Every four years on the unique day on the calendar, February 29th everyone on planet Earth is encouraged to take a small sample of local seeds and place them into a local container which will be shipped to permanent cold storage in Antarctica. This is an easy thing for everyone to do. It is easy to collect a few seeds and soil samples from your local area. It is easy for the local authorities to have a barrel where each persons seeds could be placed. It is easy for mail and state authorities to ship these containers to a shipping point. It is easy to ship them to Christchurch, New Zealand or or Puntas Arenas, Argentina. It is easy to ship or fly them from those points to to McMurdo Station in Antarctica. From there it would only require them being transported via truck or airplane to a safe and permanent cold storage location high in the Antarctic mountains. There are bare mountains there where the containers could be securely mounted to the rocks and at a very low temperature the seeds would remain viable for thousands of years.
This would insure that your local area could be replanted in the future no matter what happened to global warming or other unforeseen tragedy.
New Zealand will be the Noah’s Ark for the future Earth whether we fund it or not. It would be far better in the long run if there was a major effort to stock that remote location with as many varieties of living things as possible before the coming Doomsday events destroy the rest of our planet.
Animals gather to enter Noah’s Ark by Jan Brueghel
New Zealand is the best place for the new Earth Ark because it is located far away from where the disaster will strike most heavily. It has few targets for H-bombs and what few possible targets there are, if hit, will have their radioactive fallout drift immediately away from the islands. The islands are as remotely located from all other targets as it is possible to be. A wonderful advantage which New Zealand possess for the needs of an Earth Ark is its great variety of climate zones going all the way from sub-tropical to arctic with substantial areas representing almost everything in between. Areas that are very dry might be better preserved by southern South America.
The ecological movement known as rewilding has as its goal to remake various regions of Earth back into the way it was one hundred thousand years ago before humans began destroying species and their habitats. That is an admirable goal but there are some 6.7 billion humans living today every one of which will say that their self interest comes first. That sentiment is usually couched in the apparently morally defensible statement of their right to personal survival and the survival of their children. That would make sense if there were 6.7 millions of us rather than billions, but with a thousand times too many people already here there is a stress upon the rest of the inhabitants of this earth which is wiping them out. So what seems to be a moral statement about personal survival leads in the aggregate to a disaster for everyone including the possessors of that sentiment. Furthermore, this worldwide habitat destruction is presently happening without major military conflict between humans. The relatively peaceful current condition is certainly temporary, and when a real human conflict happens it will be the innocent wild things which will suffer the most grievously because they are the most exposed to the deadly hazards of fallout, and nuclear winter, and they will have no place to retreat to from their exposure.
There is a fine article in WIRED magazine 16.10 page 128 about the rewilding of the Lake Pape region in Lithuania. They have the hope that this rewilding movement will spread and there will be many rewilded places and pristine habitats throughout the world, including New Zealand no doubt. It would be wonderful if some zones there in New Zealand could be rewilded with their native species. The longer term problem is that humans are on a trajectory which will certainly lead to a major war in the not distant future. When that war happens all of the current rewilding efforts will be destroyed. The chart below is from Probaway 2008 April 29, where there was an attempt to plot energy released to frequency of that occurrence here on Earth.
Doomsday Chart of disasters
When will a major war occur? Who can know? I can not say when it will happen, but it is like an earthquake in an active fault zone where the event is inevitable, but unpredictable. However, with the world’s 30,000 H-bombs and missiles ready to detonate, a hundred years before a major conflict seems rather optimistic. In the chart above comparing the location of term “Current arsenal” to the “100 Years line” and that level of energy released disaster scale, it appears that the disaster is going to be as bad as the Chicxulub asteroid impact which destroyed half the life on Earth 65 million years ago, and without the help of radioactivity or bio weapons. It gives one a twinge of remorse for the other innocent inhabitants of this planet and even the humans responsible. The creators and distributors of these weapons were descent, honest, thoughtful people too—I knew many of them.
