WHAT OF THE ARK, .... ARE WE STILL AN ARK SO TO SPEAK ?

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Permalink Reply by Ricprimus on January 29, 2012 at 3:58am

Actually Christine there actually are Modern Noah’s Arks:

  There are several comprehensive efforts to protect the world's agricultural gene pool. Some 1,400 seed repositories throughout the world safeguard roughly 1.5 million varieties against crop failure and serve researchers hoping to breed desired traits.  After several years of planning and digging, the world has its first secure, deep-frozen repository for backup supplies of seeds from hundreds of thousands of plant varieties that underpin agriculture. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was built into a frigid mountainside in Norway’s northernmost archipelago, deep in the Arctic.  The vault went operational February 26, 2008.  The Svalbard facility will be a backup to the backups, preserving the DNA of every crop on the planet along with wild relatives.

  There are also several efforts, usually government or larger universitiy sponsored cryogenetic facilities that are collecting the equivalent for animals.  One of the largest is the Key Laboratory of Conservation Genetics and Reproductive Biology (China), it is a genome resource bank for the systematic collection, storage and use of biomaterials. For animals, these include germ plasm (spermatozoa, oocytes) banks, embryo repositories, cultured cell lines, blood products, tissue repositories, genomic DNA library, cDNA library and DNA samples.
  These are being built to protect against massive catastrophic events including such thing as massive world-wide disaster, serious plagues affecting specific plant, animal populations, some unforseen "oops" in modern genetic manipulation of plant, animal stocks; and of course, to perfect the techniques for some day, when a true ark is build to head for a new world with its racks of frozen seeds and embryos.

  Some of the plant repositories raise pure strain seeds of "obsolete" plants, such as the University of North Carolina, which stores and sells over 300 varieites of the various known tobacco varieites ranging from the earliest known to modern forms for ordinary people to buy (I bought 10 seed varieties last year of old, 17th century colonial period pipe tobacco plants, my storage shed is packed with dried leaves now and jars of each seed).

Photo of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

Permalink Reply by Ricprimus on January 29, 2012 at 8:17am

  But, figuratively, the planet earth is unto itself an ark; for all of the various calculations of probabilities of probabilities of other planets that should be able to sustain life of some sort, only known is actually known.  Uncounted suns and planets, but still only just one known to sustain life.