Naked Science Forum
General Science => General Science => Topic started by: shekar on 25/03/2006 22:13:47
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we know that dinasaurs we extinct because of large meteorite hitting earth.. if at all the same thing happens today destroying the mankind .... is there anything being done to re-populate the earth.
shekar
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Most major states as a normal part of their defence procedures have permanently manned strategic bunkers deep underground that can be totally independant of atmosphere and supplies for many years. It is highly probable that many of these would survive such an event. No doubt the sensible ones will include a resonable balance of sexes.
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Theirs a massive underground bunker in corsham, wiltshire, i think its called burlington, however i think its has been recently decomissioned like most of the other uk bunkers.
Michael
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Not sure the bunkers would make much difference.
These extinction events happened in a geologically short space of time, but it could still amount to several centuries.
In any event, the bunkers would only save a few lives, it would not save the complex infrastructure that makes up human society. Modern humans are not well adapted to living isolated lives. At very least, the survivors would have to go back to living as an isolated tribe of technologically limited people living off local resources, much as the earliest hunter gatherers did.
George
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chances are what wipes humans off teh earth will be human-created. in which case, do we really deserve to survive it?
Are YOUR mice nude? [;)]
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quote:
Originally posted by MayoFlyFarmer
chances are what wipes humans off teh earth will be human-created. in which case, do we really deserve to survive it?
Every successful system holds the seeds of its own destruction.
Our dominance over a substantial portion of the biological activity on this planet makes us pretty much untouchable as far as being outcompeted by another species is concerned. Thus, for us to be toppled from our position of dominance (and every species has a limited life span, just as every individual animal has a limited life span), it must come about either through a natural catastrophe (comet impact, supervolcano eruption, etc.), or because of environmental changes brought about by our own actions. Whatever we do, one or the other must be inevitable – it has happened to every other species before us, and it will happen to us.
Human beings developed because the environment of the time provided us with particular opportunities that we could exploit to our advantage. It is inevitable that as we exploit those opportunities, we consume the very things that gave us our advantage. We has thrived better than many because as we have exhausted one set of opportunities, so we have been flexible enough to adapt to another set of opportunities. I don't think we are anywhere near the end of the road in being able to adapt to the ever changing environment, but it is inevitable that one day the change that we would require to undertake to make the next adaptation will be too great, or be demanded to happen too rapidly, and we will no longer be able to make the required adaptation, and thus perish.
What any of this has to do with being deserving is something else entirely. Have we ever deserved to survive? We have survived because we have fought to survive, not because we were innately deserving of it.
George
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This is one aspect of surving catastrophe, though it relates only to crops.
Norway is planning to build a "doomsday vault" inside a mountain on an Arctic island to hold a seed bank of all known varieties of the world's crops.
The Norwegian government will hollow out a cave on the ice-bound island of Spitsbergen to hold the seed bank.
It will be designed to withstand global catastrophes like nuclear war or natural disasters that would destroy the planet's sources of food.
Source:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4605398.stm
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quote:
Originally posted by Ophiolite
This is one aspect of surving catastrophe, though it relates only to crops.
Norway is planning to build a "doomsday vault" inside a mountain on an Arctic island to hold a seed bank of all known varieties of the world's crops.
The Norwegian government will hollow out a cave on the ice-bound island of Spitsbergen to hold the seed bank.
It will be designed to withstand global catastrophes like nuclear war or natural disasters that would destroy the planet's sources of food.
I can see a few problems with this.
You have a vault full of seeds, but no-one alive who knows how to open the vault.
Even if you could open the vault, and could get the seeds to the location on the planet from whence they came, many of them might depend upon animals being alive to help their pollination or germination.
The vault is useful if one looses a few species by accident, one will have a reserve from which to draw upon to re-establish those few species; but I cannot see it having any value if there is large scale destruction of the animal population that the plants will be intimately bound with, or the destruction of the human infrastructure which would allow the resource to be utilised.
George
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I can see a few problems with this.
I think you will find these problems have all been dealt with.
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You have a vault full of seeds, but no-one alive who knows how to open the vault.
The location of and method of entry to the vault will be available to responsible parties in participating governments and organisations. If none of these survive then the odds are that the human race will have also perished, so the issue becomes irrelevant.
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Even if you could open the vault, and could get the seeds to the location on the planet from whence they came, many of them might depend upon animals being alive to help their pollination or germination.
1. Many will be closer to some.
2. Some (or many) is not the same as all.
3. Most pollination is accomplished by insects. These will generally prove much more resilient in the case of a global disaster.
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The vault is useful if one looses a few species by accident, one will have a reserve from which to draw upon to re-establish those few species; but I cannot see it having any value if there is large scale destruction of the animal population that the plants will be intimately bound with, or the destruction of the human infrastructure which would allow the resource to be utilised.
1. With respect, I think you are experiencing a failure of vision.
2. This should be viewed as the first step of many that can be taken to preserve our knowledge and resources.
In the future, on the biology side, a DNA library of the major animal and plant groups, supplemented by forzen embryos of all domestic animals and the major wild animals. On the material side conventional libraries would be supplemented by some means of prerving skill sets, tools, and manufacturing processes. With several such centres sited around the world we would be best placed to survive a major catastrophe.
A name? Animals and plants, Resources, Knowledge. Would the ARK do?
Observe; collate; conjecture; analyse; hypothesise; test; validate; theorise. Repeat until complete.