Speaker 1: The journey to this place, it begins in silence. Imagine
stepping out of the plane onto a runway that's literally
built on a constantly shifting layer of parmafrost. The air
hits you. It's thin, biting, and just impossibly clear. You
are on Spitzbergen, part of the Norwegian Small Barred Archipelago,
barely a thousand kilometers from the North Pole.
Speaker 2: It's a place of really stark, beautiful extremes. But what
makes this landscape truly unique isn't just the geography. It's
the human endeavor carved deep inside one of these Arctic mountains.
It's a global insurance policy wrapped in concrete and ice.
Speaker 1: Welcome to thrilling threads, where we pull on the threads
of the world's most fascinating stories. For years, this location
has been known by a single dramatic name, the Doomsday Vault.
Yeah means it evokes these images of global collapse, the
ultimate final chapter for humanity.
Speaker 2: But the reality is I think far more interesting and frankly,
far more relevant to our lives. Right now, today, we
are going to explore what that dramatic nickname hides and
what exactly we humans are trying to save up here
in the ultimate secure deposit box.
Speaker 1: Because while the seeds, the biological building blocks of our
food supply, are the headline, just down the hall, secured
in the same geological stability is an entire history of
human knowledge, culture, and code.
Speaker 2: That's the real story.
Speaker 1: So this episode asks what is the true purpose of
the s Falbarred Global Seed Vault and what else are
they storing in the Arctic besides seeds.
Speaker 2: It's a mission that spans biology, geopolitics, philosophy, and some
seriously cutting edge data technology. We've synthesized sources covering all
of these areas, from the logistics of archiving from millennia
to the critical counter narratives about what conservation even is.
Speaker 1: So our goal is to move past the whole apocalyp.
Speaker 2: Smith exactly and to understand the complex, dynamic purpose of
these incredible Arctic archives.
Speaker 1: Let's begin with the physical and political foundation. Because the
location of the Sfalbard Global Seed Vault, the SGSV that's
the first layer security, were on Spitzbergen Island. Why here
of all places? I mean it feels like the end
of the world.
Speaker 2: Well, it's a multi layered answer, and it starts with
the natural environment. The facility is carved what one hundred
and thirty meters deep into the side of a mountain,
and it's surrounded by permanent permafrost. That permafrost acts as
a natural freezer. It maintains these stable cold temperatures even
if the engineered cooling system were.
Speaker 1: To fail, and that engineer temperature is kept at minus
eighteen degrees celsius mise eighteen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the critical temperature you need for long term
seed preservation. But you know, the political climate there is
just as important as the meteorological one. Oh so, geopolitical
stability is paramount for a long term global project like this.
Sfalbard is regulated by the Swalbard Treaty, which is this
remarkable international agreement signed way back in nineteen twenty after
World War One. Okay, forty two nations are signatories, and
it effectively demilitarizes the islands. This legal framework makes Falbard
one of the most secure, able and neutral locations on
Earth for housing such a vital international resource.
Speaker 1: So that combination of natural stability the frozen ground, and
political stability a demilitarized zone, that's what leads people to
call it the doomsday vault. It feels like the last lifeboat.
Speaker 2: It does. It has that vibe. But the people who
actually built it, they strongly reject that simplistic narrative.
Speaker 1: Oh they do, they do, and.
Speaker 2: It's a crucial correction to make the co creator, a
British Canadian plan scientist named Jeffrey Houghton, was super explicit
and clarifying that the vault was never designed to provide
seeds after Armageddon after Armageddon, right, that popular nickname. It
completely misses the true operational purpose.
Speaker 1: So if it's not for surviving a nuclear winter or
some kind of asteroid impact, what is the sgsv's actual mission,
what's its role in the global system of conservation?
Speaker 2: Its true purpose is much more subtle, but I would
argue far more practical and immediate. The SGSV is a
backup repository for existing working GENA banks all around the world,
a backup. Think of it as a supremely secure, deeply
coal safety deposit box. It's insurance, but it's not against
a singular, catastrophic Hollywood style apocalypse. It's insurance against the
cumulative effect of countless, smaller, more common disasters.
Speaker 1: Like what kind of practical threats are we talking about
safeguarding against.
