About 800 miles from the North Pole on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in the Arctic Svalbard archipelago resides what has come to be known as “The Doomsday Vault.” Its formal name is the “Svalbard Global Seed Vault.” This long, tall, narrow, rectangular warehouse, extending about 400 feet into a sandstone mountain and essentially refrigerated in permafrost, holds about 865,000 seed samples from around the world and is intended to be used as a last-resort supply source in the event of a crisis. Basically, if the world ends — and then if the world somehow survives that apocalypse — this building will contain the literal seeds to the future and existence of humanity. It might be the most important building ever constructed.
This is the 27th installment of The Labyrinthian, a series dedicated to exploring random fields of knowledge in order to give you unordinary theoretical, philosophical, strategic, and/or often rambling guidance on daily fantasy sports. Consult the introductory piece to the series for further explanation.
The Doomsday Vault
Opened in 2008, the Doomsday Vault is managed and funded by the Norwegian government, the Nordic Genetic Resource Center, and the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the latter of which in turn is funded by various national governments and philanthropic organizations, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Any country may store seeds there for free. In this building, global politics are of no consequence. All that matters is the number of seeds a country would like saved in case the worst happens — whatever that happens to be.
The vault is constructed and situated in such a way so as to withstand the worst. If nuclear war lays waste to most of the world or a global crop blight destroys our food sources, this vault will survive untouched and will save humanity. If the ice caps melt, the vault will still survive since it is 430 feet above sea level. The island is situated nowhere near any tectonic plates. Only a few people in the world are even allowed to enter the building.
The Doomsday Vault is basically the seed version of the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox, but it contains something far more precious than gold bars: Four-ply moisture-free packets containing 500 seeds each, collectively stored in large plastic containers in rooms with limited oxygen and temperatures just below zero degrees Fahrenheit. If the building’s electricity were to fail, the surrounding permafrost would enable temperatures in the facility to stay low. If tomorrow a nuclear holocaust occurred, the seeds in that building would be preserved for hundreds and possibly thousands of years.
The Syrian Civil War
As with all backup plans, the hope is always that the backup plan will not be needed, and the managers of the vault since 2008 have been optimistic that a withdrawal would not be made for many years.
Of course, the sad fact is that the end of days comes around far more often than we anticipate. Across the world are about 1,750 local and smaller seed banks, some of which experience loss of stock due to mismanagement, equipment failures, funding shortfalls, and natural disasters. And, sadly, war. For instance, the seed banks of Afghanistan and Iraq no longer exist.
In the second half of 2015, the first withdrawal was made from the Doomsday Vault — because of the Syrian Civil War. In that conflict, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, millions have been displaced, and native crops and seed banks have been destroyed. To repopulate some of the relatively dryer regions in the country, seeds from the Doomsday Vault will be required.
This point bears repeating: The end of days comes around far more often than we anticipate.
Millenarianism, William Miller, and the Great Disappointment
Millenarianism is the Christian belief that very soon the sinful world as we know it will end (with the Second Coming of Jesus Christ) and that a new thousand-year era of peace will be enjoyed.
What I’m about to say might sound mocking, but it’s not intended that way: Since the Ascension of Jesus (as described in the Christian Bible), his followers have been waiting for him to return. His early disciples believed that the return was at hand and that they would see the Second Coming within their lifetimes. Waiting for Jesus to return is a constitutive part of being a Christian. It has been a part of the Christian legacy for over 2,000 years.
In the War of 1812, a middle-aged man named William Miller fought against the British, experienced the horrors of combat, and returned home after the war a changed man. He started reading the Bible, and in the apocalyptic books of Daniel and Revelation he discovered what he believed to be passages that, when cross-referenced with each other and placed in the context of his historical period, revealed when the Second Coming would occur.
By 1818, Miller was convinced that he had figured out (roughly) when Jesus would return. In the 1820s, he started telling others about his ideas. In 1831, he gave his first public talk on the topic. By 1840, “Millerism” was a national movement, and eventually Miller’s many followers (known as the “Millerites”), using the calendar of the Karaite Jews to aid in their calculations, determined definitively that October 22, 1844, would be the day that Jesus returned.
