Long Now Research Fellow Stuart Candy brought to our attention this visualization, which shows projections of what sorts of technologies will be available in the future, how soon, and how important they will be. It was created by London-based designer Michell Zappa, who leads a ‘technological trend bureau’ called Envisioning Technology. Their website explains that they seek to describe “where society is inexorably heading in the near future.”

Our research facilitates understanding the field for those who work in technology by painting a bigger picture of where the landscape is heading. In this, we try guide both corporations and public institutions in making better decisions about their (and society’s) future.

Presumably the programmers at Phillips weren’t imagining this sort of patient.

Long Now Board Member David Eagleman recently had a very unusual visitor at his lab. At three thousand years of age, this is by far the oldest person Eagleman has ever put through a scanner. Neshkons is an Egyptian mummy, exhumed from Luxor in the 19th century and recently acquired by an acquaintance of Eagleman’s. It turns out that scanning a mummy presents some interesting problems (and neuroscientific disappointments, such as having had his brain removed through his nostrils with a hook at death). Eagleman described the challenges in a blog post:

First, for those of you who know my lab, you’ll know that we employ magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) when trying to decipher the human brain. So this was my first plan for the mummy.  But there was a big concern here: the possibility that Neskhons had, enfolded in his ancient, never-unwrapped linens, a hunk of metal.  That would spell bad news for the MRI, which is a giant magnet. [...]

And there was a second problem. MRI scanners work, in part, by detecting changes in electron spin in fluids in tissue and bone. Neskhons had no fluid at all.

In the end, Eagleman’s team performed a CT scan, “a series of X-rays taken from all different angles and then reconstructed into a 3-dimensional whole.” The results were fantastic, with high-resolution 3-dimensional images of a body still hidden inside its linen cocoon after three millennia. (Except for its head, which was laid bare at an “unwrapping party” in Cleveland in 1900.) The mummy is currently on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas.

Neskhons’ sarcophagus [...] is vividly painted with scenes about the afterlife. He presumably wouldn’t have guessed that his body’s afterlife would take place in a transparent case in a foreign land known as Houston, Texas, among tall and long-living people with magical tubes that have the power to peer into hidden dimensions of a body and reconstruct it at 1.5 millimeter resolution.  For this reason and others, we treated the occasion with the respect and solemnity. After all, who knows where our bodies will end up in 3,000 years hence? Who will be looking at our empty hulls, and what technologies will they employ to reconstruct the details of our lives?

Advances in computing technology have led to increasingly powerful devices – a cell phone can now do what early desktop computers did not even approximate. But these developments have largely been in the form of devices, objects made of silicon and plastic. Stanford bioengineering professor Drew Endy imagines, in a New York Times article, another frontier for computing, where computers with even a tiny amount of processing power would be useful.

…what if such computers could be installed inside every cell of your body? What if these computers were used to keep track of how many times each of your cells divided, forming the basis of systems that could track and control aging, development and cancer?

In his 02008 talk in The Long Now Foundation’s SALT series, Endy begins: “I want to develop tools that make biology easy to engineer.” While his article mentions that he and his colleagues have not yet been able to program a “genetically encoded eight-bit counter,” research does suggest that it is possible.

So the future of computing need not only be a question of putting people and things together with ubiquitous silicon computers. The future will be much richer if we can imagine new modes of computing in new places and with new materials — and then find ways to bring those new modes to life.

Back in 02009 through a partnership with Applied Minds, and in turn the Air Force Research Lab (who generously invited us to include a sample), we sent one of our Rosetta materials on an experiment called MISSE-7 (pronounced “missey”), which flew on the International Space Station.  This experiment is a shorter term version of the material research begun in 01984 with the Long Duration Exposure Facility.  We sent a sample of commercially pure titanium, that was black oxide coated, and laser marked (pictured below left). This is the same material and oxide process that was used to create the front of the original Rosetta Disk. However we used a much lower power laser than was used on the Rosetta disk so the marking was not very deep.  The sample was just returned to us (below right) after its stint outside the ISS and looks no worse for wear at all except for a slight fade in the clarity of the etching.

  
(Sample before it was sent on left and after returning on right)

This marks our second space rated Rosetta Disk material,  the first one was the nickel material that is currently on the ESAs Rosetta Mission.  Below is all the info I have found out about the MISSE-7 mission so far.  I am trying to locate the section of the EVA videos where the experiment gets installed and removed.  Any help is appreciated.

