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In Interstellar, how could you build a space colony without bringing the Blight with you?


In Interstellar, there is a Blight destroying all the world's crops. If Plan A involves launching a space colony, presumably full of crops, etc., how could they avoid bringing the Blight with them?



At the end of the film we see that they've actually created space colonies. How did they manage to launch and populate them without bringing the Blight with them?




Answer



Common agriculture


Many current diseases of wheat and other crops are mitigated by chemical treatment of the seed grains - you can do pretty harsh things to them that will kill many different kinds of bacteria but still leave a seed that will germinate. It doesn't make them immune, but it allows you to re-plant them in a new disease-free location.


This is pure speculation, but if similar things are done right now, then a similar procedure could be developed to "cleanse" seeds of Blight.


Quarantine



Another common option is to identify some spots that aren't yet reached by the disease and use them to gather clean seed stock before it's too late. If really all (100% not, say, 99.9%) the world's crops are destroyed, then it still leaves seeds that are stored securely in the few isolated 'seed banks' that we have. Again, they won't be immune and need to be planted in a safe location, but even if you have a very small number of seeds (say, a dozen grains) then you can reproduce them in large quantities if you have a need and resources to do it.


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