This is the Arctic World Archive, the seed vault’s much less sexy cousin. Friedman unlocks the container door with a simple door key and, inside, deposits much of the world’s open source software code. Servers and flash drives aren’t durable enough for this purpose, so the data is encoded on what look like old-school movie reels, each weighing a few pounds and stored in a white plastic container about the size of a pizza box. It’s basically microfilm. With the help of a magnifying glass, you—or, say, a band of End Times survivors—can see the data, be it pictures, text, or lines of code. A Norwegian company called Piql AS makes the specialized rolls of super-durable film, coated with iron oxide powder for added Armageddon-resistance. Piql says the material should hold up for 750 years in normal conditions, and perhaps 2,000 years in a cold, dry, low-oxygen cave.

Friedman places his reel on one of the archive’s shelves, alongside a couple dozen that include Vatican archives, Brazilian land registry records, loads of Italian movies, and the recipe for a certain burger chain’s special sauce. GitHub, which Microsoft bought last year for $7.5 billion, plans to become by far the biggest tenant. Eventually, Friedman says, GitHub will leave 200 platters, each carrying 120 gigabytes of open source software code, in the vault. The first reel included the Linux and Android operating systems, plus 6,000 other important open source applications.