Kids Stuff

Do you want to know what the Deep Storage project is? There’s a very simple way to understand it. 

 

You know when you prick your finger, and there’s a tiny drop of blood that appears? Well, there’s actually enough information about you right there to store away and maybe, just maybe bring you back way off in the far future.

 

You know when you watch Star Trek or Doctor Who, and you see that technology’s been invented that can make perfect copies of people? That’s what we’re talking about here. Genetic cloning.

 

You see, if you donate a tiny sample of blood to the Deep Storage Project, it will be kept in an extraordinarily safe way for the scientists of the future to hopefully find and use. And it’s going to be kept in something that nobody will ever forget.

 

Now, when you look at a star, and you draw the shape you can see in your mind, it has lots of points coming out from its centre. Well, the Deep Storage Project looks like an outline of that kind of pattern.

 

And it’s big. Huge. Eight metres wide and high.  The whole thing is made of special steel pipes that have been carefully built to lock into place, like a jigsaw, and form the shape. And in its centre, there’s a special hole that’s been drilled out, especially designed to hold a tube made of super strong metal called titanium.

 

5,000 samples of blood donated by people will be in there, along with special samples from animals, plants and trees. It’s like an ark, storing all sorts of information for scientists about us, trees that are dying out and animals that won’t be alive in a few hundred years time.

 

Pollution is making the planet slowly change, and not in a good way, so this whole project is trying to keep things as they are right now. Like a giant DVD player with the pause button pressed, it’s holding this moment forever.

 

But, that’s not the end of it! The Deep Storage Project is going to be lowered into the sea. In the Pacific Ocean, there’s a very deep gorge called the Marianas trench. It goes down deeper than any other point in the ocean, and when the sculpture comes to rest there, it will wait for so long, longer that you can imagine, and one day people will be ready to bring it back to the surface. And that’s when science might, just might be able to let us all have a second chance!