‘I send an envelope of semen to the World Seed Bank every few months, but they won’t confirm that they’ve received it’

Thomas Moretti is a bachelor. At 23, he’s still looking — for the one, for his other half, for someone to grow old with. But he’s painfully aware he hasn’t got much time.

“I started to worry about potentially not being able to continue the family line about two years ago,” he tells me while scooping the foam off his cappuccino. “I know technically men can continue producing sperm well into middle and old age, but the jizz you produce in your prime must surely be prime jizz.”

Moretti contacted me a few weeks ago, eager to chat about his single-minded mission to preserve his spunk. He asked me if I was familiar with the World Seed Bank. I replied yes.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a gene bank located in Norway that acts as a backup for gene banks all over the world. It currently houses about a third of the plant genera stored in gene banks worldwide.

Moretti explains that he came across the seed vault while researching ways of saving up his own seed. “I thought, if they can keep thousands of copies of plant genetic information, surely they have room for me as well. That’s when I started sending the samples.”

Moretti walks me through his process. First, he jacks off into a zip-lock bag. Then, ensuring he has pressed all the air out of the bag (“to prevent oxidation”, he advises), he seals it and places it inside a padded airmail envelope. Finally, he affixes a label bearing the address of the seed bank and the form needed for international postage.

“I’ve sent six of these now. But I haven’t ever gotten confirmation that they received it and logged the contents, or that they received it and rejected the contents. Nothing.”

While it seems for now Moretti is content to keep trying, one hopes that sooner or later, he will either find his life partner, or finally have his jizz accepted into the Global Seed Vault.