• Samples went up on STS 129 (Atlantis) on Nov. 16, 2009
• Samples were placed on the back side (wake) of the ISS on Nov. 23, 2009
• Samples orbited Earth at ~8km/s
• Samples returned to earth on STS-134  June 1 02011

INSTALLATION:
MISSE-7 installed during  EVA 3 on shuttle Atlantis flight STS 129
Video CG Simulation of EVA 3, MISSE-7 at 2min, and 3:22

• http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/548353main_MISSE-77.jpg
• http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/547356main_MISSE-75.jpg
• http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/556618main_MISSE-79.jpg

In the effort to understand our environment, scientists generally rely on natural observations to describe the earth’s past. They examine tree rings, oxygen isotopes, sedimentary rock, pollen, and many other physical records from which we can glean information. These methods are quite fruitful, and when combined they offer compelling evidence. But wouldn’t it be nice if, at least for the last few millennia, our ancestors had just recorded all of that information for us?

Occasionally they did, particularly when they encountered conditions or events that they considered extremely important. For example, swarms of locusts that ate all of their food. Conservation Magazine describes a project by a team of scientists in China who have compiled over 8,000 historical documents that chronicle the insect’s effects:

“Outbreak of Oriental migratory locusts (Locusta migratoria manilensis) was, together with drought and flood, considered one of the three most severe natural disasters causing damage to crop production in ancient China,” a team led by Huidong Tian of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing notes in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “The earliest known written record of locusts was found inscribed on an ox bone in Oracle Script (Jiaguwen, the earliest Chinese script) 3,500 years ago, asking: ‘Will locusts appear in the field; will it not rain?’” Ever since, local histories and government documents have been littered with detailed records of locust outbreaks.

The study has shown a link between dry conditions and locust outbreaks, providing a rare biological source of evidence for climate variations. Regardless of whether or not the authors of these documents intended for them to be useful to future generations, their efforts to describe and catalog their environment in an enduring medium have proven very valuable to us, thousands of years later.

About ten years ago The Long Now Foundation initiated an effort to document every living organism on the planet within 25 years. The project was called All Species and while it did not make it through the dot com burst, it was continued by initiatives such as the Encyclopedia of Life and the Census of Marine Life. Because our knowledge of biological diversity of the planet is incomplete, scientists have always been uncertain of just how many species we have left to identify. Recently, however, a paper was published in the open-access biology journal of the Public Library of Science that approaches that question in a novel statistical way. The results are impressive. They indicate that the 1.2 million or so species that scientists have described to date comprise a mere 14% of the total number inhabiting our planet.

Our current estimate of ~8.7 million species narrows the range of 3 to 100 million species suggested by taxonomic experts [1] and it suggests that after 250 years of taxonomic classification only a small fraction of species on Earth (~14%) and in the ocean (~9%) have been indexed in a central database (Table 2). Closing this knowledge gap may still take a lot longer. Considering current rates of description of eukaryote species in the last 20 years (i.e., 6,200 species per year; ±811 SD; Figure 3F–3J), the average number of new species described per taxonomist’s career (i.e., 24.8 species, [30]) and the estimated average cost to describe animal species (i.e., US$48,500 per species [30]) and assuming that these values remain constant and are general among taxonomic groups, describing Earth’s remaining species may take as long as 1,200 years and would require 303,000 taxonomists at an approximated cost of US$364 billion. With extinction rates now exceeding natural background rates by a factor of 100 to 1,000 [31], our results also suggest that this slow advance in the description of species will lead to species becoming extinct before we know they even existed. High rates of biodiversity loss provide an urgent incentive to increase our knowledge of Earth’s remaining species.

On the bright side, there are some encouraging technological advances in social media and genetic identification that are increasing the efficiency of documenting new organisms. The internet facilitates the development of grassroots or amateur scientific projects, and it more widely distributes the daunting task of identifying another seven and a half million species (a task which would otherwise be all the more daunting in light of the dwindling number of professional taxonomists). One such project, featured previously on this blog, is known as 10000 birds and aims to photograph every bird in the world, providing a public database of avian images. For the important task of genetic documentation, DNA barcoding offers an efficient way of analyzing the genetic makeup of new specimens.

With these technologies and the development of others, it may indeed be possible to achieve a comprehensive description of life on earth in a time span closer to Long Now’s 25 year goal for the All Species project than the twelve centuries cited by the study above. And why develop such a catalog? Robert May of Oxford University’s Zoology department wrote a compelling companion piece to the study in the Public Library of Science’s journal.

[...] we increasingly recognise that such knowledge is important for full understanding of the ecological and evolutionary processes which created, and which are struggling to maintain, the diverse biological riches we are heir to. Such biodiversity is much more than beauty and wonder, important though that is. It also underpins ecosystem services that—although not counted in conventional GDP—humanity is dependent upon. [...] The essential fact is that, if we are to meet the challenges facing tomorrow’s world, we need a clearer understanding of how many species there are—both on land and in the even less well-studied oceans—underpinning the structure and functioning of ecosystems.

