Whether spurred by the Cold War , clime change , or just the seemingly inevitable arrival of an asteroid strike , humans have gone to extraordinary trouble to plan — and work up — for the forged .
These buildings pasture from the clandestine sand trap where FEMA will spread parking brake radio alert to the icy burial vault where the Norse government is compile a collection of seed to preserve the world ’s biodiversity .
Each is singular for the vaporous engineering and design knowledge of its Divine .
The Underground Village Built on Springs
Most modern Last Judgement structures can be traced back to the Cold War . It was a time when the US administration had the means — and the political uppercase — to set about extremely expensive and sprawl projects to ensure what ’s often send for “ continuity of governance , ” or the power of the US government to proceed control under nuclear apocalypse .
From a meshwork of airborne program line centers to slews of relocation centers across the Eastern Seaboard that could put up grand of evacuated government employees , it was a land - wide electronic web , and it span all the way to Colorado , where one of the more unbelievable engineering project was cut into out of unanimous rock outside of Colorado Springs in the 1950s : Cheyenne Mountain .
AP Photo
Cheyenne Mountain ’s importance on the home phase dwindled decade ago , alongside our fear about total nuclear annihilation by the Soviets . But it ’s still a middling unbelievable lesson of bunker intention . in the first place built to protect NORAD , Cheyenne MountaintransfixedAmericans of the 1960s with rumors of its “ underground city , ” which was unremarkably describes as having all the trappings of an actual town , from a barbershop to a infirmary .
Cheyenne Mountain in 1964 . AP Photo / EG .
But it was the way this “ village ” was built that ’s really interesting . deep down , many of the buildings were build on more than1,3000 metallic element springsup to four feet long and almost two feet in diameter . These springs , according to theBrookings Institute , were “ designed to cushion the jounce of nearby explosion . ” They ’re like huge shock for the full complex — if rattled , the equipment and personnel department inside would theoretically remain safe .
“ Inside 4 1/2 acres of the good deal , some 115,000 bolt shore up up the wall ( two noncommissioned officers continually check and tighten these bolts to keep the walls from break and collapsing ) . ”
A 1965 issue ofPopular Scienceabout the bunker ’s construction expatiate on the steel entanglement encase the diminished city inside Cheyenne :
Each building is sheathed in a might cucoon of steel plate that is seal fuddled . The tiniest pinhole is weld shut . That ’s to rpotect the electronic equipment from the “ electromagnetic pulsation … ” Two great steel door , stand in tandem bicycle 50 feet apart and weighing 43 rafts each , bar the mode to the hamlet right … These are the village “ blast doors , ” designed to withstand all but a direct strike by a nuclear bomb . So securely sealed will they be when complete that a person caught between them could , in metre , cash in one’s chips for lack of air .
Cheyenne has n’t been significant for X , but it ’s reemerging as a useful statement nerve centre for the government . Just this year , the US military beganstoring crucial important digital equipmentat Cheyenne once again . Why now ? To screen its communication systems against the menace ofan electromagnetic pulsation attack(or perhaps even asolar violent storm ? ) , as AFP account . Rather than , you know , all - out state of war with the Soviets .
An Emergency Broadcast Center Hidden Inside a Mountain
When we cogitate of natural selection , our first thoughts are about our immediate need for shelter . But in the long term , information – the power to take in signals about what ’s happening and where – is just as crucial . That ’s why Mount Weather is important .
Sixty mi outside of DC , on a removed hillside in the Blue Ridge mountains , sits a federally - function complex that has been the focus of a vast amount of speculation over the past 15 age . This complex — officially known as theMount Weather Emergency Operations Centre — is a a deep warren of tunnels and dugout build into a hillside and the headquarters for FEMA .
Mount Weather has been around since the 1960s , but there ’s been a reincarnate interest in its role in the federal government . In the years pursue 9/11,rumors circulatedthat the Bush administration was using it to set up a “ dark politics ” ready to operate in the case of an attack on DC . InThe Guardian , Tom Vanderbilt described a local woman who promise 911 that daylight after she say she saw “ the whole mountain opened up and Air Force One vanish in and it closed right up . ” These rumors persisted for years .
However Dubya be after to practice Mount Weather , we do know more about the certain persona it would play in the event of a national catastrophe . While the dugout is one of dozens of “ relocation site ” for a select list of a few thousand governing employee , it would also act a very important role for the average person whose name does not appear on that list — because it ’s home to thecontrol hubfor FEMA ’s National Radio System .
Stephen Little / CC on Flickr
From within Mount Weather , FEMA ensure the emergency program system that ’s been in post , in one way or another , for decades . In fact , its part as our national siren - sounder take to one of the first example in which its existence was noted by the world , as the bookSecret Places , Hidden Sanctuariesexplains :
The area was almost altogether unknown to the American world until it receive some unwelcome publicity in December 1974 , when TWA Flight 514 crash into Mount Weather . The crash cut the underground line direct to the Emergency Broadcast System , so the teletype machine in media centers around America temporarily transmit gibber .
Those nervous tests you hear on wireless sometimes ? They come from FEMA.The New York Timessays the system has never been activated by a president on the home level , but that it ’s been activated locally as many as 20,000 over the years because of weather condition effect and other region - specific emergencies .
Some argue thatthe arrangement is woefully outdatedin an epoch of digital communicating , but on the other hand , its low-toned - tech profile could actually be a pro in a situation where digital networks are down . Your smartphone may not function for long during an emergency where electricity is a no - go , but a hand - cranked radio could plunk up signals from Mount Weather indefinitely .
