Github's Arctic Code Vault

The last stop for civilization before the North Pole is Svalbard, an archipelago north of mainland Norway along the 80th parallel. Most of Svalbard’s old Norwegian and Russian coal mines have shut down, so locals have rebranded their vast acres of permafrost as an attraction to scientists and doomsday preppers. Around Svalbard, things can be hidden from the stresses of the outside world. There’s a treaty in place to keep it neutral in times of war. In other words, it’s an ideal spot for a big global reset button or two.

Located next to the global seed bank shown above is the Arctic World Archive, the seed vault’s much less sexy cousin. It unlocks with a simple door key and, inside, deposits much of the world’s open-source software code. Servers and flash drives aren’t durable enough for this purpose, so the data is encoded on what looks like old-school movie reels, each weighing a few pounds and stored in a white plastic container about the size of a pizza box. It’s basically microfilm. With the help of a magnifying glass, you—or, say, a band of End Times survivors—can see the data, be it pictures, text, or lines of code.

Github, which was bought last year by Microsoft for 7.5 billion dollars prepares humanity for the doomsday by preserving today's technology for the post-apocalypse generations.

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Writer: Sahanj Jose

Image courtesy: Bloomberg

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