Long Now Board Member David Eagleman will be speaking as part of the Bay Area Science Festival presentation “Will We Ever Understand the Brain” on Wednesday, November 2, 02011. Eagleman will discuss with Henry Markram, coordinator of the Human Brain Project, whether the myriad functions of the brain will someday be clear to us, or if they will always be somewhat of a mystery.

The lecture will take place at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco at 7pm. See the California Academy of Sciences’ or the Bay Area Science Festival’s website for details and tickets.

Eagleman is a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine as well as an author whose works include the fictional Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives and most recently, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.

When it comes to  society’s propensity for compromisingly short-term thinking, not even the scientific community is immune. A recent post on John Horgan‘s blog at Scientific American discussed a few of the trends responsible for the hastiness (and resulting shoddiness) of too much of our scientific activity. Among the trends is an overemphasis on ‘popular’ research topics, which statistician John Ioaniddis has shown leads to more inaccurate publications.

The likelihood that a claim will hold up, he argues, is inversely proportional to the initial attention that it gets from other scientists and the media. Large, fast-moving, “hot” fields, which can yield large financial payoffs, tend to have the worst records.

Thankfully, the primary subject of Horgan’s post is not fast-paced failure, but an interesting effort to promote slower, better science. A group of scientists based in Germany have published “The Slow Science Manifesto,” which praises the essential nature of “accelerated science of the early 21st century” but scolds those who demand that scientists constantly produce research with immediate practical application and clear meaning and intention. “Science needs time,” they assert, “to think.”

Science needs time to read, and time to fail. Science does not always know what it might be at right now. Science develops unsteadi­ly, with jerky moves and un­predict­able leaps forward—at the same time, however, it creeps about on a very slow time scale, for which there must be room and to which justice must be done.

The Manifesto concludes: “We cannot continuously tell you what our science means; what it will be good for; because we simply don’t know yet. Science needs time.” This statement corresponds neatly to a sentence from a chapter (titled, not incidentally, “Slow Science”) in Stewart Brand’s book The Clock of the Long Now: “Rigorously collected old data keeps finding new uses.” Brand proposes that the Long Now Library could help facilitate the kinds of long-term projects that produce large useful data sets by helping scientists overcome the obstacles that stand in the way of such endeavors. Perhaps the authors of The Slow Science Manifesto would agree with his analysis:

…in light of their great accumulative value, why are long-term scientific studies so rare? Well, (1) they’re not about proving or disproving hypotheses, the coin of the scientific realm; (2) they don’t generate quick papers, the coin of a scientific career; (3) they bear no relation to scientific fashion, where the excitement is; (4) they’re not subject to money-making patent or copyright; (5) the few that exist usually die when their primary researcher dies; (6) they’re extremely difficult to maintain funding for; and (7) ever growing archives are an expensive hassle to service and keep accessible.

The Long Now Foundation has, in fact, already had the opportunity to support a long-term scientific project. In 02008 the Nevada System of Higher Education received funding from the National Science Foundation to study climate change in the Great Basin. As part of the study they needed to install permanent climate monitoring stations over a wide range of elevation levels and ecosystem types, and the Long Now Foundation’s property in Nevada provided some key locations for constructing stations. If the project overcomes the challenges and pressures that drove a group of frustrated scientists to publish their Slow Science Manifesto, it will one day become a valuable bank of ‘rigorously collected old data,’ and future scientists will continue to use and reuse it for purposes that, quite frankly, we’ve never even dreamed of.

Brought to our attention by BoingBoing, the Center for PostNatural History specializes in specimens that are unlikely to be on display at, say, the American Museum of Natural History. As its name implies, the Center features organisms that are ‘unnatural,’ in that they were produced or altered by human activity. If we are, as some have suggested, entering a new epoch where the earth is sufficiently affected by humans so as to elicit the name ‘Anthropocene,’ then this museum could be the first of many to exhibit its characteristic life-forms. As its website explains,

The Center for PostNatural History is dedicated to the advancement of knowledge relating to the complex interplay between culture, nature and biotechnology. The PostNatural  refers to living organisms that have been altered through processes such as selective breeding or  genetic engineering. The mission of the Center for PostNatural History is to acquire, interpret and provide access to a collection of living, preserved and documented organisms of postnatural origin.

Every organism in an ecosystem, of course, exists in a network of constantly interacting relationships, so the idea that the effects of our species on other organisms are somehow ‘unnatural’ is debatable. But the idea of the “PostNatural” dovetails nicely with Bill McKibben’s “End of Nature,” referring not to a true absence of nature, but to a world in which human influence reaches ever more deeply into the biology of our planet.