He did not return. Without irony, this nonevent was named “The Great Disappointment” — disappointing spiritually because Jesus had not initiated the thousand-year period of peace and disappointing pragmatically because many Millerites had sold their possessions, given away their money, and lived literally as if the world were about to end.
For some Millerites, despondent and destitute, the world did end — just not in the way that they had anticipated.
The ultimate point is this: The end of days occurs more often than we anticipate but usually in an unanticipated manner. We don’t know how the world will end. All we know is that it ends frequently. And that, somehow, humanity survives.
End of Days Players
Let’s bring this to DFS: At times, various players will perform as if they are walking catastrophes. Take the NBA, for instance. There are a variety of ways for an NBA player to suck. Most notably, he could miss a lot of shots. He could turn the ball over every other possession. With utter ineptness, he could nuke his team’s chances of winning a game.
We can’t really anticipate when and how an NBA player will have a bad “real life” performance. We can only anticipate that it will happen more often than we want.
The key (I believe) to surviving the performances of players who might randomly self-annihilate is to find players who will still have a chance of living through doomsday because they have a metaphorical Svalbard Global Seed Vault to fall back on when everything comes crashing down. Such performers may be thought of as “End of Days Players.”
For someone in the NBA, the DFS equivalent of a Doomsday Vault is the certainty that, even if he is playing poorly, he is on the court and getting decent usage in a decent-paced game in a slate in which he is discounted.
Using our Trends tool, one can see that players who have this encompassing safety net often perform very well:
With a discounted price, no worse than average pace differential and usage, and an average of at least 30 minutes per game, these players are not just highly productive and consistent. If you peruse the “Past Results,” you will see that rarely do players who match for this trend have truly poor fantasy performances. And why is that the case?
I would argue that these players can avoid fantasy destruction even when they aren’t playing well because they have a Doomsday Vault overflowing with the seeds of pace, usage, minutes, and inexpensiveness. This vault enables them (and your DFS lineups containing them) to stay alive.
Beware the Ides of March — Maybe
The 15th of March marks the midpoint of the month situated precisely in the middle of the second half of the NBA season. And given that the second half of the season is riddled with lottery teams tanking and playoff teams starting to rest players, the action in March is unlike any other we see throughout the season. The Daily Fantasy Sports Roundtable even has an episode dedicated to post-NBA All-Star Break strategy.
Is it possible that in the month of March, with more mediocre players on the court than usual, these Ends of Days Players could be even more productive?
The sample size is small, so maybe you should beware this March-specific trend. At the same time, a trend that has matched almost four players per day for 23 days can’t be entirely dismissed.
Just saying.
Battlestar Galactica is Unrealistic
I’m a nerd, so you might not be surprised to learn that I like the show Battlestar Galactica. Yes, its last episode aired seven years and three days ago. Did you have a point with that smartass remark?
I will admit, though, that the show is unrealistic. Most of the time, I find its unrealistic qualities wonderful. I’m not bothered by the shattering of physics that routinely occurs in the show’s depiction of space travel. I’m also not bothered by the show’s problematic depiction of the mystical. After all, this is a show about people who have survived a nuclear holocaust and are trying to find another planet to call home. One must accept that unrealistic premise from the beginning.
But I actually am bothered by one very practical bit of unreality: The humans, travelling through the universe trying to find a place to live, would’ve run out of food.
To survive the unthinkable — be it the destruction of a world or the horrendous performance of a player in a DFS lineup — one must have food.
In the NBA, “food” essentially comes down to on-court opportunity, which in turns comes down to pace, usage, and being on the court in the first place. As long as you are rostering (at a discounted price) a player who has a vault of these seeds, you’ll probably live — even if he is a great disappointment.
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The Labyrinthian: 2016, 27
Previous installments of The Labyrinthian can be accessed via my author page. If you have suggestions on material I should know about or even write about in a future Labyrinthian, please contact me via email, [email protected], or Twitter @MattFtheOracle.