Speaker 2: We're talking about bad management, administrative failure, budget cuts that
lead to the refrigeration getting turned off, oh wow, equipment malfunctions, fires, floods, hurricanes,
and sadly, human conflict. The world's primary active gena banks,
you know, the ones in Brazil or India. They're critical
research hubs, but they are subject to all these local,
political and environmental risks. Smallbard serves as the ultimate safety duplicate,
far far removed from those daily risks.
Speaker 1: The scale of this insurance must be massive.
Speaker 2: It is. It's designed to hold safety duplicates for up
to four million seed samples. Right now it holds over
one point two million sample point two million, yeah, which
represents an astonishing preservation of genetic diversity for our food crops.
The goal is to ensure that plant breeders in the
centuries to come have access to the traits they need
disease resistance, drought tolerance, heat tolerance to feed a changing world.
Speaker 1: And what about the longevity of the contents. We know
the structure is designed to last, but how long do
the seeds themselves actually stay viable.
Speaker 2: That's where that minus eighteen degrees celsius temperature is absolutely critical.
Haughton's research showed that seeds of most cereal crops, so wheat, barley, maize, rice,
they'll keep for at least one hundred years.
Speaker 1: Under those conditions one hundred years minimum.
Speaker 2: And often considerably more. They are in a deep state
of cryosleep. It's a living library designed for centuries, not
just decades.
Speaker 1: Now. This is the point that truly elevates the Small
Barred story beyond theory and into immediate vital importance. It's
not just some reserve for a distant theoretical future. It's
already been used, that is, in a real world rescue.
Speaker 2: It The case study of the gene bank in Aleppo,
Syria is maybe the most powerful proof of concept for
the entire project. This is where the Vault moved from
just being passive insurance to an active rescue operation.
Speaker 1: Okay, walk us through what happened there.
Speaker 2: So, the International Center for Agricultural Research and the Dry Areas,
which is known as IKARTA, they maintained this vital gene
bank just outside Aleppo, and they managed an invaluable collection
of drought resistant crops from the Fertile Crescent, a crucial
resource for Arit agriculture.
Speaker 1: Worldwide, so super important stuff.
Speaker 2: Incredibly important. But when the Syrian Civil War escalated, fighting
engulfed the area and it became impossible for staff to
safely access and maintain the facility, the active collection was
effectively lost, lost to destruction and just chaos, exactly administrative breakdown.
That's a catastrophic failure of a working collection, a huge
loss of biodiversity.
Speaker 1: So what was the recovery path? How do they fix that?
Speaker 2: Well, because of Ikarta's foresight and their adherence to global protocols,
much of their collection had already been deposited as safety
duplicates in this fall Barred Global Seed Vault.
Speaker 1: AH, so the backup was already in place.
Speaker 2: It was so in twenty fifteen they made the first
ever withdrawal from the vault.
Speaker 1: They actually pulled seeds out of the doomsday vaults.
Speaker 2: They did. They withdrew approximately thirty eight thousand samples and
these weren't just random seas. These were carefully chosen strains
they needed immediately for research and to reconstitute their collection.
Speaker 1: And where did they go?
Speaker 2: The material was shipped out and used to establish new,
secure active collections at Ikarda's new headquarters in Morocco and Lebanon.
Speaker 1: That is a phenomenal achievement. It means the war destroyed
the original facility, but it didn't destroy.
Speaker 2: The science precisely. Houghton noted that the saved material, material
that had been collected decades earlier, it came full circle
and was growing again in new gene banks. This just
illustrates that the threat isn't always some massive external force.
The threat is local conflict, the breakdown of infrastructure, and
the administrative vulnerability that plague daily human existence. Stalbard is
the escape valve for that reality.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to a key distinction, the difference between
passive backup and active scientific work. The SGSV is passive, right,
It just holds things, but it relies on these active
research centers.
Speaker 2: It does. The whole global system is a network. We
look at the US Department of Agriculture facility in Fort Collins, Colorado.
That's a perfect example of an active gene bank. While
Stalbard freezes and weights, Fort Collins is actively engaging with
its collections.
Speaker 1: What kind of active work are those scientists doing.
Speaker 2: They are essentially mining the genetic diversity. They are continually
growing out the seas, evaluating them and asking these fundamental
pressing questions like what does this specific ancient variety of
wheat have that might contribute something vital to a modern
variety that's facing a new past or trying to adapt
to increasingly severe heat waves. They're the ones testing the
material against new threats, making sure we have solutions ready
to breed into our future crops I understand.