And the nature of that influence is not really clear – what will be its long-term effects? How will people choose to utilize biotechnology? At the very least we can take notes as we go. Given that the vast majority of the species on our planet are not yet described by scientists, it is encouraging that the goals of the Center for PostNatural History include “the maintenance of a unique catalog of living, preserved and documented specimens of postnatural origin.”

Mr. Freeman, as it turns out, is quite the geek.

An  episode from the show’s second season recently asked, “Can We Live Forever?” Well known scientists such as Michio Kaku and Aubrey de Grey provided perspective on the challenges and research underlying the the science of human life extension. (Coincidentally, a newly announced DARPA research initiative on the subject, called Biochronicity, was mentioned on Long Views just last month.)

Also featured in the discussion was Long Now Executive Director Alexander Rose. You can see a clip of his segment below:

Cities are often hotbeds of creativity and innovation, where the pace of life is faster and the diversity of people is greater. But humans aren’t the only things living in our cities – recent research by evolutionary biologists indicates that the processes of evolution and ecological change can also speed up in urban environments. In a New York Times article, science writer Carl Zimmer shares a glimpse of research conducted in New York City on organisms ranging from mice and fish to ants and bacteria.

Evolution is one of life’s constants. New species emerge; old ones become extinct. Environmental changes have often steered evolution in new directions. And modern cities like New York have brought particularly swift changes to the environment. European settlers cut down most of New York’s original forest; towns grew and then merged into a sprawling metropolitan region. The chemical environment changed as well, as factories dumped chemical pollution into the water and soil.

An increasing (though still small) number of biologists are focusing their attention on cities, which seem to be excellent laboratories of evolution. In his presentation “Viral Time” at Long Now’s SALT series, Zimmer discussed the remarkable pace of evolution in viruses and bacteria, which despite their size have the potential to cause profound and widespread change. And as city-dwellers are often reminded by signs beseeching them to wash their hands, bacteria play a significant role in any urban landscape. Many of the 1,000 gene mutations that researchers have identified in New York City’s native white-footed mice are associated with combating bacteria.

Dr. Munshi-South and his colleagues have been analyzing the DNA of the mice. He’s been surprised to find that the populations of mice in each park are genetically distinct from the mice in others. “The amount of differences you see among populations of mice in the same borough is similar to what you’d see across the whole southeastern United States,” he said.

Urbanization does not simply produce pavement on top of nature. It produces a dynamic mixture of anthropogenic and natural elements that evolves quickly and that can lead to both extinction and adaptation. Given the likelihood of rapidly increasing urbanization throughout the world, these research projects could offer important models for the future as well as hopeful stories of resilience.

The planet Neptune was first observed by astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle in the night sky of September 23, 01846. Well, it wasn’t until recently that the large blue planet completed its first (roughly) 165-year orbit since the night when Galle first viewed it from the Berlin Observatory. Paul Gilster at Centauri Dreams wrote a thoughtful and interesting post on the event, which occurred on July 12 of 02011. Gilster even includes a brief overview of Neptune’s appearances in science fiction:

H.G. Wells likewise wrote about Neptune in ‘The Star’ (1897), a short story in which the planet is destroyed by a collision with what appears to be a rogue wandering planet from the interstellar deep. The event puts a brilliant new star in Earth’s sky, one that inexorably approaches our planet. Interestingly, the massive new object now gets a gravitational assist from Jupiter, as foreseen by a canny mathematician who forecasts the end of the human race…

To put Neptune’s orbital longevity in perspective, I like to reflect on the fact that it will orbit the sun a mere sixty times in the next 10,000 years.

While speaking at Long Now’s Long Conversation with Peter Schwartz last year, NASA Ames Research Director Pete Worden announced a partnered initiative with DARPA to explore long-term space travel, calling it the 100 Year Starship Study. Watch video of their talk in our previous post about it.

The conversation around this research agenda will be opened wide at the 100 Year Starship Study public symposium in Orlando later this fall.

The organizers say they’ve received 520 abstracts and will be choosing from among them the presentations for the event. Seven main research tracks will guide the agenda:

• Time-Distance Solutions
• Habitats and Environmental Science
• Biology and Space Medicine
• Education, Social, Economic and Legal Considerations
• Destinations
• Philosophical and Religious Considerations
• Communication of the Vision

Long Now’s Stewart Brand will participate in the Symposium by filling the chair overseeing the Philosophical and Religious Considerations Track.

