A manifestation of unusually long-term thinking is taking form on the Arctic island of Svalbard: a “doomsday” seed bank meant to contain every kind of agricultural seed on the planet.

The high-security vault, almost half the length of a football field, will be carved into a mountain on a remote island above the Arctic Circle. If the looming fences, motion detectors and steel airlock doors are not disincentive enough for anyone hoping to breach the facility’s concrete interior, the polar bears roaming outside should help.

Given how little thought is given to a whole range of serious threats, this project is remarkably proactive:

The “doomsday vault,” as some have come to call it, is to be the ultimate backup in the event of a global catastrophe — the go-to place after an asteroid hit or nuclear or biowarfare holocaust so that, difficult as those times would be, humankind would not have to start again from scratch.

Planners even examined what is likely to happen to Svalbard if global warming picks up, and how it would fare in the event of serious cooling due to a Gulf Stream collapse.

There is a a little-known futurist movie precedent: the odd 1971 environmentalist-in-space film Silent Running (rating on FatM — it is rated 64th of 118 movies). The Earth has been transformed — it is now 75 degrees everywhere — and the last forests and flowers exist only on a small fleet of space ships in orbit near Saturn. One man is trying to preserve them for the future, and goes to extremes to do so.