As the world paces towards more and more deadly weapons and the threat of climate change looms large, Norway’s “Doomsday Vault” is probably just in time in a bid to conserve the most important aspects of our planet in case of Doomsday esque situation arises. The vault is officially known as the World Arctic Archive, which opened this week and has already received two submissions.
The vault is located about 620 miles from the North Pole in Svalbard, Norway, in an abandoned coal mine close to the Global Seed Vault. The Global Seed Vault stores seeds of different crops and fruits etc. in the case of a catastrophe, while the World Arctic Archive will now store significant aspects of different countries’ culture.
This is done via a Norwegian company Piql‘s data conversion technology that transmits the digital data onto a photosensitive, multi-layered analog film. Piql claims that the analog films can last between 500-1000 years, and describe the technology as similar to copying data into “big QR codes on film.”
According to documents by Piql, any country can send in their submissions of text, images or audio-visual content to Piql’s servers, which will be then transferred to the special film that can withstand significant wear and tear. The film will then be placed into a secure box which is of course stored in the heavily fortified vault. The data will be available online, while it can also be shipped in a physical format.
Analog storage is considered to be more disaster proof since it doesn’t require any special codecs or operating systems to decipher in case our generation suffers some sort of catastrophic technological reset.
For now, only Mexico and Brazil have submitted their artifacts, with Brazil submitting historical documents like the Brazilian Constitution and Mexico sending in historical scrolls dating as far as the Inca period for safe keeping.