Rather than putting a stop to the trashing of the planet, these two new projects seem more geared for the post-apocalyptic rebuild after we’ve throughly fucked things up.

Encyclopedia of Life

This article from BBC News tipped me off to the absolutely awesome Encyclopedia of Life project. Basically, it’s a massive effort to catalog and document every single species on the planet in a highly accessible, web-based encyclopedia format. From the site’s intro:

This is the very beginning of our exciting journey to document all species of life on Earth. Comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing, and personalized, the Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about all life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world.

So far, so good. It’s easy to browse, loaded with pictures and you can even filter the amount of info you’d like to see if your gray matter just can’t handle detail above a 3rd-grade reading level.

My doomsday-minded brain wants to know what sort of backup system they have in place. Maybe they need to deposit their monthly archives in the…

Global Seed Vault

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault has just opened it’s doors, buried in the permafrost of Svaldbard, Norway only 680 miles from the North Pole and capable of housing over 100 million seeds. Even if it’s refrigeration equipment fails it will still maintain temperatures of -3C, and will remain dry even in the event of catastrophic climate change. Now that’s planning ahead. There are already well over 1,000 seed vaults around the world, but most are either half-assed attempts or have fallen victim to various military and financial conflicts. The Svaldbard Seed Vault seems to be the real deal, not just for housing the seed stocks of a single country, but as a global insurance policy for every nation on Earth. It’s even coupled with massive funding from The Gates Foundation, Monsanto and quite a few others to help countries deposit their seeds (insert bad sexual joke here).

Check out the interactive diagram to choose which room you’ll want to sleep in after the apocalypse.

The Doomsday Mash-up

So we have the Encyclopedia of Earth project and the Svaldbard Global Seed Vault. Now we just need to add a DNA Bank and tack on the Frozen Ark Project, put it all into one convenient interstellar vehicle (piece of cake, right?) and we’ll have the Titan Ark from Titan A.E. Then we can continue on, conscience-free, knowing that we can just spawn a whole new planet after we’ve rendered this one useless.