The oldest book of the Bible, Genesis, has God commanding Noah to round up males and females of every animal on Earth to ensure the survival of such species after the global calamity He was set to unleash. Now, with the help of data modeling and cryongenics, Russia’s Moscow State University (MSU) has received an enormous grant to collect the DNA of every single living and extinct creature on Earth. The massive DNA collection is hoped to preserve the heritage of life on this planet despite any future calamities.

MSU’s rector, Viktor Sadivnichy, unabashedly calls the project “Noah’s Ark.” A depository will be created, he said, to store the DNA “of every living thing on Earth.” This includes currently living as well as threatened and extinct organisms.

MSU’s “frozen zoo” comes at possibly the most critical time in Earth’s biological history. Habitat destruction, pollution, disease and climate change have drastically increased the number of threatened and endangered species. Schemes to ensure their protection have become critical.

The venture will be built at one of the university’s campuses and, projected for completion before 2018, will be physically enormous. To house the amounts of desired material and data, the facility, it is said, will require 166 square miles of land.  By comparison, the country of Liechtenstein is 62 square miles.

Russia’s updated Noah’s Ark will not be the first attempt at salvaging DNA on a global scale. The Svalbard Seed Vault, whih is built into the permafrost of Norway is a depository intent on storing representative seeds of all of the food plants in the world. According to the Kingdom of Norway, the installation was developed to ensure the “genetic diversity of the world’s food crops is preserved for future generations.” The vault “is designed to store duplicates of seeds from seed collections around the globe.”

The Svalbard Seed Vault opened in February, 2008 and is said to currently house 1.5 million specific seed samples of food crops and can ultimately store 4.5 million. Much of the planning for Svalbard has come from the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which is funded in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Several farcical reviews of Svalbard appear on Google Local. Eyad Arafat wrote that he goes “to this place every day after school. It is a great place to just relax and do some Yoga.” Ryan Mersmann, a student at Brigham Young University, wrote that the installation “is excellent for all your doomsday seed storage needs! … Way better than some of those ‘other’ seed vaults I’ve tried!”

Comedy aside, Sadivnichy said the MSU project will be a collective effort from “all” of his school’s branches, including the zoological and anthropological museums. The Russian facility, he said, will “freeze and store various cellular materials, which can then reproduce.”

The Russian project is linked to a global frozen zoo effort. One its more visible and successful efforts have been helping reintroduce the almost-extinct California condor to the skies of North America. For the first time in almost 100 years, a condor was seen flying earlier this year over the city of San Diego, California.

The intent of the project is nothing less than the end of biological extinction in the ever-more challenging ecology of Earth. “If it is realized,” Viktor Sadivnichy said, Russia would be the “first nation to create an actual Noah’s Ark of sorts.”