Speaker 1: They also tackle some of the hardest conservation problems, right
the species that don't fit neatly into a freezer pack.
Speaker 2: That's the recalcitrant species problem a great term. These are
seeds like those from many tropical fruits, avocados or even
apples and cocoa, whose seeds actually die if you dry
and freeze them. Huh yeah, So you can't just stick
them in this Ballbard system. This doesn't work.
Speaker 1: So how do you Facilities like Fort Collins handle those?
Speaker 2: They turn to some really cutting edge cryopreservation techniques. Instead
of freezing the seed, they often can serve buds or
tissues or even embryos. They use extremely rapid cooling methods,
frequently involving liquid nitrogen to conserve these parts.
Speaker 1: That sounds incredibly complex.
Speaker 2: It is it requires constant monitoring and high levels of
technical expertise to ensure the living material can later be
regenerated into a whole plant. And this contrast sharply with
Svalbard's relative simplicity. S Fallbard is just a very big,
very secure, very cold warehouse, the active banks of the
sophisticated laboratories.
Speaker 1: And looking at the entire global operation, it's managed through
this powerful structure of international cooperation.
Speaker 2: It's a masterful piece of global governance. The whole system
is ultimately guided by the UNFAO and the International Treaty
on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.
Speaker 1: So there's a real framework, a.
Speaker 2: Very clear one. The management structure is a tripartite partnership.
The Norwegian government owns the facility, the Crop Trust provides
funding and assists in global resource mobilization, and the Nordic
Genetic Resource Center or nord Gen handles the daily operations,
the logistics and all the careful documentation.
Speaker 1: It's almost astonishing that a project with such profound global
significance runs on what seems like a pretty modest budget.
I saw some figures that really drive this point home.
Speaker 2: It is a phenomenal return on investment. The original construction
cost for the vault was approximately twenty eight million dollars.
Speaker 1: That's it for the whole thing.
Speaker 2: That's it, And it's annual run costs are less than
a million dollars a year. Wow. For that minimal outlay,
you are literally backing up. And this is a quote
essentially the entire genetic diversity of all of our crops.
Speaker 1: Which is a powerful statement about interdependence, isn't it.
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate expression of interdependence. Kennadozi's the secretary
of the Seed Treaty, has often stressed that no country
today is truly self sufficient in its food supply.
Speaker 1: Right, everything comes from everywhere.
Speaker 2: All major crops cultivated globally are botanical immigrants. They originated
somewhere else. This conservation system is just a modernized technological
framework for the seed sharing practices that farmers have used
for ten thousand years. We are securing everyone's heritage for
everyone's future.
Speaker 1: That sets the stage beautifully for our next question. If
we are securing the biological heritage of humanity, what about
the intellectual and cultural heritage? What else are they storing
besides seeds?
Speaker 2: And the answer is that right next door in the
exact same mountain is a completely separate venture. The Arctic
World Archive or a AWAEWA. This is where humanity's digital heritage,
the blueprints, the art, the music is being stored for
the very long term.
Speaker 1: So it's not the same vault. It's a parallel operation,
but it's using the same unique geological security precisely.
Speaker 2: The AWA opened in twenty seventeen. It was created through
a partnership between Pickley, which is a Norwegian data storage
company specializing in ultra long term archiving in SNSK, a
local mining company. It's built out of a mine shaft
from an abandoned coal mine.
Speaker 1: So cool.
Speaker 2: The SGSV safeguard's life itself. The AWA safeguards the record
of that life.
Speaker 1: What kind of records are taking up residents in the permafrost, Well, we're.
Speaker 2: Talking about foundational, historical and governmental records first and foremost.
The initial depositors were governments including Brazil, Mexico and Norway Okay.
They placed copies of their constitutions and other significant foundational
historical papers into the vault. This is about securing the
fundamental documents that define national identity and political continuity.
Speaker 1: That's a powerful, full symbolic gesture archiving the document that
defines your state in a place that's designed to survive
the state it is.
Speaker 2: But the contents quickly move beyond just political documents into
essential scientific and environmental data which reflects our immediate global crises.
For example, the archive includes extensive information about the biodiversity
of Australia. Oh interesting, yeah, including the detailed data from
the ATLSS of Living Australia, and.
Speaker 1: I understand it also holds crucial technological tools related to
our changing climate.
Speaker 2: That's right. Geoscience Australia deposited copies of their machine learning
models related to climate chains in.