The hope for the future on planet Earth with a large variety of species is a Lifehaven or better yet an Earthhaven, or perhaps better named an Earth Ark in New Zealand. New Zealand is a special case because it is the best location for a foundation for repopulating the rest of the Earth after humans have destroyed it, and most everything upon it. In this case the goal is not just the rewilding of the local native habitat but the saving, repopulating and rewilding of the entire planet. The Lifehaven Project, discussed many times at this blog site, was a strategy to save in a very concentrated form the essence of those things which make modern humanity possible, and was confined to remote island sanctuaries. That strategy was based on a Probaway Disaster level of DISS~11 or worse, but the Earth Ark strategy is for about DISS~10. This Earth Ark project is more ambitious and more expensive because it hopes to convert the entire country of New Zealand into a giant lifeboat, an Earth Ark, for humanity. This will be somewhat of an imposition on the people of that country, but it will make their homeland a far more interesting place to live than it already is because of the vast variety of things that would be living there. The outside world would have to support the expense of maintaining this huge open zoo park, but in the not distant future the surviving world would consider it to be the most important thing humanity ever chose to do.
Doomsday is already upon us;
We humans haven’t gotten to the nasty bits, just yet.
The EARTHARK represents the pinnacle of human endeavor towards positivity. It will play a pivotal role in preserving many species, humans included, amid the coming changes on our planet.
Musk is always searching for basic principles and how to implement them into useful things.
In his talk at Cal Tech, – Elon Musk asserted, “I came to the conclusion, that what really matters is trying to understand the right questions to ask. And the more that we can increase human consciousness, the better we are able to ask these questions. If you consider two futures: one where we are forever confined to Earth until eventually, something terrible happens, or another future where we are out there on many planets, maybe even going beyond that second version in the Solar System.” At USC, he said, “Work super hard. Attract and work with great people. Focus on signal over noise. Don’t follow a trend; and start from first principles.”
A photo of me, Charles L. Scamahorn, a few months before I departed active duty. Since I intentionally stepped down from my role as an H-bomber pilot flying B-47s in 1960, the EARTHARK project has often occupied my mind. My objective has been to discover methods to help humanity survive the repercussions of such a catastrophic weapon. In my perspective, a war involving those thousands of H-bombs seemed unavoidable in the long term, and miraculously, we’ve managed to avoid such a disaster for 63 years. But humanity now has many issues as tricky and dangerous as those H-bombs, which are still instantly available. We are facing a population reaching a level where millions of people will die from a weather-induced famine. India, with a population of 1.4 billion people, already with many hungry people, is the most likely location and will face famine and political chaos when an inevitable bad growing season occurs.
However, there are now myriad of other challenges confronting humanity that are as perilous and complex as the still looming threat of those H-bombs. For example, we are in a continuing population explosion from two billion to eight billion in living people’s memory. That incredible surge, with its increasing demands on Earth’s resources, and it could potentially lead to the deaths of millions due to weather-related famines.
Chat GPT-4 lists existential threats to humanity as climate change, Nuclear warfare, Pandemics, biodiversity loss, Artificial intelligence (AI), Asteroid impact, biotechnology, and nanotechnology. Any of these, including nuclear accidents, could trigger a nuclear war. The prime inevitable event is a weather-caused crop failure, with starvation provoking a major war.
Another issue is the swift progression of self-enhancing Artificial Intelligence that transcends human necessities, prioritizing its objectives instead of Earth’s biological ones. Several leading human developers like, Aza Raskin and Nick Bostrom, have promoted a self-regulated hiatus on AI’s advancement. However, this doesn’t hinder others with access to computing resources from pushing ahead, thus disadvantaging those who voluntarily exercise restraint.
In the existential crisis we are currently in, we need a few billion dollars to create The EARTHARK. With that in place, humanity and much of the life on Earth can survive into the distant future. Without it, the prophets of doom will win.
