 But for now, I will leave you with Tim, who is going to talk to you about the upcoming apocalypse. So thanks for coming to the sauna, let's get started. So imagine this scene. It's the year 2025. You open the wooden box and take the relic out carefully, hold it in your hands and then you try to press the button and flick it briefly, but then it goes dark again. And the last iPhone on earth has died forever. So that's sort of like the mood like I want to set for this talk. And there's three main points I want to make, yeah, okay, let's just do it like this. There's three main points I want to make. So A, our current civilization, though we take it for granted, is much, much more fragile than it seems. The second point is, if we think about survival, we have to think about long term survival, not immediate survival. And the third point I want to make is, well, the best time to start preparing and to start experimenting is, of course, right now. Okay, so first, let's look at fragility. So there's a lot of things that could go wrong, right? Maybe you say, yeah, but will it really have that big of an impact? Well, I can give you a few examples, what could potentially happen. It could be something external. It could, for example, be something like a large asteroid strike or large meteorite strike. We have craters. We have found craters in the crust of the earth. And if something on this scale would happen again, then, well, okay, it's obvious that nothing can survive in the immediate impact zone, right? So you're saying, yeah, okay, maybe if it happens in Australia, it's not so bad over here? Well, it will be because basically what happens is when the impact happens, a lot of stuff is swept up into the atmosphere, and the whole earth will go dark in a very short time. And when the earth goes dark, when the sunlight is blocked, all the plants will die, all the animals will die, and we will also die. So that's one possible scenario. It could also be something that is not external, but it could be something that we cause ourselves, right? It's like nuclear war. It's always an option, maybe even becoming more of an option at the end of this year. We don't know, right? But it's really, there's like 3,000 nukes on the earth right now, I think. And just not even, we don't even need 3,000, right? Just a couple of them, let's say like 10 and 20 would have the same effect. Just total annihilation where they strike. But then in the aftermath, there is darkness and widespread chaos. Well, then there's other options. If you're still not convinced, right? I have other options for you. I could offer a deadly virus that breaks out. This is also something that could actually, that could just be happening right now. We don't know, right? Just a virus that mutates in a way that it has a long incubation period. At the same time, quite badly or quite dangerous, then it would immediately spread. I mean, we have, this is the nice thing, like we have everything is connected. Normally, it's a good thing, but in this case, it's a very bad thing, because it would mean the virus would basically reach everybody on the whole earth, except maybe some disconnected tribes in the Amazon or something, right? So, why does this, why do I say that civilization is more fragile than it seems? Well, okay, so there are these things that could potentially happen. But then the other thing we have to take into account is that we are very much at the set. Everything is interconnected right now, right? If you look at a medieval town, a medieval village, it is maybe not 100% self-sufficient, but it's pretty self-sufficient. Whereas on the other hand, we are anything but, right? We need, for example, to make the iPhone, right? This is like, it's, if you really look at all the thing that goes into an iPhone, where all the raw materials, they have to be fetched from Africa, smelt it somewhere, transported again, turned into parts, turned into sub-assemblies, turned into the final assembly, and it's mind-boggling, right? This is, the whole earth is collaborating to make just this one, this one, this one magical object, and I can hold it in my hand, finally. But this is not just for the iPhone, right? The same is also true for most kinds of foods, most kinds of machines that we use. And so, the problem in that is, if, let's say, I'm from Germany, right? I would say in the whole of Germany, 80 million people, there is, there's not 100 people that could make an axe from scratch, probably. Maybe there's more, I don't know, right? But we can make, what we can make is like, specialized motors for cars, specialized parts for rockets, everything, right? But we can't do that, well, we, A, we won't have to do that, but B, this is not, like, this is, we can only do because the parts are coming from China, the parts are coming, are being assembled in Vietnam, everything, right? So everything is connected. So even, even if it's not the total global catastrophe, even if it's, let's say, a local catastrophe, local, that takes out most of Asia, we are still, we still have a problem, a severe problem. Okay, so this is, this is part number one, why I think the civilization is quite, quite more fragile than it seems. Second part, if we were serious about survival in such a case, what would we have to do, what would we have to look at? And then there is like, there are these people called preppers, they always get very excited when the world is about to end, like in the year 2000, right? And then they come out and make preparations, they go to Walmart and buy, I don't know, 1,000 cans of beans, right? And 22 tons of flour, right? And this is all nice and good, and it would actually probably help in the first year. But after that, when all the beans are eaten, right, what do you do then, right? So this is short-term survival. This is not so interesting to me. This is also very, it's more like you're concerned with yourself, right? I want to survive. Whereas I think, well, Igor, in another talk, he put it like this, the humanity currently is like the nervous system of the planet. And so we should not think about how can I survive, but how can we make sure that this nervous system in some form or other can survive, right? So that's what I mean with long-term thinking in survival. The short-term, of course, first some people have to survive short-term, of course, otherwise we can't do it, but I'm more interested in what would we have to do if we expect to do this long-term. And I think we need three kinds of things to make this work long-term. The first one is seeds. The second one is tools, and