Speaker 1: Bushfires, the models themselves, not just the.
Speaker 2: Data the models, and this is an incredible example of foresight.
They aren't just archiving the data about fires, they're archiving
the complex proprietary models used to predict and manage those events.
Recreating those cutting edge models would be hugely expensive in
time consuming, so preserving the finished intellectual product is essential
for future climate researchers.
Speaker 1: That is definitely forward thinking. But perhaps the most famous
and certainly the most massive deposit involves the very foundation
of modern technology. The code vault from the GitHub archive program.
Speaker 2: This is just a monumental effort. GitHub, which is the
world's largest host of source code. It was acquired by
Microsoft in twenty eighteen, initiated a program to archive all
public open source code in the AWA, all of it.
It's an attempt to ensure that the cumulative knowledge of
the world software engineers endures.
Speaker 1: All the public code. That must represent a truly staggering
volume of data. How do we even begin to visualize
that scale?
Speaker 2: Okay, so the initial archive from February twenty twenty was
twenty one terabytes. That's already huge. Yeah, But to give
you a sense of what that means in human effort,
one source noted that if someone were to type continuously
at a speed of sixty words per minute, it would
take them one hundred and eleven thousand, three hundred years
just to type out the characters stored in that archive.
Speaker 1: One hundred and eleven thousand years.
Speaker 2: It is essentially the entire digital language of modern civilization.
Speaker 1: That number. That's a fantastic mental anchor for the sheer volume.
And what does the code archive actually contain? Is it
just obscure development tools?
Speaker 2: Far from it. That single first reel of film holds
what you might call a Technological Civilization starter kit.
Speaker 1: A starter kit.
Speaker 2: I love that it includes the code for both the
Linux and Android operating systems, along with over six thousand
other major open source applications that underpin everything from web
browsers to data processing tools.
Speaker 1: It is literally backing up the fundamental operating systems that
run the modern world. If civilization needed to reboot its
digital infrastructure, they would start there exactly.
Speaker 2: The code is stored as an incredibly high density matrix
or a two D bar code, with each platter carrying
one hundred and twenty gigabytes. It's designed to be readable
for centuries, securing the language of technological creation.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting the collective effort involved, even if people
didn't know they were part of it.
Speaker 2: Yes, the sheer breadth of the open source community means
everyone who contributed, even if they were just fixing a
tiny typo in some documentation, suddenly got this Vault badge
on their profile.
Speaker 1: Right. I remember seeing that.
Speaker 2: And they realized their code was heading north. There was
this wonderful online sentiment where one comment or joked that
their shitty code was in there too.
Speaker 1: I saw another great anecdote about someone who accidentally archived
their weather map API key.
Speaker 2: It just speaks to the wide net cast by the
archive program, but it reinforces the central point. Open source
software is the infrastructure. As one Person Online profoundly put it,
if society ever collapses, the priority should be to get
FFmpeg image magic and opens allo up again as fast
as possible. Everything depends on that. Literally, the essential tools
are now safe.
Speaker 1: So we have the biological foundation for our food and
the digital foundation for a technology. But there is a
third pillar of human experience being preserved, which speaks directly
to humanity's emotional and creative life. Music Vault or GMV.
Speaker 2: The GMV is a separate, dedicated initiative focused on preserving
music for future generations. Its mission is to safeguard the
most important living musical expressions, archiving music that has profoundly
shaped societies and inspired cultures across history.
Speaker 1: What prompted this initiative was there a specific event that
made people realize the urgency.
Speaker 2: There was a frightening moment in recent history, the twenty
nineteen fire at Universal Studios, Hollywood, which destroyed scores of
irreplaceable master tapes and recordings by iconic artists.
Speaker 1: A huge loss, a.
Speaker 2: Devastating loss, and it highlighted the fragility of traditional music archives.
The brainchild behind the gmv's Luke Jenkinson, an IT entrepreneur
whose company LRA is partnering with Microsoft to make this
a reality.
Speaker 1: So we are moving away from film and code matrices
and into a radically different storage medium for music. Tell
us about the technology used in the Global Music fault.
Speaker 2: The GMV is utilizing silica glass platters. This is a
material that offers incredible resis millions far beyond traditional magnetic
media or even archival film. Silica glass platters are essentially
immune to many of the threats that destroy digital data.
Speaker 1: In what way is silica glass more resilient?
