A secret project to ‘back up’ planet Earth in the event of a nuclear war is taking place in a bunker in the Alps of Switzerland, it has been revealed
As different conflicts explode around the globe with fears of all-out World War Three, a US firm has installed a British-designed “Superman” memory disk containing a compilation of human history.
Located deep inside a mountain vault near Flums, Switzerland, the futuristic quartz disk designed at Southampton University’s Optoelectronics Lab – holds 60 million microscopic pages of human knowledge and is designed to survive a nuclear holocaust.
The nano archive covered with laser, holds the entire contents of Wikipedia and the Rosetta language archive.
Future additions to the archive will also hold 100,000 books and millions of photos and illustrations covering every key aspect of world culture, art, literature, science, sport and history.
The project called Global Knowledge Vault is run by Arch Mission Foundation, which plans to install similar memory disks and vaults on every continent.
The foundation famously had one of its memory disks in the glove box of Elon Musk’s space-bound Tesla Roadster and is running two missions to land “Lunar Libraries” on the surface of the Moon next month.
It also has plans to send the 7.5cm disks to Mars, Venus and near-Earth asteroids.
Arch Mission Chairman Nova Spivack showed off the “Earth disk” being installed at the Hagerbach Test Gallery – a massive research and development facility hidden beneath a mountain.
He said to the Sun UK: “If something really bad happens on Earth, this will be our planetary insurance policy – our backup.
“It seems increasingly likely that something catastrophic could happen in our lifetime.
“We are overdue a geological cataclysm, not to mention cosmic energy bursts and all the risks that humans themselves are causing – nuclear war, bio apocalypse, etc.
“So this project is literally about saving the world – all our knowledge, history, art, science, and culture – so it can never be lost.
“It’s like the Seed Vault, but for information.”
The Hagerbach facility was founded in 1970, and the massive bunker has 5.5km of underground tunnels, caverns, laboratories and even its own miniature railway.
The unique facility is primarily used by firms to test structural engineering, mining and tunnelling techniques.
It is also used for research into smart use of underground space – such as aquaponics, underground farming, subspace energy and underground data centres.
It also hosts foreign fire services who use the tunnels for underground fire-fighting training.
The bunker even has its own restaurant and huge seminar space and despite being hundreds of metres beneath solid rock has strong WiFi and phone connection.
