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from the do-not-store-all-your-seeds-in-one-basket dept.
When civil war broke out in Syria, scientist Ahmed Amri immediately thought to rescue the seed bank that sat in cold storage in Aleppo:
Specifically, 141,000 packets of them sitting in cold storage 19 miles south of Aleppo. They included ancient varieties of wheat and durum dating back nearly to the dawn of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, and one of the world’s largest collections of lentil, barley, and faba bean varieties—crops that feed millions of people worldwide every day. If these seeds were decimated, humanity could lose precious genetic resources developed over hundreds, or in some cases thousands, of years. And suddenly, with the outbreak of violence, their destruction seemed imminent.
It's rare that people consider stores of human knowledge more precious than their own lives. What knowledge would Soylentils sacrifice their own lives to save?
(Score: 2, Informative) by fnj on Saturday April 18 2015, @03:46PM
I expect you know, but a lot of others might not. It's an archipelago far north of Scandinavia proper. Hardly anyone lives there. The population is 2000-odd; large majority Norwegian and most of the minority Russian and Ukrainian. Most of what goes on there is mining, research, and tourism. It is sociologically one of the safest places on the planet. There is virtually no crime. I very much doubt if you could find any disaffected parasites there.