The Svalbard Seed Vault in Norway safeguards duplicates of 1,165,041 seed varieties from almost every country, with room for millions more. Its purpose is to back up gene bank collections to secure the foundation of our future food supply. The Seed Vault is the ultimate insurance policy for the world’s food supply, securing millions of seeds representing every important crop variety available today and offering options for future generations to overcome the challenges of climate change and population growth.
A temperature of −18 °C is required for optimal storage of the seeds. Permafrost and thick rock ensure that the seed samples remain frozen without power. The seeds are sealed in custom-made three-ply foil packages, sealed inside boxes, and stored on shelves inside the Seed Vault. The low temperature and moisture levels inside the Seed Vault ensure low metabolic activity, keeping the seeds viable for long periods.
GitHub has put the final touches on its Arctic Code Vault with a nearly 1.5-ton steel box covered in AI-generated etchings that aim to entice future generations to explore it. Video GitHub Arctic Code Vault GitHub initially deposited its 21 terabytes 20 February 2020 snapshot of all public repositories shortly after the pandemic began. Still, none of its employees were there to witness or participate in it because of the pandemic. It left that job to local contractors.
The mostly QR-encoded snapshot is stored on over 180 reels of film that have, since July, sat 250 meters deep within a mountain in Svalbard, Norway, in a former coal
mine. The spot is cold, close to the North Pole, and near the World Seed Bank. GitHub never revealed what vault they were originally stored in, but whatever it was not beautiful enough to signify their importance to future generations who will likely have little knowledge of the cultural and economic context the open-source code was generated in.
Given the archive's 1,000-year target, it is almost certain none of today's tech giants will exist then, and nor will the tech they produced from networks to software, smartphones and programming languages. The artist Alex Maki-Jokela created the shiny new vault's AI-generated etchings within the Arctic World Archive.
"GitHub's Arctic Code Vault is now a literal vault, with our archival film reels resting safely within its 1400kg/3000lb edifice. Even if its inheritors many centuries from now don’t know what it is, they'll certainly recognize it's something extraordinary," writes the founding director of the GitHub Archive Program. He says the designer and executive director of its partners, the Long Now Foundation, told him: "If you don't make it beautiful, it's for sure doomed."
While some may wonder what the point of the vault is given the long horizon, he has a few ideas. "A worrying amount of the world's knowledge is currently stored on ephemeral media," he notes, referring to hard drives and CD-ROMs. Someone in the future might also need software that is otherwise lost. Future historians could see the widespread use of open source and its volunteer communities as well as Moore's Law as historically significant. It also offers a bottom-up view of the tech world rather than just the view from the top. "We hope that by storing and indexing millions of repositories, we have captured a valuable cross-section of the world of modern software," writes Evans.
Another potentially useful addition is the Tech Tree project, a selection of mostly human-readable works describing how the world uses software today. The Tech Tree is divided into thirteen sections covering how computers work and how they're connected; algorithms and data structures; compilers, assemblers, and operating systems; programming languages; networking and connectivity; modern software development; modern software applications; hardware architectures and hardware development, electronic components like transistors and semiconductors; technologies before electricity; function, culture, and history written over the last 150 years; and cultural context.
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