As the person responsible for changing the tape in our IT servers, this article in New Scientist about, well, backing up the world (or Doomsday vault to avoid world famine, as they put it) appealed to me. Two million seeds will be held in a concrete room in a mountain on a freezing island by the Norwegian government and the Global Crop Diversity Trust. The theory being that this would "safeguard the world's food supply against nuclear war, climate change, terrorism, rising sea levels, earthquakes and the ensuing collapse of electricity supplies", assuming anyone is alive to do it, of course (or can remember how).
Reminds me of some past ideas on the GIB, including:
- the similarly cheery Post-Apocalptic Human Knowledge Manual
- a Full Catalogue of the Edible World
and another one I can't dig out about storing this kind of knowledge / civilisation back-up off the Earth in some sort of space capsule......
[All this originally prompted via WorldChanging and the Guardian]
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