3 ms·

I kind of wonder the utility of something like this, if crops get wipe out for whatever reasons, I am sure finding new viable seeds will never be a real issue c

I kind of wonder the utility of something like this, if crops get wipe out for whatever reasons, I am sure finding new viable seeds will never be a real issue compared to fighting whatever wipe out the crops in the first place.

rojobuffalo 8y ago
I see them less as agriculture starter kits and more as archives of genetic information. Perhaps a climatic catastrophe reaches a new equilibrium after 200 years. A bunch of plants have gone extinct or are so hard to find they might as well be extinct. Civilization suffers a near fatality, but recovers just enough to trek out to those seed vaults. The seeds might serve an important role in breeding projects. It's maybe not the highest utility contingency, but it mitigates risk of permanent loss of genetic information.
sametmax 8y ago
It's a backup disk for dna. Nit a backup plan for the apocalipse
dogma1138 8y ago
You’ll be surprised since we’ve already have to make withdrawals from this vault.
pm90 8y ago
That is a really simplistic way to think about this. Most of the crops that we grow today were perfected after millenia of selective breeding and cannot be found in the wild. So the only place you can find them are in human granaries and fields grown and maintained by humans. Without humans to harvest and cultivate these crops (fertilizers, tilling, irrigation) most of the crops would likely perish. Although it sounds horrible, I can certainly imagine a scenario in which some kind of catastrophe would wipe out a large section of the human race, and perhaps most of our farmers/crop growers as well. A decade after this catastrophe if a post-apocalyptic human race gains some kind of political stability, it would be immensely useful to have this kind of vault to restart agriculture.
everdev 8y ago
I guess it's unlikely that all edible plants get wiped out, but you might not know which plant is most likely to get wiped out until it happens.

rojobuffalo 8y ago

I see them less as agriculture starter kits and more as archives of genetic information. Perhaps a climatic catastrophe reaches a new equilibrium after 200 years. A bunch of plants have gone extinct or are so hard to find they might as well be extinct. Civilization suffers a near fatality, but recovers just enough to trek out to those seed vaults. The seeds might serve an important role in breeding projects. It's maybe not the highest utility contingency, but it mitigates risk of permanent loss of genetic information.

sametmax 8y ago

It's a backup disk for dna. Nit a backup plan for the apocalipse

dogma1138 8y ago

You’ll be surprised since we’ve already have to make withdrawals from this vault.

pm90 8y ago

That is a really simplistic way to think about this. Most of the crops that we grow today were perfected after millenia of selective breeding and cannot be found in the wild. So the only place you can find them are in human granaries and fields grown and maintained by humans. Without humans to harvest and cultivate these crops (fertilizers, tilling, irrigation) most of the crops would likely perish. Although it sounds horrible, I can certainly imagine a scenario in which some kind of catastrophe would wipe out a large section of the human race, and perhaps most of our farmers/crop growers as well. A decade after this catastrophe if a post-apocalyptic human race gains some kind of political stability, it would be immensely useful to have this kind of vault to restart agriculture.

everdev 8y ago

I guess it's unlikely that all edible plants get wiped out, but you might not know which plant is most likely to get wiped out until it happens.