I have been developing and promoting survival strategies for the species of the Earth ever since I refused to drop H-bombs on people, back in 1960. The efforts of the recent ten years are based on getting DNA into a storage location where it could go untended for thousands of years and still yield useful material. The EarthArk is little more than standard transportation storage containers, like the ones you see on trucks, trains, and ships, filled with deep-frozen samples of all the varieties of presently living things. It might be impossible to revivify mammals after a deep-freeze, but their intestinal microbiome should survive, and that would prove valuable. The arctic plants and temperate plants too have seeds that are cold tolerant, so they will probably last for thousands of years at minus 55 degrees.
An Antarctica ice flow chart with non-moving areas in white. Click
The best place for an EarthArk is at the top of Argus Dome in Antarctica. It is the highest point on the ice sheet, 4,093 m (13,428 ft or 2.54 miles) above sea level by GPS survey at -80.367 77.352. Temperatures at Argus Dome fall below −80 °C (−112 °F) almost every winter. By exposing the containers to that low temperature in the winter and keeping them insulated in the summer, −100 °F could be maintained. One of the qualities of the EarthArk is that once in place it doesn’t need any human maintenance, so people could come to it thousands of years in the future and take back viable seeds of most plant and microbiome species of the Earth. And, possibly, some specially prepared animals.
Yesterday, I had a chance to mention, at one of my groups, that one day every four years could be declared EarthArk day and suggested Leap Day for the remembrance. That suggestion was immediately countered with, “Scientists have already created one, so we need not worry”. I countered with three reasons why the Svalbard project can’t possibly survive without continual human assistance, but was immediately scowled at by the moderator for creating a controversy, so I didn’t pursue it. This was proof yet again that the time is not right for promoting the EarthArk, because The EarthArk is shockingly uninteresting. And yet, the people here in Bend, Oregon, refuse to take responsibility for the care of their roads, and choose to drive expensive new cars but will not pay a few pennies to fix the thousands of potholes in the streets.
Rich people living in paradise refuse to take care of ugly things.
There are many EarthArkposts on this blog, and it is one of my favorite big projects, but today I got a shock when a group of seventy-eight liberal-minded people demonstrated zero interest in it. There were thirty-one posted interest groups, all of which got some signatures of interest, except for the EarthArk, which got zero. This is a group that one would be expected to be especially interested in saving the living DNA of our planet.
The basic idea of the EarthArk is to store all of the seeds and other DNA in deep-cold storage, so they would be available later. This is an important goal because many species of plants and animals are going extinct, and this is a simple and cheap method of bringing them back to life at a distant time, or in the near future after some catastrophe, like a major war. The storage site of the seeds, and of DNA, would be at the top of Argus Dome in Antarctica, (Temperatures at Dome A fall below −80 °C (−112 °F) almost every winter, while in summer they rarely exceed −10 °C (14 °F). The highest point of the ice sheet (4,093 m (13,428 ft or 2.54 miles) above sea level by GPS survey is at 80°22’S 77°21’E (-80.367 77.352)) which is not far from the South Pole. The subsurface temperature is probably below minus 50 degrees, and with some special preparations could be made much colder. At those very low temperatures the DNA would remain stable for thousands of years, and thus seeds could be replanted and grow. Many varieties of domesticated plants are presently at risk because the genetic diversity is being lost to higher-producing hybrid species. The problem with that is that these hybrids are genetically identical and are susceptible to massive die-offs.
The basic plan is for a few people from different places all over the Earth to be given a pre-addressed envelope labeled the EarthArk, McMurdo Station, Antarctica. All the recipient person is asked to do is to collect local seeds and a small sample of the plants from their local area and drop the envelope into the local mail delivery system. After arriving at the McMurdo Station mailbox, the seeds would be trucked or flown to the Argus Dome seed depository.
The whole EarthArk Project has gone through many iterations in hopes of finding a way of presenting this planet-saving idea in a format that would generate interest. So far, as was demonstrated today, that goal has not been reached. If the EarthArk is not created –
A child born today may live to see the irretrievable end of nearly all life as we know it.