There will also be a Sci-Fi Author’s Discussion Panel featuring, among others, Charlie Stross and former SALT speaker Vernor Vinge.

The 100 Year Starship Study public symposium will be held from September 30 through October 2, 2011 at the Hilton Convention Center in Orlando, FL. Registration is free.

Over the course of a lifetime the human body undergoes various developments at various timescales. There are daily processes such as digestion and sleep, but also decadal processes by which infants mature into adults – undergoing puberty somewhere along the way – and gradually grow old. Biologists have fruitfully studied the mechanisms behind these daily, monthly and yearly sorts of developments, but the factors that actually determine when and how quickly they occur are much less certain.

Wired’s Danger Room featured a recently announced effort by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to investigate those temporal determinants. The Wired blog post explains the agency’s ‘Biochronicity’ project:

There’s a hidden clock that underlies every process of every living thing — from when our cells start dividing to how quickly we age. Researchers at Darpa, the Pentagon’s extreme science agency, believes they can find it, using a mash-up of biology, code-cracking, mathematics and computer science.

…to uncover the calculus within the genome, it might take some looking beyond the genome. Genes may contribute a few elements to the inner clock, but they interact within a larger scaffolding of cell processes and environmental factors. Furthermore, all those interactions may not be subject to any top-down control of a particular actor. Darpa’s “master regulator” may turn out to be more of an interlocking network of systems.

So it appears that the best way to learn about the long-term biological development of a human may be to study a plethora of individual timing mechanisms and the factors that influence them. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency hopes to use such information to predict the course of processes such as cell cycles and aging. The trick, perhaps, will be to come full circle and use knowledge of numerous, distinct yet interdependent mechanisms to paint a holistic and coherent portrait of yearly, decadal or even lifetime development. So it goes with long-term thinking in general. The big picture is composed of – and derived from – small pixels.

The success of this research could have profound implications for long-term thinking in society. Michael West, a scientist who has been studying human aging and cell mortality since the early 1990s, spoke at The Long Now Foundation’s SALT series in 02004 about “The Prospects of Human Life Extension,” pointing out that an average life-span of 100 years or more would likely change the way that people think about time and how they plan for the future. It was none too many generations ago when few humans lived beyond their forties.

Danger Room writers Noah Shachtman and Lena Groeger are excited and encouraged about the scope of the project.

Biochronicity is a return to the fundamentals, the building blocks of science. Of course, this mission to uncover how time is encoded in our biology will begin with tiny steps. But now could be the perfect time to start.

The Planning:
Over the last couple years artist Steve Rowell has been planning a project to document the Svalbard Global Seed Vault as part of a larger project about the beginnings and future of agriculture.  The Seed Vault is designed with a 1000 year design life to store back-up samples of every food crop seed in the world.  About a year ago Rowell contacted me to see if Long Now would be interested in participating in his project.  I said that we would as long as I got to come along on one of the trips to Svalbard and meet the creators of the Vault.  The Norwegian government management of the vault required that Rowell also get participation from Scandinavian nations, specifically Norway as part of his project.  Over the last year he was able to secure funding and collaboration with a Norwegian and a Dutch artist, and with it an official invite to visit the Vault.  Long Now would cover our accommodations for this scouting trip, and I would cover my own flight.  The Seed Vault administrators seem to be a bit overwhelmed with the interest in the Vault.  They open the Vault about twice a year to deposit new seed stock and they are apparently inundated with requests to visit.  However the remoteness of the location and their limited time on site means they really don’t have time to give many tours.   But with persistence and the Scandinavian participation Steve was able to secure us the invite.  We quickly booked our complicated flights, and found accommodation in one of the few places to stay in winter.

The Journey:
On February 22nd I boarded a Lufthansa jet bound for Munich out of San Francisco.  I would be meeting Steve in Oslo the following evening as he was traveling from Washington DC.  It took three tries to fly out of Munich due to aircraft difficulties that resulted in me arriving at 1:30 am in Oslo.  After a couple hours of sleep I met Steve the next morning at the airport hotel breakfast area, and we boarded our SAS flight to Tromsø at the northern tip of Norway.  It was a rare clear day, and I was able to see the stunning fjords of Norway as we crossed the 66th Latitude into the Arctic circle.

In Tromsø we were asked to exit the plane and go through an ID check.  I think it has something to do with the unique treaty status of the Spitsbergen Archipelago where Svalbard is.  The Spitsbergen Treaty, ratified almost a century ago, gives Norway sovereignty over the area, but they have to grant completely equal access, immigration, and commercialization to any signing nation with minimal taxation.  This also means that there are a number of refugees on the island, and I suspect they want to keep track of them.

