doomsday projects

nomos

Administrator
this is great

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7264758.stm

Leading dignitaries have attended the official opening of a 'doomsday' seed vault built 130m (426ft) inside a mountain on a remote Arctic island...

The vault, designed to withstand all natural and human disaster, will house samples of all known food crops.

but coupled with this you start to feel like maybe you're out of the loop...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/03/10/sciark110.xml

Plans are being made for the first experiments to pave the way for a "doomsday ark" on the moon.

An artist's impression of an European Space Agency mission station on the moon
The lunar databank would eventually be manned

The ark would contain DNA, embryos and all the essentials of life and civilisation, to be activated should Earth be devastated by a giant asteroid, a climate flip or nuclear holocaust.

The information bank would provide survivors on Earth with a remote-access toolkit to rebuild the human race, said Bernard Foing, the executive director of the International Lunar Exploration Working Group (ILEWG).

are there more of these things?
 

swears

preppy-kei
This sort of thing shits me up. I'm glad I was too young to understand what was going on with the cold war, 'cause I would've spend all day under my bed shivering and crying.

Climate change is scary though, read that it would take FIVE Kyotos to offset just the increase in China's emissions in the same period. It's like giving a cancer patient Flintstones' chewable vitamins.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
"It would be buried in a vault just under the lunar surface, where it would be tended by robots." :cool:

How are they going to "activate" the DNA or the embryos tho?! Or is it just activating the broadcast signal?
 

swears

preppy-kei
What is the point of a lunar ark? If there is some huge, apocalyptic event, the earth's surface will be uninhabitable, and moon's surface will be still be uninhabitable and hundreds of thousands of miles away. :confused:
 

zhao

there are no accidents
Bomb Shelters Making a Comeback

A nuclear engineer and designer of bomb shelters, Sharon Packer, can well attest to the swelling interest in home bomb shelters."I'm getting calls all day long and into the night," Ms. Packer says. "We haven't had so much activity and gotten so many calls since right after 9/11," she says.

Shanghai Completes Massive Underground Bunker

completion of the city’s largest subterranean bunker, spanning an area of over 90,000 square meters, reported Shanghai Morning Post. The massive underground shelter is able to accommodate 200,000 citizens at a time, offering protection from ground-level disasters such as nuclear radiation, poisonous gas releases, or terrorist blasts.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
What is the point of a lunar ark? If there is some huge, apocalyptic event, the earth's surface will be uninhabitable, and moon's surface will be still be uninhabitable and hundreds of thousands of miles away. :confused:

well in the week or so that it takes for radiation to spread over ever inch of earth, it might be possible to get it together to send some people up to the moon, where facilities and supplies might keep a small group alive for how ever many months.

in the end i guess it is pretty futile.
 

swears

preppy-kei
zhao:

But wouldn't it be way easier just to have an underground base on earth? The moon is radioactive anyway 'cuz there's no ozone layer. Seems like the whole lunar base idea is just for publicity.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
What is the point of a lunar ark? If there is some huge, apocalyptic event, the earth's surface will be uninhabitable, and moon's surface will be still be uninhabitable and hundreds of thousands of miles away. :confused:

Plot device for naff sci-fi.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
completion of the city’s largest subterranean bunker, spanning an area of over 90,000 square meters, reported Shanghai Morning Post. The massive underground shelter is able to accommodate 200,000 citizens at a time, offering protection from ground-level disasters such as nuclear radiation, poisonous gas releases, or terrorist blasts.

Oh, the irony! There was a piece in the paper today about some report that reckons five Kyoto Protocols would have to be enacted to counteract the rise in China's CO2 emmissions between 2004 and 2010.

Edit: sorry swears, you got in there before me.
 
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noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
But wouldn't it be way easier just to have an underground base on earth? The moon is radioactive anyway 'cuz there's no ozone layer. Seems like the whole lunar base idea is just for publicity.
Nah, there's already a massive base on the moon. The super-rich are convinced that the Earth is fucked so they are getting ready to split. This way they get everyone else to pay for their future plans. They love that sort of thing, the more blatant the better. Luckily I'm connected so see ya later suckas.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
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Luckily I'm connected so see ya later suckas.
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
When humans become extinct, it will be long overdue. The genetic viability of the offspring of these stored embryos would be nil after a few generations. Silly!
 

Dusty

Tone deaf
... the surrounding permafrost would act as natural refrigeration to keep the facility at the temperature needed to preserve the seeds.

So that'll be the permafrost thats going to melt thanks to global warming? Nice try Norway, but back to the drawing board.
 

Agent

dgaf ngaf cgaf
tesla technology is always the answer: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/08/wireless_electricity/

Happily for lovers of neologisms everywhere, they have dubbed their discovery: WiTricity. Nikola Tesla, who first proposed radiant energy around the turn of the last century, would be proud, we are sure.

The team suggests the system could be modified to create power hotspots for laptops so mobile users wouldn't need to run down their batteries when they are out and about.

The wider scientific community is keen to stress the safety of using magnetic fields and resonance to transfer power.

"The body really responds strongly to electric fields, which is why you can cook a chicken in a microwave," Professor Sir John Pendry of Imperial College London told the BBC. "But it doesn't respond to magnetic fields. As far as we know the body has almost zero response to magnetic fields in terms of the amount of power it absorbs."

This, we are sure, will not stop someone from claiming that their WiTricity has given them a headache/nausea/caused them to be bed ridden. A friend of El Reg recently reported meeting someone who claimed her LCD screen made her sneeze. We'll make no further comment.
 
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