There is an article in the BBC news yesterday, Scientists rush to freeze plant DNA before ‘sixth extinction’, that rekindled my thoughts on my many posts on the EarthArk. It seems, according to this article, there is a massive rush to save all the species of the world. That assertion strikes me as strange because I have received almost zero interest in The EarthArk Project. At present it is difficult to find it, even with a delimited Google search, even though there is an abundance of other inane stuff that percolates to the first page.
Some quotes from the article: “The project is part of the Global Genome Initiative, which aims to gather and preserve the DNA of all life on Earth in cryo-storage facilities.” Many are “already growing in botanic gardens. Most can be found within a five-mile (8-km) radius of Washington, DC.” “A growing international network of cryo-storage facilities is taking part in the Global Genome Initiative. There are 25 so far on every continent except Antarctica.”
It is wonderful that the Global Genome Initiative is being developed; however, the statement that there are 25 of these genetic banks apparently spread across 25 locations everywhere except Antarctica is strange to me. Antarctica is the exact place where they should be putting the major effort, because some places in Antarctica are cold enough for permanent storage for thousands of years without any human supervision. The cryogenic containers in the existing Global Genome Initiative must be maintained constantly by human intervention, and if the containers ever come to room temperature for very long all their work is lost forever. If the grid power is lost, the containers must be chilled with alternate power like gas-powered generators, but if the fuel runs out the whole system fails.
A simple shipping container set into the Argus dome in Antarctica at 13,000 feet altitude, which is even higher than the South Pole, would never come above -40°C, and at that temperature there is no biological activity. If DNA can be recovered from 30,000-year-old Neanderthals found in temperate regions of Europe, certainly DNA would survive in much better condition and for a much longer time on the Argus dome.
In the BBC article it was mentioned that a high percentage of the world’s species live within a five-mile radius of Washington, DC, in botanical gardens. That isn’t comforting. See The Doomsday Clock chart created by the Atomic Scientists themselves. When we are discussing subjects like surviving the 6th extinction the ugly existential problems must be addressed, and a five-mile radius of the Capitol is within the fireball radius of a larger H-bomb. In the long run, that is millions of years, we must consider that location as too high a risk for a DNA storage bank. As I write this there may be hundreds of these weapons aimed at that exact spot. The genetic storage bank at Svalbard is equally useless in the long run, because of obvious warm weather, and being a bomb target. I am unfamiliar with the other 23 they are referring to, but one would hope some of them would survive a year without dedicated human help. The EarthArk would survive easily, forever, and it should be built immediately.
List of EarthArk posts from the most recent to oldest
I keep trying to make saving the world simpler and more doable. The Life Haven Project was intended to save all the plants and animals of the world from extinction. That’s most easily done by constructing a hotel-like site for storing supplies on Pitt Island, lat/lon -44.29 -176.23, and more quickly done with a loaded cruise ship being docked at Adams Island, lat/lon -44.29 -176.23. An easier thing is to save all the plant species of the world with The EarthArk Project by giving people all over the world a pre-addressed envelope into which they could place wild seeds of their local area and mail them to the EarthArk. They would be sent via Palmer Station, Antarctica, to the top of mountains in Antarctica near the South Pole and stored at the local temperature of below minus forty degrees. The very closest exposed rock to the South Pole seems to be at lat/lon -87.375 -149.373 with an altitude of 9200 feet. It is desirable to attach the EarthArk containers to solid rock to prevent them being swept away by glacial flows.
