In the Science Fiction classic, A Mote in God's Eye, humans encounter their first alien civilization. The moties, while welcoming humans with open arms (all three of them), attempt to hide the secret of their past. This secret is so profoundly disturbing that once the humans discover it they become determined to either wipe out the moties, or keep them bottled up in their own system forever. I'll tell you what that secret is, shortly, and you'll see why the story below reminds me of the book.
The Government of Norway, it seems, has decided to build a seed bank. What is that, you ask? I suppose a seed bank is best described as part library, part museum, part warehouse. "It is to house seeds of all known food crops." Norway describes its purpose thusly:
The vault aims to safeguard the world's agriculture from future catastrophes, such as nuclear war, asteroid strikes and climate change.
The seed bank will be built on the island of Spitsbergen, which is quite north of Norway. Click here to see webcam pictures from the island. Why Spitsbergen? From the article:
Dr Fowler said Svalbard, 1,000km (621 miles) north of mainland Norway, was chosen as the location for the vault because it was very remote and it also offered the level of stability required for the long-term project.
"We also modelled climate change in a drastic form 200 years into future, which included the melting of ice sheets at the North and South Poles, and Greenland, to make sure that this site was above the resulting water level."
By building the vault deep inside the mountain, the surrounding permafrost would continue to provide natural refrigeration if the mechanical system failed, explained Dr Fowler.
Welcome to the end of time. Pretty eerie, isn't it, to watch the building of a reservoir of knowledge and "basic agricultural material" that might be used to help mankind rise from the ashes of a disaster that will most likely be self-inflicted? It is eerily similar, I must say, to the alien "moties." Their human guests found museums that housed the accumulated knowledge of centuries of civilization. Only, the moties themselves weren't advanced enough to have developed all of the complex machines found in these "museums." The moties, it seemed reproduced at a furious rate, causing a rapid ascent and peak of their advancement, a frenzied series of wars over resources, and the destruction of their entire civilization. This happened over and over again; endless cycles consisting of progression followed by complete self-annihilation. They found it useful to archive knowledge and technology to help their descendants, trying to recover from yet another armageddon, to progress a little bit quicker and with a little less difficulty.
In effect, they built their own seed banks.
Cross posted on Shadow of a doubt