultural policy and regulations upside down and stop pushing for industrialisation and feeding corporate-controlled global markets at the expense of letting farmers freely feed their own communities and countries. This means making food sovereignty the foundation of farm policy instead of continuously pushing agriculture further down the destructive path of corporate-led global market integration.

Svalbard is about putting diversity away, in case of some hypothetic emergency. The real urgency, however, is to let diversity live -- in farms, in the hand of farmers, and across people-controlled and community-oriented markets -- today.

The vault was built by Statsbygg, the Directorate of Public Construction and Property.

Asked about the vault's estimated life-span, Westengen said 'It was built to last 200 years.' The constructor could not 'guarantee' a longer period.

Why won't they learn?

I thought this was built by Superman because his Fortress of Solitude had a dated floorplan. Have you ever tried to hang a flat panel HDTV on an ice crystal wall? That's why he had to move into a place with concrete walls and a more modern decor.

Damn, that looks like it was designed by Mike Mignola - maybe it's the set for Hellboy III? That's gotta be Lobster Johnson in the first picture! :-D