We re-boarded in Tromsø to find the plane completely packed.  Aside from it’s major coal mining activity and arctic scientific research, Svalbard is a winter tourist destination to see the northern lights and wildlife.  Crammed onto the plane were Swedish grandmothers, Russian coal miners, scientists and even a couple babies.  Everyone had shed the usually fashionable northern European winter-wear for serious expedition wear.  Huge gore-tex parkas with fur lined hoods and patches reading “Antarctic Survey 1996″ abounded.  We landed in 30 mph crosswinds and driving snow.  The pilot was clearly used to the airport bringing the plane down fast, but touching down without even a bump.  We caught the local bus to our accommodation – Mary-Ann’s Polarrigg, and even glimpsed the Seed Vault perched just above the airport.

Longyearbyen:
The town of Longyear was founded by an American from Massachusetts of the same name.  He bought the rights to a coal deposit from a Norwegian company and established one of the first permanent outposts on the island.  With the coming of the airport in the 70′s, Longyearbyen changed from a tiny mining town to a University town and adventure tourism destination.  I will not recount the history of Svalbard in any detail, it is well recorded by many sources including Wikipedia.  I do recommend The Future History of the Arctic by Emmerson for anyone interested in the bizarre and increasingly consequential future, present and past of the Arctic region.

Mary-Ann’s Polarrigg (entry shown above) known locally as “The Rigg” is a long row of prefab buildings from various eras, mostly leftover from the mining industry.  Mary-Ann the proprietor is an amazingly sweet lady who has filled the place with the wildest and weirdest eclectica to be found on Svalbard.  Stuffed polar bears and arctic foxes mingle with old mining equipment and incredible historic photos.  She is also the chef, preparing hearty Nordic breakfasts and dinners of local seal, trout, reindeer and of course… whale. (In Norway they have t-shirts with a picture of a whale and the tag line “Smart food for smart people”.

Our first two bone-chilling days on the island we spent touring around in a borrowed car from Mary-Ann as our appointment at the Vault was not until our third day.  There are only a few miles of road there, the longest runs of which service the airport and the coal mines.  We got a tour of the Polar University where every student is taught arctic survival and how to use a rifle.  Everyone on Svalbard is required to own a gun, and be trained in its use, for protection from polar bears.  Svalbard is the first place I have ever seen 20 year old students walking in and out of school with rifles slung over their shoulders.

There is a strange basic irony about Svalbard that we discovered on the University tour.  One of the main research topics and political focuses on the island is climate change and atmospheric pollutants.  While the Norwegian mainland gets all its electricity from clean hydro-electric power, the only coal fired power plant in Norway is actually on Svalbard.  But without this coal power, the island would have to evacuate in less than 48 hours.  On Svalbard coal equals life.

The Seed Vault:
Sunday was the scheduled day to visit the Vault, and that morning it was a white out blizzard.  We had been told that not even the Royalty of Norway were allowed in the actual seed vault, and to expect to only see the entry hallway.  Our guide at the University, a few days before, was shocked that we would even be allowed to see the hallway.  The drive up the switchbacks was a bit perilous in the snowstorm.  We had to stop multiple times as visibility dropped to zero.  We met our hosts Roland von Bothmar and Anders Nilsson of NordGen at the top of the road, and together approached the vault.  Apparently they had spent a lot of time the previous day cracking and melting ice off the door as it had been above freezing allowing water to run down, and then freezing the door shut as the evening temperatures dropped. (Note that there is a lot value to a design that sheds water away from hinges, seems, and especially locks.)  Their work had paid off though as they were able to open the door quickly and we all scrambled in out of the nearly horizontal snow stinging our faces.

The 320 feet of fluorescent lit down sloping entry hallway is separated into three equal sections.  This first section we enter into from the outside door is not completely sealed off from the outside air.  You can see where the permafrost meets the building in a sloping line of hoarfrost built up on the wall.  We move deeper toward the next door.  Roland asks us to watch out for the ice on the floor, apparently the freeze thaw cycle melts the frost on the walls which then runs down the floor and then freezes again, making the ramp treacherous.

On the other side of the door the hallway widens to a 20 foot diameter corrugated metal tube with a concrete floor.  Roland explains that this part of the vault has been shifting as the permafrost around us thaws and freezes.  Indeed the concrete on one side of the floor is cracking as evidence of this.  The wall at the end of this section is a new addition and is still covered in a tyvek like building wrap.

