Can you think of one thing that is crucial to our world and society? Most of us would assume that we need to store items and goods that will be useful for survival. That may be true when the world as we know will end and everymen will fight for themselves. However, what happens after we stop fighting with each other and start thinking about rebuilding the world as it was pre-apocalypse?
Github comes with an answer to that question. This American company, founded in 2008, provides an enormous database filled with repositories. On the site, there are more than 37 million users that uploaded more than 100 million repositories. Github partnered with other companies that provide storage and develop programs. They all have one goal, to preserve the human legacy. To accomplish this, they have built a vault 0.16 miles, or 260 meters, below the permafrost of an arctic mountain in Svalbard. This region of Arctica is regulated by the Svalbard treaty, labeling this sector as demilitarized.
So why do we need to store this data in a safe underneath the ground in Arctica? These libraries, research data, and repositories are the backbone of the internet and, ultimately, our lives. The whole system that we know is built upon information stored there. Over 6000 companies, including Google, Facebook, Netflix, Microsoft, Twitter, and Amazon, use Github. All of their lines of code will be securely stored and will survive the time and events that may occur.
This plan is a first attempt to preserve our history in a way that could be accessible in the future. Github wants to prevent events that happened to the Library of Alexandria, the Pantheon, or Saturn V. All of those cases share similar disaster. We have lost something that our ancestors worked hard on irreversibly.
That kind of initiative is needed for humanity to move forward. We have no idea how will the future look like. There is a chance that in 100 or 200 years, someone will be learning from the information stored in this vault. There is also a possibility that we will face catastrophe. In such an event, something is comforting in thinking that we will be able to restore some part of our present lives.
Sorces:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub
https://archiveprogram.github.com/
https://www.linuxinsider.com/story/86367.html
https://www.zdnet.com/article/github-were-storing-your-open-source-code-in-the-frozen-arctic-for-1000-years/
There is also the other vault, where all the seeds are stored. It is crucial to save all of plants species in case of natural diseaster. In my opinion in case of code it should look a little bit different. Some of companies which store their repositories on Github have huge influence on climate changes so they increase probability of natural catastrophe. Maybe github should include only eco friendly companies in their vault? :))
PS, I am so stoked on the idea of your post. My github repository will probably be stored in the vault too!