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"I'm very taken by mythology. I read it at a very early age and kept on reading it. Before I discovered science fiction I was reading mythology."
- Roger Zelazny

Life Bank  
  A storage facility with the genetic material that was produced by Earth's ecosystem.  

Can we take some of the Earth's biosphere with us if we are forced to leave our planet?

There had been a time when wheat, soybeans, potatoes, corn and rice had been the major foods of the human race. Now there was no one alive who had ever seen them.

But they existed in the Life Bank, as did virtually every plant and animal that existed on Old Earth.

Technovelgy from The Ophiuchi Hotline, by John Varley.
Published by Quantum Science Fiction in 1977
Additional resources -

Compare to the genetic ark from Earth, a 1990 novel by David Brin.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Ophiuchi Hotline
  More Ideas and Technology by John Varley
  Tech news articles related to The Ophiuchi Hotline
  Tech news articles related to works by John Varley

Life Bank-related news articles:
  - Doomsday Vault Design Now Final
  - Survival Seed Vault Low Cost Life Bank
  - Svalbard Seed Vault (aka Doomsday Vault) Gets Upgrades
  - Lunar Biorepository Proposed For Cryo-Preservation Of Earth Species

Articles related to Biology
What'll You Have? Extinct Animals Returned, Or Synthetic Eggshells?
Black Fungus Blocks Radiation
Lunar Biorepository Proposed For Cryo-Preservation Of Earth Species
Let's Make Slaver Sunflowers! Engineering Plants To Reflect Light

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Science Fiction in the News

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'And here they began to build...'

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'I made disks of my own voice to the number of five hundred very carefully chosen words.'

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Preventing annoying space debris build-up.

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