Once through this next doorway the floor curiously transitions to asphalt, possibly to allow more flexibility and water permeability.  There is a pump system and grating newly installed in the floor to deal with the water from the thawing frost.   All of these water and freeze-thaw issues have been discovered since the vault was finished in 02008. The walls and ceiling of this section are about 25 feet wide and tall.  The very rough surface is a product of the drilling and blasting into the loose local shist.  The rock has been stabilized with large bolts roughly every 4′, covered in shot-crete, and then a white paint.  This wall, ceiling and floor finish is the same for the rest of the vault, including the seed chambers.  This hallway terminates in a large concrete wall with a metal door in it, and there are a few other doors on the right hand side at the end of the hall.  Above are cable racks and the ever present ventilation tubes.  One set of the tubes has frost building up on each joint section, these are the cooling pipes for the seed vault bringing them down from today’s ambient -5C to the desired -18C.  We enter the doors on the right into a control room.  This area has desks and a PC and a sign in book.  The list of people who have signed in is impressive,  Everyone from UN president Ban Ki-moon to President Jimmy Carter, and… us.  I had assumed this was as far as we were going to get, but then Roland says that he is turning the lights on in the next section for us, and warns that camera lenses brought into the colder areas will fog up.  We leave a selection of lenses here, and pass through the third lock. (Sound recording in the last hallway section)

Through the doors the asphalt starts sloping back upward and we enter into a lateral access hall where you can see each of the three seed vault doors.  The doors are embedded in concrete walls blocking off each rough blasted chamber.  The central chamber, vault 2, is covered in a thick layer of frost, cracked away around the door from the recent depositing of this years seed stock.  The cooling pipes above are fully covered in thick frost here as well.  The only adornment in the whole space is a spear-like metal shape on the wall, a seed sculpture by a Japanese artist who donates these pieces to seed banks all over the world.

There is a shelf here with some plastic bins and seed samples of the types found in the vault.  Glass jars, vials and bags each containing labeled seeds from different seed banks around the world.  Now they use a standardized mylar zip lock bag and plastic bin.  However Roland points out the USDA submissions always use their own box, a cardboard one.  It turns out that this seed vault is the second one on Svalbard.  There was one created in the 01980s for just Scandinavian species which is inside a shipping container in one of the old coal mines.  It was sealed 30 years ago and Roland hasn’t even been there.  Roland explains that all the seeds arrive by cargo plane a week ahead of each deposit, upon arrival they use the airport x-ray machine to make sure there are only seeds being deposited (e.g. no bombs).  In the last 3 years since the vault opened they now have over 637,000 varieties in the vault, and they have not even filled up one chamber yet.  Roland also confirms what we learned from the University, that all the seeds here are edible crop seeds with one exception.  Through a partnership with the University at Svalbard they have stored about 60 varieties of plants from the Spitsbergen Archipelago, none of which are edible.

Roland also mentioned all the crackpot theories and stories people have about the vault – like the one where it is really all the big bio-tech companies trying to control the world food supply. These of course are not true in the least. It is a Norwegian government project run by a consortium of academic, government and non-profit scientific entities. The seeds remain the property of each donating country, and the manifest is public (you can go to the website and download it now if you like). Depositors can pull their seeds at anytime for any reason. So far no company has submitted GMO seeds, likely because of how much disclosure they would have to do around them as part of the process.  The really interesting question though is what happens if a country ceases to be a country, who then owns the seeds and the rights to access them? (Sound recording in the transverse tunnel)

Roland opens one of the empty vaults for us.  We shuffle into the air lock area and after the outer door is closed, the next door is opened.  This vault, number three, has no seeds or cooling system.  It is about 100 feet deep and 30 feet wide and tall.  Some of the same shelving used in the active vault is in here, along with the plastic bins ready for more seeds to be delivered.  Amazingly the thick stone wall shared with the active vault two is covered in frost.  Wires dangle from sensor equipment on each wall, and there is one spot you can see the fractured native shist where the shot-crete doesn’t quite meet the floor.  We also go into the other empty vault, number one, and it is similar, except it is completely empty.  We ask if the spaces were sterilized or treated in any way before the seeds go in.  Roland says that they are not, and that the mylar bags and the cold are all the seeds need.

Then to our surprise, Roland offers to open the active vault.  Jimmy Carter wasn’t even allowed into that vault.   We crowd close to the ice covered door, we need to let as little cold air out as possible.  Roland unlocks the door with one of only four keys in the world, and we hear the frost crack at the hinges.

We rush into the airlock, and the next door is opened.  This vault is COLD.  The difference between -5c and -18c (0F) is palpable.  The inside of my nostrils hurts and the skin on my face tightens.  Most of the space near the door is taken up by the cooling equipment.  Apparently this equipment was installed just 6 months ago to replace the original equipment that was less efficient, loud and blustery.  Ten feet in front of us is a locked gate, and ten feet beyond that are the shelves and shelves of boxes.  Each box is marked with the logo of a seed bank from a different nation, the USDA cardboard boxes are front and center in the second row of shelves.  We are allowed a few photos and video and are ushered quickly back out again.