An Arctic Bunker With Backup Copies of the World’s Crops
Another prospicient - term necessity for endurance ? The ability to grow crops , which of trend require seeds . If some or all of the worldly concern ’s biodiversity has been wiped out , there ’s now a backup of sorts seat deep below permafrost and rock above the Arctic Circle on the remote island of Svalbard .
There , the Norse administration maintains something squall the Global Seed Vault . The Global Crop Trust calls it “ the ultimate insurance plan ” against extreme weather condition , overpopulation , and climate variety – its remote location of the vault was opt because of the exposure of other come storage hub .
On the airfoil of the versant where it ’s located , an installation by the Norse artistDyveke Sannethat acts as a kind a beacon . It ’s designed to make the entranceway of the vault seeable from anyone nearby , a tough task , deal that its ark - like concrete entrance is well hide out in the natural camouflage of snow and tundra – thanks to shards of mirror create a beacon fire of bluish - green brightness level .
The hurdle is theoretically resistant to nearly every conceivable terror : No electrical energy ? It stays relatively coolheaded naturally ( though it ’s kept at a precise -0.4 degree Fahrenheit using a / c ) . prove ocean levels ? It ’s more than 400 foot above sea floor . turkey blast or asteroid smasher ? The vault ’s three computer storage rooms are protect by the versant , where they are snuggle more than 400 feet from the open . It ’s a natural fort , and inside , the government is assemble million of smorgasbord of source in a outer space that could eventually hold 4.5 million seeds . Right now , it ’s cringe up on the one million mark .
If a special region of the world undergoes some build of disaster — be it a computer virus or a typhoon or a state of war — the vault is there to allow for the seeds to regrow the species of crops that of course existed in that region . In possibility , it could also provide the building blocks for the new world . The designer behind the structure , Peter W. Söderman , designed it for what the vault ’s administrators describe as a “ about infinite lifetime . ”
AP Photo / Global Crop Diversity Trust , Mari Tefre
Still , the vault is n’t without critics . A late floor inThe Guardian wonder Norway ’s approachto genetic diversity , enunciate that a single insurance policy policy is n’t the right means to protect the mankind ’s crops :
There is now a growing body of opinion that the world ’s religion , in Svalbard and the Crop Trust ’s unsubtle commission to create ejaculate banks , is misplaced . Those who have worked with granger in the field , especially in developing country , which contain by far the greatest variety of plant , say that variety can not be boxed up and saved in a individual container – no matter how dependable it may be .
A Vault That Could Keep Humanity’s Knowledge For Survivors
But what about survival in an even long - terminal figure sense ? What about the centuries of learning and science that could be lost if a spherical outcome took place — is there a way to safeguard that ?
This is n’t just a question ask by paranoid preppers . Many historiographer and scientist have pointed out the need to bear on human noesis in a more permanent form . When you ’re trying to protect huge sum of data , pick a digital medium ( CDs ? Mac Minis ? ) is a bad and fraught undertaking — within a decade , betting odds are estimable that most digital storage mediums used today will be old-fashioned and intimately useless , to say nothing of within the next one C .
In the mid-2000s , a project called Planets organized by 16 different European university and libraries lay out out to produce a condensation containing the instrument next humans might need to decrypt outmoded file formats . The groupcalledthe digital storage quandary “ a central sarcasm of our geezerhood – the rapid progression of entropy engineering put our information at risk . ”
After four years of work , in 2010 , Planets fill in their task : Creatinga capsulethat could explain virtually any file format , from USB to microfiche , to future humans . As Gizmodo explained at the time this space capsule is currently entomb in a secret bunker in Switzerland calledSwiss Fort Knox — a privately - running play trap beneath a mountain in the Swiss Alps that ’s home to a number of secure data host and other digital warehousing systems .
Planets preserved the ability to unlock our current file formats , which within decades will seem as antiquated as a lost language . But other investigator are thinking even further into the future tense — to a time when humans may need to rediscover the whole of human knowledge as we know it today .
A few years ago , the journalistEd Yong report ontwo scientists , Ewan Birney and Nick Goldman , grow a cheap , fast cognitive operation for encode and decoding information in pieces of DNA – which can last for millennia and can hive away immense amounts of information in a unmarried fragment ( “ all of the world ’s datum would agree in the back of a minivan , ” he write ) .
Yong saysBirney and Goldman are even thinking about how to ramp up a storage bank vault that would “ teach ” next visitors , human or otherwise , to decode this DNA library using descriptive hieroglyphic - manner markings inside a tiptop - secure vault :
Goldman and Birney ’s hypothetical vault would have three rooms . First up : an prefatory chamber , with explanatory illustrations engrave on a lasting metal like nickel or gold . We can not assume that any modernistic language or visual formula will survive , but thankfully , the alchemy of DNA will remain unchanged . We could draw out the intact double helix , corpuscle by atom , using concentric circles to present the individual elements …
Eventually they realize access code to the mother load – the bedroom that put in the terminated knowledge from humans ’s first age , waiting to be decoded .
That was back in 2013 .
Since then , progress on DNA storage has continued steady . This spring , a mathematical group of scientists at Zurich ’s Swiss Federal Institute of Technology published a paper in the German journalAngewandte Chemiereporting the results of a series of storage experiments that encoded text on desoxyribonucleic acid and then protected it using a chemical outgrowth similar to fossilization . Their decision ? If stored at low temperatures , you couldpreserve data on DNA for two million geezerhood .
There ’s been a dull but steady shift in term of how we suppose about survival , then . While during the 1950s and 60s the US administration pour resources into build airtight bunkers and command gist , “ endurance ” for some today mean leaving behind a preserved while of cognition — if we ca n’t survive , then our data point might .
connect with the author at[email protected ] .
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