Einstein's left eye

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By the way, I ran across this bit of news today:

A vast underground vault storing millions of seeds from around the world has opened in a mountain on a remote island near the Arctic Ocean.

Dubbed the "Doomsday Vault," the seed bank is considered the ultimate safety net for the world's seed collections, protecting them from a wide range of threats including war, natural disasters, lack of funding or simply poor agricultural management.

The Norwegian government paid to build the vault in a mountainside near Longyearbyen, in the remote Svalbard islands between Norway and the North Pole. Building began last year, and the vault opened officially Tuesday.

Good Lord, maybe Silent Running really is coming true...

2008

According to the Issac Aasimov short story "Franchise", in 2008 the U.S. president will be selected by a computer program looking for the "most representative citizen".

In the Larry Niven/Jerry Pournelle novel "The Mote in God's Eye", faster-than-light travel is also perfected in 2008. And according to Futurama, suicide booths are invented then, too.

The 1972 sci-fi film Silent Running takes place in 2008. By then all plant life on Earth has died out, and Bruce Dern is committed to growing and preserving plants in geodesic domes orbiting Saturn so that eventually the Earth can be reforested (the movie also demonstrates why we should never put Bruce Dern in charge of anything).

So...some good and some bad things to look forward to next year...