Save the world, plant a treeFollow

Linky
BBC 06/2006


F'ucking hippies and their crazy ideas. How many want to make a bet that a bunch of stoners are trying to send pot seeds for a new generation to this place? I got $5 on it. On the bright side, well. . . I can't really think of a bright side. If we ever need to use this seed bank the world will probably in pretty poor shape. Let's all hope that this was just a huge waste of money.

FYI ~ For the good of all mankind (er . . . make that womankind) I'll be stopping by the bank later this week to make a seed deposit myself.

But if Buddha was right, Denmark may beckon

Totally. They should have just put them in space, would have made more sense. The way I figure it, according to that guy that invented the interweb, the whole world is going to be under water in the next 50 years. I'm fairly certain that Kevin Costner will be dead by then and we won't have any mutant fish/human hybrids to swim down to the then underwater seedbank and retrieve any of the cargo . . . not that they could plant them anyway considering everything will be wet.

Kelp man... Kelp!

Perhaps some sort of ark is in order.

Edited, Feb 25th 2008 9:51pm by Natdatilgnome

I doubt they're being stored outside in a sack.

If you were in charge of this endeavour are you going to be the one to take chances when it could be the only seeds to survive doomsday?

I would, but I'm no a pale blond viking who drinks 8 pints of Vodka a day and believes in rock spirits.

They tend to be more risk adverse.

Actually, these guys are probably counting on the fact that the seed bank would only actually be needed for after a runaway greenhouse effect, which would perhaps crash the world's ecosystems. In the case of a runaway greenhouse, Norway will have an ideal tree growing climate.

The last time the world had all the CO2 in the air, that is presently locked up in the remaining crude oil, the only place trees grew WAS around the North and South pole. The areas of the Earth that are now temperate and tropical at the time were so hot that they were utter wasteland deserts.

It is the massive tropical rainforests around the South Pole that rotted down and fossilised into the massive coal beds that drifted north and became Western Europe and Britain.

The seeds aren't being stored just for doomsday scenarios. It's also to maintain a diversity of genetic strains of each crop.

For example, there could be an outbreak of a plant disease to which a particular strain of wheat has increased resistance.




Edited, Feb 27th 2008 6:32pm by trickybeck