Friday, February 29, 2008

Planting seeds in a barren arctic mountain is a good idea?

I have a brand new reason to hope there is no catastrophic event of world-wide proportion. No global warming which results in Topeka’s real estate values tripling because they can now advertise beach front property. No tsunami creating a wave large enough for Gilligan to surf from his remote desert island all the way to Tokyo. (Wasn’t that a plot from the 1965 season?) No hijacking of the Electoral College resulting in the constitutionally valid installment of Chuck Norris as President of the United States. Nope, I need the world to keep plugging along just fine. Why?
Well, I read that a gigantic vault has been created inside a mountain near the city of Longyearbyen (I know it looks like I made that name up but I didn’t) on the remote Svalbard Islands between Norway and the North Pole. This vault was created and will be maintained as a safe repository for millions of different seeds. The very first shipment stored there contained over one million seeds. These seeds are all for plants used for food like eggplant, lettuce, barley, and potatoes. This all sounds well and good, doesn’t it? If there is a horrible occurrence like Donald Trump’s ego blots out the sun for an extended period of time dropping the world into an ice age even worse than the one starring Ray Romano and the food supply is truly depleted, this seed vault could be used. But think about it beyond the surface. This means the entire food supply for the planet would be vegetables.
One of the few perks to being a forty-five year old man is I no longer have to eat my vegetables. Oh, my wife keeps slipping them onto my plate in an effort to help me eat healthy. I eat a few of them while my children are watching so I can be a good role model (which despite one Globe Exchange contributor’s opinion is something I am cognizant of), but then I can hide the rest under the napkin and nobody is the wiser.
There have been bunches of movies made over the years showing the horrors of a post-apocalyptic civilization on Earth. The Planet of the Apes showed how horrible it would be if Charlton Hesston was the only human being capable of speech. There is an NRA joke there somewhere but I do not want to tick them off. (They have guns which have not yet been pried from their cold, dead fingers.) The Road Warrior showed Mel Gibson as the last good man in a world thirsty for gasoline. This was long before we saw him fight for the rights of 13th century Scotland or heard him go on an anti-Semitic drunken rant. Waterworld had Kevin Costner which in and of itself is darned frightening.
I have a new pitch for Hollywood using the Doomsday Seed Vault as the premise. The world has just come through a horrible event. The heroic Norwegians are making a valiant attempt to re-cultivate the Earth, but everyone is just sick to death of broccoli served with a side of artichoke hearts. Then suddenly into the land rides a stoic stranger. A man with no name, no past, and no spinach stuck in his teeth. He is a savior to the horribly healthy yet strangely unsatisfied population of the planet, for he brings with him a long forgotten secret. This secret will lead to a renaissance, a chance to re-gain some of the joy from the lost ante-apocalyptic days. He has the secret of high fructose corn syrup, the most powerful sweetener ever created by man. Who cares about the gigantic rise in obesity and possible liver damage? It tastes good and once again the world can have soda pop and Baby Ruths. It isn’t until the pivotal climax of the third act that we find out he also carries the answer to the centuries old question, “Just what is nougat?”
I hope there are other groups squirreling away different things, just in case. Might I suggest a vault containing Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton, and Bugs Bunny movies? If I have to deal with living in a post-apocalyptic world with Charlton Hesston, Mel Gibson and Kevin Costner I am really gonna be aching for a laugh. Or a vault containing all the books I never had the time to read. I would be smarter than Burgess Meredith and I would be sure I had a couple extra pairs of glasses. (There are big bonus points available if you get that reference.)

6 comments:

Eric Pyle said...

Twilight Zone! Twilight Zone!

Do I get the points?

Anonymous said...

The article i read about the seed vault said that the seeds are kept at some exact tempaerature ideal for long term storage. So if some norwegian trips over the cord or if said catstrophic event wipes out the power grid, they're useless? And what about the soil? any event catastrophic enough to destroy all the seeds on the planet has got to affect the soil. They got a dirt vault somewhere? What grows in northern Norway, anyway? If some environmental holocaust wipes out all plant life, how do they get to corn seed to Iowa...dog sled?

Chris said...

Eric, you get the points but I have, as of yet, discovered nothing the points are useful for.

Chris said...

To anonymous...
I just said they made the vault. I did not say they thought everything through. The advantage of writing a humor column is I do not have to make sense of things just talk about them.

Anonymous said...

I'm not asking for you to explain it, this is science not the entertainment category of Trivial Pursuit. The potatoes and mushrooms are underground in a cool environment! They're going to sprout! Someone will open that vault after some major environmental catastrophe and there'll be green mold on everything! That'll be what the planet will have to servive on GREEN MOLD! Well, at least we'll have Penicillin!

Chris said...

Better to eat Green Mold than Soylent Green.