Speaker 2: Think about the biggest threats to data, water, extreme heat,
physical abrasion, and most critically, electromagnetic pulses EMPs. Silica glasses
resistant to all of these. The data, the master quality
audio files are etched into the surface of the glass
using highly focused laser optics. If a massive solar flare
hit Earth, wiping out magnetic storage globally, this physical etching
would remain completely untouched.
Speaker 1: And how dense is the data storage on these plotters
right now?
Speaker 2: Each square platter can hold about one hundred and fifty
gigabytes of master quality files. That's a huge volume for
high resolution audio. But the developers are aggressively working to
push that capacity higher, aiming for one or even two
terabytes per square in the.
Speaker 1: Near future, which would make it viable for archiving vast
national music libraries exactly now, music is profoundly cultural. Curation
is vital here. How is the GMV avoiding the inherent
biases of institutional librarians who might only archive what they
deem important in the current moment.
Speaker 2: That was explicitly part of Jenkinson's vision to bypass those barriers.
He argued that the music industry, with this new technology,
has a chance to remove those barriers of figuring out
what should we archive when essentially you can archive everything.
The idea is a holistic approach to capture the global
sonic landscape.
Speaker 1: But you can't truly archive everything. So how do they
ensure balance and representation across diverse cultures.
Speaker 2: They collaborate closely with the International Music Council the IMC,
and they use designated music rights champions from around the globe.
These champions are responsible for ensuring that the collection doesn't
just reflect commercially successful or dominant cultures. It's about preserving
the musical expressions that define specific societies, particularly those facing
cultural erasure, and the stories of those champions really embody
that mission absolutely. I mean think of individuals like arn
torn Pond, a Cambodian musician, human rights activist, and a
survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime. Oh for doctor Ahmad sarmast,
an Afghani music educator who risked his life to establish
music schools in defiance of the Taliban. These curators bring
a necessary depth and an understanding of cultural survival to
the collection. They ensure that the archive holds not just
popular tracks, but the cultural resilience that's encoded in music.
Speaker 1: That is a staggering commitment from the genetic code that
feeds us, to the operating code that runs our world,
and now to the cultural code that defines our spirit.
All frozen and waiting in the Arctic. The existence of
both the Arctic World Archive and the Global Music Fault
really underscores one of the great quiet crises of our
digital age, the astonishing frigility of modern data storage. We
create more data than ever before, yet our ability to
keep it for more than a decade is shot uckingly core.
Speaker 2: That's the core of the longevity crisis.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The vast majority of the world's data we were talking about,
roughly eighty percent, is stored on magnetic media like hard
drives and tapes. These to degrade rapidly. Traditional tapes require
migration every few years, and hard drives can become unreadable
within decades, often much sooner due to format obsolescence or
just physical decay.
Speaker 1: And the volume is accelerating exponentially. The numbers related to
data production are difficult to even conceptualize.
Speaker 2: They're massive. We're entering the zetabyte era. To put a
zetabyte in context, it's a billion terabytes billion terabytes. Sources
project that the worldwide installed storage capacity is racing toward
twenty six point three zetabytes by twenty thirty, and then
a stunning leap to two hundred and fifty one point
eight zetabytes by twenty forty. We're talking about the yattabyte
era by the twenty fifties, a unit so large it's
rarely used outside of theoretical physics, and.
Speaker 1: Girtner is already warning us about a huge bottleneck in
this correct.
Speaker 2: Despite the massive production, Gartner is projecting a zetabyte scale
supply gap in the second half of this decade. We
are creating data faster than we can reliably store it,
especially for long term archival needs. This constant requirement to
migrate data every seven to ten years is complex, incredibly
costly and energy intensive. It's a Sisifian task.
Speaker 1: So the Arctic vaults are a direct practical response to
this archival crisis, a huge investment in media that doesn't
need to be constantly migrated. Let's start with the proven
technology currently securing the AWA, the Peak ecosystem. It feels
beautifully retro using film, but it's entirely digital.
Speaker 2: It's a very high tech twist on traditional photography. Peak
film is a thirty five millimeter with polyester film coded
with the silver halled emulsion, just like the film that
preserved images for over a century.
Speaker 1: And the lifespan is huge.
Speaker 2: The claim longevity is hundreds of years. Some sources are
confident in a five hundred year lifespan, others are aiming
for a thousand.
Speaker 1: How exactly do you take binary data ones and zeros
and physically encode it onto a photosensitive film.