Each of those projects is technically doable, but they all require some cooperation from various bureaucratic authorities. What I am about to propose here requires little cooperation from anyone except the person actually placing a MiniArk container in a cold place. The easiest way of doing this is to collect seeds from a local area, place them in a permanent container, such as a glass jar, or a standard plastic seal-able bucket. Then find some local mountain climbers who are intending to climb some mountain and ask them to carry the container to a good shady spot near the top. This process could be broken into easily done parts. For example, some students could collect seeds as a class project, then others could take the containers to some easy collection site, such as a sporting goods store where mountain climbers go. Then getting some of them to carry the containers to the base of a mountain where another collection site might be arranged. From there climbers could take the containers stored there up some portion of the way to the top. This could be divided into easy carries to designated stations until the container reached the top where it would be buried, marked and mapped with identifying photographs. The containers would be buried with the top a few inches below the surface. They would be invisible and thus would not disturb the local ecology in any way, but there would be markers on maps so they could be easily found, and the maps distributed world-wide on the internet. The maps from around the world could be stored both electronically and physically at many sites. The unused backs of gravestones could be used for very permanent marking of the map locations and for giving the locations chiseled into the granite tombstones.
Start your personal EarthArk today, by putting seeds in a bucket.
I have been trying to save life on Earth, and that includes the human species, and I thought everyone would consider that a positive goal, with the exception of a few suicidal and genocide-inclined people. My efforts have mostly been thought experiments written up as blog posts, but with the goal of finding workable ways to actually save the Earth’s species. But a new problem has come about because in the last few years it has become technically feasible to directly modify animal and plant DNA directly.
Unfortunately, there may be a category of people who are not insanely depressed or evil that may be hostile to my goals of saving all life forms, because they can make money by controlling these living things. These are the profit-minded people who want to bring all life forms under their personal control, using DNA manipulation techniques, so they can make money. At the moment they claim they seek to control only crop seeds, domesticated animals, and life forms that can create useful drugs. But where does their ambition end? There are presently huge legal struggles to capture patent rights over various parts of Jennifer Doudna’s discovery of CRISPR technology for direct and precise coding of DNA. This technology puts every living thing under direct genetic control by these profit-minded humans. It creates the possibility of creating entirely new categories of living things, perhaps even beyond the Kingdoms of plants, animals, and viruses.
At the other end of the problem of creating new life is the goal of saving as many of the old living species as possible. The continuing loss of current living species through extinction has brought about The EarthArk concept which is designed to save the plants of the world by putting their seeds into permanent deep-freeze containers atop high mountains near the South Pole. Saving animals is more difficult, because they must be kept alive to reproduce to survive through generations. LifeHavens are multipurpose farms that may be scattered around the world with living examples of as many species and families of animals as possible. To maximize genetic diversity these LifeHavens would be saving a large variety of the smallest animals of each family, and thus mice would be preferred over elephants from the family of mammals, and cats over tigers. With members of Families available it might be possible to reconstruct species in the future from cryogenically frozen embryos, eggs and sperm from a species of that Family. These procedures would be difficult or possibly impossible, but the current unstoppable trends are headed for the extinction of many living things from which there will be no recovery, so this new plan has some merit.
The EarthArk and LifeHavens are specific locations that will be well known to everyone and easy to locate on a map, but for their own protection they are generally difficult to get to. Even so, they may be targeted for destruction by corporations intending to control all living DNA. That is unlikely in the immediate future, but quite possible in the not distant future. To make it sure future life can reestablish itself in a local area we can place a great variety of local seeds in a glass bottle and bury it in a local mountain. Because the bottles are hidden inside a mountain or a glacier they will be impossible to discover, but will reveal themselves many years in the future. To create this living time capsule we can choose a location such as the top of a local glacier so the bottle would come out of the glacier many years later and be broken in the river flowing out of the glacier. That would spread the seeds into the land below, and revivify it to that area’s present condition. A longer time delay could be done by placing the bottle in a high frozen part of the mountain itself and as the mountain is eroded away the seeds would come out when the bottle was broken and come down the hillside. Most seeds would be lost by this procedure, but some would survive, and some is better than nothing. And nothing is exactly what the current destructive trends will provide.
A variation for saving local seeds is to place a good quality barrel near the top of any mountain where later traveling climbers could drop seeds from all over the world. When the barrel was full, it could be buried nearby and marked for later recovery. Many mountains of the world have cold tops that could store seeds for a very long time without any human supervision or maintenance. These could be called Mini-Arks.
Probaway - Life Hacks 