i stumbled acrossed this and it struck me a vault full of all the diff seeds that we eat all around the world ALL OF THEM frozen and preserved and tucked in a mountain to act as a "noahs ark" of seeds so that if we destroy ourselves the lucky survivers can plant the seeds and revegitate the bare earth that once was!!! LOL hahahaha its funny i think because if we blow ourselves up the lucky survivers will not make it up the mountain and if they do they will have trouble breaking into the vault the seeds are stored in and how would you get the seeds down the mountain they have like a million strains of seeds and no cannabis thats a bummer although i do think its good for preservation for the chance a plant might go extinct and i think they should have more then just food seeds they should have trees and grass and shrubs and flowers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault
I read about this awhile back. It's pretty interesting and is actually a good idea. Who knows what our future holds and if 1000's of years from now we are forced to use those seeds. It's never bad to have a just in case plan.
One of the functions of this is also to preserve heirloom strains that are quickly going extinct because of the homogenization of commercial varieties. We have engineered our food crops for maximum yield, and shelf life, but have lost a lot of biodiversity. If we have a crop failure because of disease on the scale of something like the potato famine in Ireland, with only a few types of genetics, we will have world wide starvation. At least with the seed bank there will be some hope of the survivors being able to pick up the pieces and move on.