Speaker 2: It's a precise two stage process. First, the digital data
files converted into its binary form. Then this dedicated machine,
the pickle writer, uses Photon's intense, precisely controlled light to
expose the photosensitive layer of the film, encoding the binary
code as a series of microscopic pixels.
Speaker 1: And the second stage is fixation, making it permanent.
Speaker 2: Yes, the pick processor takes over. It's a sophisticated photochemical
development process, often utilizing specific chemicals like Code Act ninety seven.
This chemically fixes the data. The exposed silver hallied particles
are converted into metallic silver, permanently fixing the data onto
the film, creating a physical, immutable record.
Speaker 1: That concept of immutability is the core selling point, isn't it.
Speaker 2: It's the greatest strength beyond its physical durability. Once that
film is chemically fixed, the pixel's values cannot be changed
or deleted without physically destroying the film. This makes it
an immutable film write once read many or worm medium.
Speaker 1: And why is that so relevant in a world of
constant data manipulation.
Speaker 2: It addresses the concerns of data manipulation, corruption and crime.
Since the data is physically fixed, it is described as unhackable.
In the digital sense. You can't remotely alter the code
for fraud or sabotage. You have a definitive, unaltered record
of the data at the moment it was archived.
Speaker 1: But the perennial issue with any archival medium is technological obsolescence.
If the pickreader, the specific device needed to read the film,
ceases to exist in five hundred years, what good is
the data.
Speaker 2: Still recognizes this, they are actively investigating and ensuring that
the decoding methods are hardware agnostic. The binary code is
represented by distinct light and dark pixels. So in theory,
if future generations possess any image capturing device, a highly
advanced camera, microscope, some future sensing a rate, anything that
can see it, anything that can see it, anything capable
of sampling those image patterns, they can decode the data
without needing the original proprietary reader. The medium itself becomes
the instruction manual.
Speaker 1: That's reassuring. It forces us to think in completely different timelines.
But pile is not the the only technology aiming for
this multimillennial longevity. Let's look at the next generation inorganic storage. Specifically,
the Germans startup Serabite.
Speaker 2: Serabite is making a deliberate historical connection. They were inspired
by the cuneiform tablets of ancient Mesopotamia, records pressed into
clay and baked, which have lasted five thousand years wow.
Their approach is to emulate that permanence using modern materials.
Speaker 1: And their ceramic nanomemory writes data onto glass exactly.
Speaker 2: They use widely available, inexpensive glass media, but instead of
magnetic fields or chemical processing, they use femtosecond lasers. A
femtosecond is one quadrillionth of a second, an incredibly short pulse.
These lasers write the data onto the surface of the
glass media, creating physical modifications. They're ultra durable.
Speaker 1: That seems incredibly ambitious, especially regarding durability.
Speaker 2: They are targeting an ultra durable five thousand year lifespan,
and from a business and performance perspective, their roadmap is
also ambitious. They plan to scale to one hundred petabytes
per rack by twenty thirty with transfer rates.
Speaker 1: Of two g tobs one hundred petabytes per rack.
Speaker 2: That's one hundredfold capacity increase over their current pilots, and
it aims to significantly outperform the performance and density of
magnetic tape.
Speaker 1: Storage, What is their current commercial viability? Where are they
on that technology readiness level scale?
Speaker 2: Cerobyte ceramic nano memory is currently at a technology readiness
level or TRL of six. TRL is a system developed
by NASA to track the maturity of technologies. Okay, TRL
six means that prototypes are starting to be deployed and
tested in a irrelevant environment, but it's not yet fully commercialized,
which would be TRL nine. They're right on the cusp
of market deployment.
Speaker 1: TRL six is exciting, but it means they are still
in the near term the deepest dive into long term
archival storage that involves the material of life itself DNA.
This is still highly experimental.
Speaker 2: Correct DNA data storage leads the organic storage domain, and yes,
it is still largely at the proof of concept stage,
currently at.
Speaker 1: TRL four TRL four.
Speaker 2: TROL four means that the basic technological components have been
integrated and tested in a laboratory environment, but it's not
yet a true integrated system ready for deployment.
Speaker 1: So why is everyone so excited about storing data in DNA?
Speaker 2: Because of two unique properties that no other medium can match. First,
just tremendous density. DNA is the most efficient information storage
medium known to science. Because the data is stored at
the molecular level, it's orders of magnitude denser than any
silicon based technology we have. Theoretically, the entire world's data
could be stored in a volume smaller than a cubic meter.