the third one is knowledge. So seeds is pretty obvious because this is something we cannot manufacture, right? Seeds, either we have them, and we don't have any, then we're fucked. But I hear you saying, okay, so I will just go to the next field and take some weed and they are on my seeds, right? I'm done. Why do I have to prepare for that? Well, the problem is the kind of weed that's growing in the fields, this is not the kinds of seeds you want. This is hybrid seed. This will, if you seed it and grow it the next year, it will produce very different plants from what you're seeing right now in the field. And it would take several, like it would take like 10 years to grow this into, even if you know how to do it, it would take a longer time to grow this into a viable seed again. So what we actually want is the kinds of, like what's called hail loom seeds, seeds that are still in the original form, not bred into a hybrid form. And, well, there is happily, there is a large store of these seeds. It's the Svalbard seed seed, Svalbard seed vault, if you have heard about it. It is in Svalbard. There is an island and it's basically in the middle between Iceland and the North Pole. So the seeds are very well protected there. That's the good thing. The bad thing is we would have to go there and fetch them if you want to use them, right? So it is not really, I mean, this is, of course, it is also meant as a backup, as a plan B. But right now it is mainly a backup for seed banks that put their stuff there, basically put a backup copy there to fetch it again if their local, like the working copy is destroyed. But we could use it. But even better, we should have distributed seeds, seed banks basically everywhere to maximize the chance that wherever, like whoever people are able to survive, then they have seeds readily available. And that, yeah, that is the first thing, seeds. Tools. Tools are in a way also something like seeds, right? Because tools are what allow us to make new things. So an anvil and a hammer. This is quite a small thing still. Allows me potentially to make hundreds and thousands of other tools that I can use then to bootstrap other parts of society that are still needing tools, right? So I think it's more viable to concentrate on the tools that are, yeah, that are compact tools that tools for making other tools. And then let's say we have seeds, we have tools. Now the most important part still missing is know how, is knowledge. I mean, me with a hammer and an anvil, I could start poking around and trying to figure it out, but it would be much better if I had already done the workshop that's happening this evening, for example, right? And then I had, so like I had started on doing something useful. And the same is true for everything else. There's like the same is true for agriculture. Like if you have never had a garden and you just read about it, everything sounds very nice and easy. But when you try it, it's not that easy. There's unforeseen complications. And so my feeling is better to work out all the kings like right now than later when we don't have the time, right? Maybe you just have this one harvest and it has to work. Either it works or you're dead. So in this case, I would rather prefer to have it done already a few times beforehand, right? So in the third part, I wanted to show a few examples of things that me and others have been trying, experimenting with, and I call this approach seed banking. So like I said, we need seeds. Tools are also seeds in a way. Knowledge is also a seed, it doesn't have to be complete. We can generate new knowledge, but we need the starting point. So together, we need these seeds and we have to store them in a way that they are readily available in a distributed fashion. So what I've been doing personally, I've been working on, I haven't actually built it, but I have constructed a seed bank which is just like a, basically, it's just a sandbox, literally just a sandbox because it doesn't have to be refrigerated, right? If you make it deep enough, let's say half a meter and put the glasses, the jars with seeds on the bottom, then I think, and maybe even cover the whole thing with boards or something, I will think this will, hopefully, this will stay like at quite a uniform temperature all over the year. It would be best if it was refrigerated, like it would be best if Germany had pomefrost soil, but it doesn't yet. So that's one thing I'm working on, then I'm working on growing potatoes very, I mean, it sounds banal, but it is actually, like I said, you read about it, it sounds simple, you do it, then, oh, okay, I didn't foresee that. So I'm looking forward to harvest my first crop this fall and let's see the only potato I've taken out of the ground so far is like this. Yeah, but the growing season isn't over yet, right? What else? Oh, yeah, there's this, I was going to show you a few screenshots, there's a guy in Australia and he has a YouTube channel and it's called Primitive Technology. Google it and then watch it because it's awesome. And so he's like, he has this hobby. There's less of a, it's just like, I think it's fun. It's fun to go into the woods with empty hands and start making things. So there's one video where he's basically, he's literally starting with empty hands and he's making a house with a tile roof. Okay, so what does he do, right? He goes and grabs a stick and a suitable stone and makes a stone axe. Then he starts felling trees with a stone axe. Then he's erecting the beams for the house and I don't know, he's just choosing stuff right that he finds there. And then he's making the tiles from clay. He builds a little oven to fire the tiles, puts the tiles on the roof. And in this video, basically it's like, he shows everything, but of course, like the video is 15 minutes. It probably took him like, I would say a month or so to do the whole thing, right? It's just a hobby. He has a full-time job. He lives in a normal house. He just does this for fun. And he has like tons of other stuff. And I truly encourage you to check that out. I can't remember. There were two other examples I was going to bring up. Oh yes, oh yes. In Germany, we have children's, like now, once you have this mindset, right? Once you have this mindset and watching out for stuff that could be useful, you see it everywhere. Like this, on German children's television, there's a very famous program called Sendung mit der Maus. And they have like comic stuff. And then they always, they have one topic each week, where they show how something is made. So they go to factories. They show how