How to create enthusiasm for humanity’s backup plan.

Tags

Earth Ark, Natural Disaster, Noah's Ark, Saving Humanity, Saving the Earth, Saving the Ecology, South Pole, South Pole seed bank

The biggest problem in the world today is one that is totally unrecognized and that is—there is no backup plan for saving the ecology of the world or the even the humans now living upon it. The Earth Ark, Lifehavens, Antarctic Life and Data Banks and the South Pole Seed Bank are possibilities which could be implemented without too much expense. Cost is a relative term, but when the cost of preserving humanity in these ways is compared to the millions of times greater amount which is now being expended upon humanity’s destruction, the saving of it is cheap indeed. Furthermore, once any of these are in place humanity would have at least a minimal ability to recreate the habitability of our planet for hopefully a hundred years and perhaps a few thousand years.

A very rough guess for the monetary cost of the Earth Ark project has to be in the range of billions of dollars to set up, and a few million dollars per year to maintain. The Lifehavens could be set up for a few tens of millions of dollars, and would cost a few million per year to maintain until a way could be found to make them economically self-sustaining by data storage or possibly by energy creation from the winds which have been a problem for previous residents of the islands where they might be located. The South Pole Seed Bank costs very little other than the expense of flying the seeds and other materials to be stored there, either air dropped or flown into the airport at the South Pole. Although that place is remote the cost of hauling simple containers to that location is easily computed, and there would be few surprise expenses. So we might guess that ten million dollars would create a substantial seed and soil bank around the South Pole. The Antarctic, Life and Data Bank would cost official governments no money at all, and can be done entirely by voluntary efforts by private citizens. All that project requires are some shipping containers located at convenient places throughout the world so private persons could store local materials from their own homelands in them, and thus create their own life-restoring habitat package.

The only outside expense would be the transportation of these containers to the Antarctic. That might be done by subscription or by donations by people who believed in saving the planet, and who would wish to have their name associated with the creation of an unquestionably peaceful project for giving humanity the opportunity of restoring life for future generations.

It is necessary to emphasize that these Life Banks are for restoring any given place to its natural state at some time in the future when the present natural ecology has been destroyed by the continuing of the processes that are now clearly upon us. Global warming is only one symptom of the many problems we face. It is talked about in the media because it is easily measured, and the effects are so easily understood, and predicted. The current year by year destruction isn’t easily seen by people but we can see that over a period of a lifetime it is easy to discern real problems, and over a period of a thousand years it will clearly be catastrophic.

The economics that force people to make a living day to day on an individual basis are not a problem for this project. But because there are so many people, and each person adds a little to the destruction to the environment in the aggregate humanity does become a problem. These vast multitudes of people, estimated to be about 6.8 billion, create the basis for the problem, as the human activities of our huge population nibble away at the limited resources until at some point they will be gone and suddenly everyone will become desperate. This will happen even if there are no violent wars and only economic competition, because at some point there will be a limited resource which everyone desperately needs to survive, and then they will struggle with all their might to get it. When that happens there will surely be a catastrophe. Even with the best of intentions, and the utmost of cooperation the present way of consuming the limited resources of the Earth will bring on this eventual shortfall. It may not be for fifty years or it may have already begun, and we just don’t see exactly what it is just yet. But it will come. What these projects do is to make some preparation for that day of reckoning. It will probably be within the lifetimes of people now living, possibly very soon, but surely within a couple of hundred years. That seems like a long time but people now living can easily remember events from one hundred years ago, and so thinking a hundred years into the future doesn’t mean, we are talking about space aliens, it means it will probably have an enormous effect upon people now living. Possibly it will impact you directly. Whatever the timing, it will seem in retrospect to be very recently that these projects were being considered and implemented or rejected.

The big question for humanity right now is, “How to create enthusiasm for a backup plan for humanity and for the Earth, so that it can get started.”

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Lifehaven – South Pole

Tags

humanity's survival, Lifehaven, remote islands, South Pole, survival, WW III

The South Pole has had a permanent residential scientific community since 1957. Its official name is the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, and it is owned, and operated by the United States. A fleet of LC-130s maintain a daily cargo service during the summer from October to February flying in from Christchurch New Zealand. The population varies from over 200 in the summer to under 90 in the winter when it endures six months of night, and no flights come in or go out.

Because of the great expense of getting people into this site and maintaining them there it isn’t a viable site for 1000 people on a permanent Lifehaven basis. Even fuel costs 20 times per gallon what it does back in New Zealand, where it is brought in from. They are absolutely dependent on the outside world for food supplies, and energy for heating and electricity. All of Antarctica suffers from those extreme limitations although those on the periphery or on Palmer Pennusila are cheaper, and might be viable.

The South Pole Station would be a perfect place for an unattended seed bank. It has a very low average temperature and rarely gets above zero degrees F., and because of the high altitude it has low atmospheric pressure. In this location seeds would never germinate, and would age very slowly. Recorded temperature has varied between a high of −13.6 °C (7.52 °F) and a low of −82.8 °C (−117 °F). The annual mean temperature is −49 °C, which means that the ice a few meters below the surface would be constant at very near that temperature. Therefore, all that is needed for a seed bank at this location is to place a well made barrel with selected seeds a meter or more below the surface and mark it in such a way that it can be found for a very long time into the future. The buildings at this location are constantly sinking into the ice and are constructed upon pilings so they can be jacked up occasionally and stay above the surface.

If they were constructed in the form of barges they would float up in the water. It is frozen water, of course, but there is still a hydrodynamic pressure difference between the bottom, and the surface creating buoyancy just as there is in liquid water. It is probably too much trouble to construct a pressure resistant barge beneath the buildings, but the same principle of buoyancy applies to our smaller seed barrels. They would float rather like buoys at sea but they would have seeds packed into them. The cheapest way to do this is to have a loaded heavy barrel at the bottom, denser than ice, with a solid shaft connected to an empty barrel at the top, much less dense than ice, and a flag pole sticking up from that which would remain visible above the surface so long as the barrels floated. More elaborate but better would be to construct a vertical cylindrical barrel 3 meters in diameter and 30 meters deep heaver, and stronger at the bottom to resist the hydrostatic pressure, but adjusted to be buoyant in ice. It would have a spiral staircase from top to bottom and the walls would be filled with drawers filled with seeds. Either, or both of these structures should remain stable, floating, visible and the seeds viable for thousands of years.

For people to recover the seeds a very long time into the future might be as difficult as it was for Scott who walked into the South Pole in 1909, and died of starvation trying to walk out. However, at some distant time in the future it might be worth the effort and the risk to come to this location. But those intrepid survivors would have to know exactly where they were going, and what to expect when they got there. What they find can never be more than what we put there so we should choose carefully. What they take back to their world will probably prove of incalculable value and permit the planet to be terraformed back from a scorched cinder into something a little more like the beautiful one we presently live in, and are in the process of destroying.