For those happy souls who ponder the doomsday scenarios of worldwide nuclear destruction, the existence of a "Doomsday Vault" (actually named the Global Seed Vault) may be a bit of a comfort. The vault's purpose is to store seed samples of the world's crops in case something were to go very wrong — if crops everywhere were destroyed and mankind was in need of a serious reboot.

The vault made news recently when a shipment of new seeds pushed the vault's collection past the 500,000 mark, surpassing the previous record-holder in crop diversity, a national gene bank in Fort Collins, Colo. Dug out of permafrost just 600 miles from the North Pole — in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard — the seeds could stay frozen in three air-locked rooms for 200 years. The Nordic Genetic Research Center runs the facility with the Norwegian government.

So, how many seeds can the vault hold? Two billion.

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