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Thanks, so then the first line is straight up fake news: >"It was designed as an impregnable deep-freeze to protect the world’s most precious seeds from any global disaster and ensure humanity’s food supply forever."
I think it's safe to assume that while it's not the immediate intention, it certainly can act as such in a pinch.
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Placing the vault in a more populous and accessible region increases the possibility of, well, take your pick: theft, terrorism, political interference, collateral damage in the case of war, and so on.
Also, when I questioned the wisdom of putting it somewhere maximally inaccessible, I didn't necessarily mean they should have gone to the opposite extreme of putting it in the middle of a population center. Nothing personal but this mode of argument seems both fallacious and unhelpful. I suggested an alternative (a somewhat accessible mountain cave) grounded in real-world experience (actual locations of military comm…
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It not really a doomsday vault despite the media trying to portrait it like that. It's really a seed storage for anyone who wants to store some seeds. I visited the vault a few years ago and was very disappointed to learn this. I had imagined some committee planning what we need to get back from Mad Max to normal. But it's really more like a bank lock box.
But.. “We have to find solutions. It is a big responsibility and we take it very seriously. We are doing this for the world.” “This is supposed to last for eternity,” said Åsmund Asdal at the Nordic Genetic Resource Centre, which operates the seed vault.
"It was not in our plans to think that the permafrost would not be there and that it would experience extreme weather like that,” Sorry, but isn't that the entire point of a "doomsday vault". To protect from doomsday events, like extreme climate change?
It not really a doomsday vault despite the media trying to portrait it like that. It's really a seed storage for anyone who wants to store some seeds. I visited the vault a few years ago and was very disappointed to learn this. I had imagined some committee planning what we need to get back from Mad Max to normal. But it's really more like a bank lock box.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That and saving the seeds of flowering plants without preserving eggs of pollinating insects isn't very useful.
I remember hearing I think it was a Radiolab episode which talked of an instance where a lot pollination was done by humans, by hand, with paint brushes and pollen. It turned out that the humans were actually better at it than the insects, because they were more consistent. So the result was a crop that was larger than it would have been had insects done the pollinating. It's kind of a "waste" of human effort to do m…