[Rune] When we go to the Arctic,
we dress up to survive a winter storm.
Rifles to protect ourself against polar bears.
It's the same thing with the Arctic World Archive.
[Narrator] Deep in the permafrost of Svalbard
lies the Arctic World Archive. Like its neighbor,
the Global Seed Vault, the Arctic World Archive,
aims to protect the most essential pieces of human culture,
from the chaos of the external world.
That means art, literature and code.
[Thomas] In the next thousand years,
there will be no major invention
where software doesn't play a role.
We think it's important
to preserve knowledge of open source development
for future generations.
[Narrator] From phone operating systems,
to digital payment platforms,
open source software has had a huge influence,
in our everyday lives.
Here's how GitHub and the Arctic World Archive,
have partnered to preserve that code for the future.
[Thomas] GitHub is an online platform for software developers.
Repos include Linux, Android, Ruby, Bitcoin.
And then you know, projects from all around the world.
We had the epiphany that we wanted to preserve
that knowledge in an archive.
[Narrator] We interact with the open source code housed
on GitHub every day.
These pieces of code are an essential,
but often invisible part of modern culture.
Unlike other big tech companies,
GitHub backs up this code,
in data centers around the world.
But hard drives are susceptible to failure or data loss.
So Thomas asked Piql,
the company who runs the Arctic World Archive,
to devise a more permanent solution for the valuable code.
Their answer, film.
[Rune] We have converted film
into a modern digital information carrier.
This is a piece of Piql film. It's a silver halide film.
We convert files into light, a sequence of photons.
That's exposing the film, because film is light sensitive.
You cannot really see it with your bare eyes. It's
just a gray field, but once you put it under the microscope
you see it's actually individual pixels,
building up that super high resolution QR code.
[Narrator] The first few frames on these film reels
contain tiny readable print in five languages,
that provide clear instructions,
on how to convert the QR codes back into usable files.
All that a future human would need
to reconstruct the archive is a computer,
a camera, and a light source.
[Rune] We chose the location of the Arctic World Archive
because it's really remote.
[Narrator] Longyearbyen, Svalbard, is the northern most settlement
in the world, with a population of less than 3,000 people.
It's most famous for a building down the road
from the Arctic World Archive - the Global Seed Vault -
which aims to preserve plant genetic material,
much like the AWA aims to preserve human culture.
International treaties and the cold dry permafrost
protect the contents of the vaults from the outside world.
[Rune] The vault itself is located 300 meters
down in a decommissioned coal mine.
It's literally protected by polar bears.
So you don't walk around without the rifle.
Inside the walls today there is manuscripts
from the Vatican library, Brazilian football history.
Once upon a time, Brazil had a good national soccer team.
So it's good to keep the memories
from the good and glorious days.
Opera, classical music, rock music,
the Bible is there.
[Narrator] And of course, open source code from GitHub.
[Thomas] We did the initial drop
of the most popular open source repos
on just one film reel.
It was super cold, it was dark all day,
but it was also very exciting to be there.
[Narrator] And this year Piql wrote every open source GitHub repo
with at least 250 stars onto film reels,
and deposited them in the vault for perpetuity.
[Thomas] I remember, you know buying my first Linux distribution
at a bookstore in Berlin, Germany.
And now open source is everywhere.
Software is such an important piece of our life
that I'm personally motivated to preserve it
for future generations.
[Rune] The Arctic World Archive, it's meant to be not only
for my kids, but for my grandchildren.
The world is developing extremely fast.
There are events that have happened,
that we should bring to the future
so we can learn to make good decisions.
[Thomas] The same way that you might find an old book
in a library that opens your eyes
of you know, how things were. You know
in a thousand years hopefully there's still humans on earth,
and we want to tell them, you know
that we deeply care about open source collaboration,
and we want to preserve that for future generations to come.
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share it with a friend and check out
Freethink.com for more stories of people moving the world.