the biscuit is made or whatever. And then they had this, like a few weeks back, they had how our ancestors made iron. And this totally blew my mind. This was so awesome. Like I learned that there is a form of iron ore that you can just pick up from a field. It's called bock iron ore. And it's created by bacteria. My mind was already blown at this point, right? I was like, okay, iron ore is something you find in deep in the mountain? No, they show actually there's like a plow going over the field. And then you can pick up some of like, oh, stones. Yeah, this is the iron ore, okay. And then they go, and just on the lawn, they make a very primitive oven to smelt the iron ore. They put in the ore, they put in charcoal, they put in, and this is so simple, right? But it is like, it looks very simple in the video. Maybe they practiced a few times, I don't know. And, but it's also a lot of work. Like this, the oven, the kiln that they built was like, I think it was like two meters high or two and a half meters from clay. This took several days and they had to fire it for, I don't know, a day or two. In the end, they push it, actually, they push it over to get at the iron that is on the bottom. And then they still have to work out all the, like as many of the impurities that they can. And in the end, they have like, I don't know, like maybe the size of an iPhone, right? That is the amount of iron they produced in a week. So, but still, right? Still, it's kind of useful to know how to do it. And I would have loved, I was so envious that I was not there when they did it, right? I would have loved to just be there and watch instead of having this video. But the video was so cool. So, to sum it up, I think civilization is more fragile than we normally think. And so, if we reflect on this fact and think about it, then it is, even if I'm not saying that something bad is happening next year or in the next 10 years, I'm not going to predict the future, right? But just because there is, I think, a non-zero possibility of something like this happening, it's quite rational to do some kind of preparation for this case. And if we think about it, then the only, like, I'm arguing the best thing we can do is long-term preparation. We can try to make sure that seeds, all seeds are basically distributed all over the earth. And in the, let's say there's just like, maybe just Nicaragua survives, nothing else survives, right? But even then, they should have seeds that they can use, right? Maybe they would have something anyway. They would have something like random stuff, but I want it to be a little bit more focused. Yeah, and well, the final, my final thought is, if you think, yeah, this is, I don't buy it, right? I don't buy the whole story. Then still it's a nice framework. It's a nice, it's just a lot of fun playing around with stuff, right? And this is what I see when people are doing this all over the place without this framework. So why not just have this in the back of your mind while you tinker with stuff? And I set up a Google group, if anybody's interested. It's empty, but it has the slides. So there's an incentive, you can go there and then you can check out the slides and see what I forgot to tell. And it's tinyurl.com slash seed banking. Thank you. Thank you. Very impressive to do that without slides or anything. You will still have four minutes for questions if you want to take questions. Sure. Sure. If you want to ask questions, please raise your hand and I will bring the mic to you. Hi, you were saying that there were three stages that you had to plan, the seeding, the tools and the knowledge. But what about material? Would that come under the knowledge of, say you were saying blacksmithing? Would you say the knowledge of learning what steels you could use in an apocalypse situation? Would that be classed as knowledge or would you put that in sort of like the seed banking? You'd stockpile a small amount of tool steel for tools in a future date? Yes, so for the knowledge, I think ideally I envision something like recipes, a collection of recipes. And I mean, we should not assume that the earth is in the state of 2000 years ago. We should assume the earth is the current state. So maybe I would not start with black iron ore, right? Maybe I would start with how do I melt a lamp post? What's the best way to melt down a lamp post? Because it will give me a lot of iron quickly versus much more slowly, right? So stuff like that, practical stuff. Hi, I have a question. I'm interested in what do you think are the pros and cons of decentralized prepping strategies? Well, as there's so much uncertainty, what can happen? I would argue it's pretty clear that decentralized is much superior, right? Because let's say the Svalbard Seed Vault, it's awesome. It has 1.2 million different kinds of seeds. But if it's taken out, then it's gone, right? This is sort of like the, that is always the point against a centralized approach. Hi there. Hi there. It was quite an optimistic talk. I think Vinay Gupta's talked about buying a whole load of food and a crossbow with which to protect it. And you look at a lot of the apocalypse TV programs like Walking Dead, the threat often comes from other people. Do you think there is any kind of value in preparing sort of to defend yourself against other people who are coming for your seeds and blacksmithing equipment and so on? Yes, certainly. I mean, I think there's more missing, right? This is more like the technology side and the whole part, like the whole organizational side. This is also something I was thinking about if like what's even needed to make a camp like this work, right? You need, yeah, just, this is not, this is there's order and it's not spontaneous, right? There's this planned order in the camp. And you would even, we need something like that in an even bigger scale, of course, to organize the survivors and deal with, yeah, also deal with people who are playing to other rules, right? Yes. One last question. Hi, have you thought about like, keep storing bacterial colonies for making medicines or anything like that? Like, sorry? Or beer, yes, but yeah, that kind of seeding. No, that's a very good point. No, I haven't, that's a little bit more tricky. Everything that's living is more tricky. Like I would also like to ensure that we have goats and cows, but how do we do that, right? We can't freeze dry a cow. We could, yeah, no. If you have good ideas, then, yeah, let's talk. So we are out of time. Thank you. If you have more questions, I suppose you might be available. Yeah, yes. Thank you. Thanks.