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If you believe the media hype, the Svalbard
Global Seed Vault is preparation for doomsday.

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Inside here -- and no, I'm not allowed in,
like the rest of this tour group -- inside

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here, on the edge of the world, is a giant
freezer that keeps plant seeds, storing them

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frozen at minus 18 celsius, safe from any
disaster. The vault is earthquake-resistant,

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it's high up a mountain in case of sea level
rise, and deep in that mountain, 150 metres,

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in case of asteroid strike. And, in theory,
even in a cold-war nuclear apocalypse there'd

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be a lot of missiles flying overhead, over
the North Pole, but no-one's actually going

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to bother getting one to land on this arctic
wasteland.

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It's a good story, isn't it? The doomsday
vault, ready to kickstart the earth after

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most of humanity's wiped out. But it is just
a good story.

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In reality, the Seed Vault is an offsite backup.
Many countries in the world have their own

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version of it, for their own local seeds:
The US has one in Colorado, and Britain has

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one in West Sussex. If a plant goes extinct,
hopefully it can be recovered from there;

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but as anyone who's ever accidentally deleted
a file knows, you should always have multiple

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backups. And that's what this is. When a country's
seed bank is flooded, or goes up in flames,

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or gets destroyed through incompetence or
malice: the Svalbard vault will be there to

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help them restock.

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In the event of an apocalypse, we're going
to have a lot of things to do that are much

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more important than trekking to the Arctic
Circle to recover some obscure seeds.

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