Speaker 1: That's a staggering visualization. What's the second, and arguably more
profound advantage sustainability.
Speaker 2: Once the data is encoded into synthesize DNA strands and
then dehydrated, it requires no energy whatsoever to retain the data,
no entergy zero. Unlike server farms that require constant power
and massive cooling systems, a vial of dry DNA simply
sits there, perfectly preserved at room temperature in a dry
atmosphere for thousands of years. It solves the massive energy
cost of archival storage.
Speaker 1: And the data integrity is phenomenal.
Speaker 2: It is the media itself is incredibly robust, capable of
lasting millennia. Furthermore, it is truly software defined storage. This
means the data is the medium. There is no pre
existing blank DNA media. The media is created as the
data are written. It is an ideal green choice for
archival storage and long term time capsule use cases, the
data is effectively frozen and will remain readable as long
as organic chemistry exists and we can sequence DNA.
Speaker 1: It's astonishing to realize that Spalbard isn't just about preserving
the past. It's an incubator for the technologies that will
define humanity's relationship with information for the next five thousand years.
Speaker 2: This brings us to perhaps the most critical part of
this exploration. We've discussed the how and the what, but
now we must address the why and the cost. These
monumental efforts force us to step back and ask a
harder question, what does the act of archie on this
scale reveal about humanity's relationship with a non human world.
Speaker 1: You're touching on the critical perspective that Swalbard's history is
rooted in a tradition of extractive resource depletion, going back
to whaling, hunting and the nineteenth century coal rush.
Speaker 2: Yes, many critics view this conservation project, despite its necessity,
as existing within a broader, frontierist world making trajectory. This
framework suggests that the tools of conservation, though well intentioned,
can sometimes perpetuate the economic model that caused the loss
in the first place.
Speaker 1: This is the concept of the salvage frontier. Can you
unpack that critique for us?
Speaker 2: The salvage frontier, a concept explored by scholars like Anna
eld Singh, suggests that when we focus intensely on protecting
small areas of biodiversity, like the seeds in the vault,
we are operating within the same extractive paradigm. The critique
argues that the project ultimately conserves the extractive resources nature
relations of modern production.
Speaker 1: In practical terms, that means we save the genetic material
in the vault, but we don't fundamentally change the global
agricultural model, the monoculture, high yield farming, the reliance on
pesticides that led to the loss of diversity. Initially, we've
simply created a technological patch or a lifeboat.
Speaker 2: Precisely, the ex situ conservation world, the world of the
scientific gene bank often views plant materials simply as extractable,
quantifiable entities, what they term BioCapital.
Speaker 1: BioCapital, these seeds.
Speaker 2: Are suspended in time through what's called croopower, indefinitely available
for future, undefined use by plant breeders, but disconnected from
their origin.
Speaker 1: That term BioCapital is powerful. It suggests that the value
of the seed is reduced to its utilitarian genetic traits
detached from the cultural, social, and ecological context where it evolved.
Speaker 2: That is the core philosophical tension. The conservation system is
focused on arresting change, on preserving a static resource, rather
than embracing the dynamic, evolving diversity cultivated in situ, the
biodiversity that exists in farmers' fields and in local knowledge systems.
We save the genetic resource, but we often lose the
story of the cultivator.
Speaker 1: This philosophical tension led directly to a powerful counter narrative,
one embodied by the Stalbard Arc art project.
Speaker 2: The Svalbard Arc is a profound response to the techno
optimism of the vault. This was an art project that
offered conservation as commemoration. Instead of depositing seeds, pure BioCapital
artists buried artworks in the permafrost right alongside the seed
vault artworks. These pieces represented agrobiocultural diversity, the cultural histories,
local practices, and traditional music that the scientific collections often exclude.
Speaker 1: It feels like an act of mourning.
Speaker 2: It absolutely is. It moves beyond the idea that technology
can simply save everything. It forces an effective acknowledgment of
loss and focuses on the cultural connection that is often
reduced to genetic barcode. It's a very different ritual from
the Vault's functional salvationist narrative.
Speaker 1: What were some of the specific exact samples of the
artworks buried? They highlight exactly what the SGSP misses.