After the visit I read some of the material we received.  It doesn’t go too much into the “why” of things, just what happened in the building process.  But what was apparent was that they had a very tight deadline, and I am not sure why.  Most of the decisions, location, contractors, and material choices were made solely for this expediency.  While it will likely be okay if people are there to maintain it, it seems some of the issues like the shist rock site, ferrous metal reinforced concrete, permafrost shifting and flooding, may require a lot of intervention to maintain the integrity of the vault.

I certainly learned a lot being here.  Mainly that even if you put your site in the hardest to reach place in the world, people will still want to come and visit it – in droves.  They did not design it for visiting, and are having to deal with this fact now.

We ended the day with a dinner up at Huset, the most northerly restaurant with a Michelin star.  We ate scallops and reindeer with Roland and Anders as well as a seed scientist from University of Arizona who was in town to deposit their collection of desert legume seeds from around the world.  What an amazing day.

Other Travel Notes:
Our last day here we finally got an opening in the weather.  We arranged a guided “skooter” (snowmobile) tour and our original plan was to visit the Russian coal outpost of Barentsburg, but after talking to some folks we switched it over to Temple Fjord.  I cannot recommend touring Svalbard this way enough.  We even saw the direct sun for the first time since our arrival when out on the fjord.  Be prepared for cold unlike anything you have ever experienced. Under the thick “skooter suit,” boots and helmet loaned to me by the guide I wore: expedition weight base layers, a complete down suit, a fleece, two pairs of thick socks, a neck gator and a balaclava.  I still got chilled to the point of numbness.  Any small chink in your armor, and the wind augmented by 50km/hr on the scooter cuts right to your bones.  We encountered a dutch two masted sail boat that purposefully traps itself in the sea ice each year there.  They operate it as a kind of outback adventure hotel.  Do not miss touring these outer areas, they are spectacular.

Some notes about clothing.  The Norwegian tradition of removing your “outside shoes” is honored almost everywhere on Svalbard.  Bring snow boots that are easily removable, and carry some slippers or flip flops around with you so you don’t end up in your socks everywhere.  The other pro-tip is to bring a pair of ski goggles with clear lenses (not dark tinted as you wont be able to see).  Even if you are walking 500 yards, you will be glad you did in a snow storm.  As you might expect bring lots of down, fleece and gore-tex layers.  Neck gators, balaclavas, mittens and glove liners are also a must.  It can rain, snow, blow 40 mph, and then turn to sunshine all within an hour.  Headlamp and even a little red flashing jogging light is also a great idea for walking around after dark (eg. after 3pm).

There are some excellent eating and drinking establishments on Svalbard.  The Michelin starred Huset up high in the valley is astonishingly good, (but pricey) and includes a wine list of over 1100 titles.  Also the pub in town next to the market has one of the largest single malt whiskey collections in all of Europe, not to be missed.  You should also stop by the Svalbard Museum, it has won several well earned exhibit design awards.  Likely one of the most interesting and informative small museums I have ever been to.

A general note that if coming in winter (which I do recommend) that you put at least a day or two of float in your schedule.  While you can do most things even in the worst weather here, it seems a bit silly to tour the fjords when you have 20 feet of visibility.  Also note that there are 4 months of the year where there it basically as dark as night.  We had plenty of indirect light on our trip at the end of February.

Living and travel costs in Scandinavia are expensive, but Svalbard is even more so.  Pretty much everything aside from water, reindeer, and polar bears has to be imported by air to Svalbard.  A personal pizza and drink can easily run $20-30, a simple dinner for two and a couple beers can come in well over a $100.  Simple accommodations even in the slow season are hard to book and expect to pay over $150-300/night.  The Polarrigg was nice as they have a full kitchen for guest use, and Mary-Anne let us use her vehicle several times at no charge.  There is a Radisson which is very central, a huge benefit as its a very short walk to most local services (you can walk from the Rig as well but it’s about 1/4 mile in often bad weather).  The funny thing though is some things cost less than on the mainland because of the unique tax status of Svalbard.  Alcohol is much cheaper here, basically US prices.

Like many Scandinavian and northern areas where alcoholism is rampant, the state controls the liquor stores here.  However Svalbard has the most control I have ever seen.  There is one liquor store, and each citizen’s purchases are allocated and recorded.  In addition visitors must present their plane ticket on which they write what you have bought to be sure you do not go above your personal allocation while there.  You can fly in with liquor though…