More durable than bronze, higher than Pharaoh’s pyramids is the monument I have made, a shape that angry wind or hungry rain cannot demolish, nor the innumerable ranks of the years that march in centuries. I shall not wholly die:
some part of me will cheat the goddess of death.
Thus wrote, not without reason, in 23 BCE the proud and self-conscious Horace. So far, he has been quite right – ancient monuments have crumbled, or disappeared completely, while his poetry still remains. However, you might ask – for how much longer? Latin is already dead, at least as a spoken language, while its connoisseurs are dwindling. Pessimists may contradict Horace’s optimism with Thomas à Kempis phrase from 1418: O quam cito transit gloria mundi, how quickly the glory of the world passes away. As a matter of fact, more and more people, in particular youngsters, have a diminishing interest in the written word, in particular in the form of longer texts like novels and newspaper editorials, preferring short messages and slogans that are easy to understand and preferably not longer than half a page.
How may we be able to warn future generations about lethal dangers buried beneath Earth’s surface? Thousands of years from now, our descendants can probably not understand any of the writing systems currently in use. And how can we now adequately predict which future geological upheavals lay in store? Nuclear waste is drilled deep down into primeval rock, but can it really be guaranteed that cracks cannot occur, that atomic waste will not sip into underground water resources? Considering who little was expected from the effects of climate change just a few years ago, it makes you wonder about the safe future of our planet and the shortsighted damage we are doing to it.
In 2008, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault was inaugurated on the Norwegian island of Spitzbergen. It is intended to be a secure backup facility for the world’s crop diversity. More than 100 metres below earth, in the tunnels of an abandoned coal mine, the Seed Vault currently conserves 1,280,677 accessions, representing more than 13,000 years of agricultural history.
…..
