![]() ![]() We work with the same perspective on the future. “At the National Museum we have works from antiquity until today. Works to be stored include ‘The Scream’ by Edvard Munch, ‘Winter Night in the Mountains’ by Harald Sohlberg, the Baldishol Tapestry and Queen Maud’s ball dress. In addition to all data from the National Museum collection database, high-resolution digital images of works by selected artists are included in the archive. READ ALSO: Norway's 'Noah's Ark' seed vault chalks up a million crop varieties Launched in 2008 with the aim of providing a “fail-safe seed storage facility, built to stand the test of time and the challenge of natural or man-made disasters,” the Svalbard facility has 1,059,646 unique crop varieties deposited in its so-called “doomsday vault”. “It’s very pleasing to see such a special project as the seed vault receive international recognition,” director Harald Nikolaisen of Statsbygg, the government construction and property advisor behind the vault, told NRK. The World Wide Web was named as the number 1 project on the list, perhaps unsurprisingly. The Intel processor, the euro, the human genome project, Live Aid, Netflix, Bitcoin, the iPod, Wikipedia and the Atari 2600 are all amongst the diverse top 50. The list, compiled by Project Management Institute, selects innovations in technology and health, architecture, finance and entertainment as well as literature. It takes its place amongst cultural and social milestones such as the Apollo 11 moon landings and the Harry Potter books as one of the 50 most influential projects of the last half century, NRK reports. Some of it just looks like magic but is based on tried and laboratory-tested physics principles at the edge of our understanding.The ‘Noah’s Ark’ seed bank is located inside a mountain on Svalbard, a remote Arctic island in a Norwegian archipelago. ![]() "When you get to cryogenic temperatures, strange things happen. "It's like they're locked in place by strings, but invisible strings," Thanga said. Temperatures that cold would likely freeze metal, so the team has introduced a type of floating shelf made of a cryo-cooled superconductor material and powered by quantum levitation using a powerful magnet. For reference, the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine is stored at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit. ![]() The seeds must be cooled to minus 292 degrees Fahrenheit, and the stem cells to minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit. The team's proposal for the ark includes solar panels on the moon's surface for electricity, elevator shafts down into the facility and Petri dishes housed in cryogenic preservation modules. "We were a little bit surprised about that." That's over six times more than it took to build the International Space Station, which required 40 rocket launches. The team's model for the underground ark includes solar panels, at least two elevator shafts and cryogenic preservation modules.īased on some "quick, back-of-the-envelope calculations," Thanga said that transporting about 50 samples from each of 6.7 million species - totaling 335 million samples - would take about 250 rocket launches. While the moon is not hospitable to humans, its harsh features "make it a great place to store samples that need to stay very cold and undisturbed for hundreds of years at a time," they said. Because human civilization has such a large footprint, if it were to collapse, that could have a negative cascading effect on the rest of the planet." "As humans, we had a close call about 75,000 years ago with the Toba supervolcanic eruption, which caused a 1,000-year cooling period and, according to some, aligns with an estimated drop in human diversity. "Earth is naturally a volatile environment," Thanga, a professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering in the UArizona College of Engineering, said in a press release. University of Arizona researcher Jekan Thanga and a group of his students proposed the concept in a paper presented during the IEEE Aerospace Conference this week. Instead of two of every animal, the solar-powered moon ark would cryogenically store frozen seed, spore, sperm and egg samples from some 6.7 million Earth species. ![]() Scientists are pulling inspiration from Noah's Ark in a new lunar proposal that they call a "global insurance policy." They hope to send an ark to the moon, filled with 335 million sperm and egg samples, in case a catastrophe happens on Earth. ![]()
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