Speaker 2: One notable example came from the art collective Seeds in Service,
an ecofeminist urban gardening project. They created this delicate pamphlet
shaped like the Seed Vault entrance, made of hand crafted
paper bags filled with seeds they had saved in their
urban gardens. This emphasized the human labor, the local and
non institutional practice of seed saving, which is often.
Speaker 1: Marginalized, and the documentation of ancient Khmer music playing arak
is an incredibly poignant example of preserving the y.
Speaker 2: The documentation of playing Iraq is critical. This is a
traditional agricultural music often performed during shamanistic ceremonies to call
spirits for rain. It's inextricably linked to the cultivation of
the land. It was nearly wiped out during the Career
Rouge period and now faces immense threat from rapid modernization
and cultural displacement. By archiving the documentation, the project argues
that the loss of this traditional music, this cultural expression
tied to food production, is just as irreversible and dramatic
as the loss of a unique crop variety.
Speaker 1: So this act of conservation as commemoration is a political act,
resisting the idea of dismembering biocultural connections. It forces us
to ask, are we saving the seed for its genetic
utility or are we preserving the entire context of human
ingenuity and our relationship with the land.
Speaker 2: And that leads us back to the difference between a
functional scientific archive and an emotional cultural testament. The Seed Vault,
even as it rejects the doomsday narrative, often employs a
symbolically charged, almost religious esthetic. It is frequently compared to
Noah's Ark. The ARC Project, with its burial ceremony, expresses
grief and focuses responsibility on the present, the need to
cultivate a mournful hope today rather than simply relying on
a future technological fix.
Speaker 1: The ultimate synthesis of these two missions, the scientific and
the cultural, is now being planned through a physical space.
Speaker 2: That's the planned visitor center. The arc, designed by the
acclaimed firm Snehetta, is intended to be the Bridge, an
exhibition space designed to interpret the contents of both the
SGSV and the AWA for the public. It will educate
visitors about the distinctive geology of the Swalbard Archipelago, how
it formed over millions of years, and the dramatic transformation
it is undergoing now.
Speaker 1: And the design itself contrasts the functional with the contemplative.
Speaker 2: Yes, the journey into the facility moves from a rational
and stoic entrant structure into a space that is designed
to evoke the unique environment of the vaults. But the
ultimate symbolic gesture is planned for the center of the
exhibition space, which is.
Speaker 1: A single live tree exactly.
Speaker 2: A single live tree planted in a ceremonial space. This
element is designed to invite immediate physical contemplation on climate
change and the resilience of life on Earth. After learning
about the billions of seeds and terrobrites of data stored
safely inside the mountain, visitors will confront a living, breathing
organism that suggests a need to actively reconnect the missions
of the two vaults to ensure that what is archived
inside can thrive outside.
Speaker 1: It's the perfect analogy for the entire project. We are
securing the blueprints for a world we hope still exists.
But the greatest security lies in nurturing that world today.
Speaker 2: When you reflect on what is contained deep inside the
permafrost is fall barred, the scope is truly breathtaking. It's
an astonishing collection. Millions of crop seeds, the entire public
history of software code, global constitutions, and the world's most
important musical expressions, all secured using cutting edge, millennia scale
storage technologies like peak film, ceramic nano memory, and the
ultimate frontier of DNA storage.
Speaker 1: This isn't a passive project. It is a monumental, ongoing,
and expensive attempt to ensure that, regardless of future crises,
be the biological erosion, digital obsolescence, or human conflict, the
fundamental building blocks of human civilization endure. It is humanity
trying to solve its current problems by building a robust
foundation for tomorrow, five thousand years into the future.
Speaker 2: That archive represents an incredible, deep commitment to fall into
the next fifty centuries. It suggests that despite our many
self inflicted crises. We still believe in the continuation of
knowledge in life, but that commitment to the future imposes
a responsibility on us today.
Speaker 1: If our legacy, from the genetic code that feeds us
to the operating systems that organize our society is being
stored in the ultimate time capsule, waiting for the people
of three thousand AD to hopefully read it, the question
is not if future generations will need this knowledge, but
what responsibilities does the very act of preserving data for
five millennia impose on us right now?
Speaker 2: If we are archiving the code for a better future,
should we not be actively building that future today? So,
for everyone listening, what piece of your personal, cultural, or
digital heritage do you believe is most essential for the
future to inherit and what are you doing right now
to safeguard it from the more mundane day to day
threats of obsolescence, neglect,