Surviving Global Catastophe: Low Orbit Cosmo-Ark?

So I was watching some cheesy "survive 2012" videos on youtube linked from a post on a thread here, and it got me to thinking, always a bad thing.

I thought, lets say some sort of global catastrophe happens a little further off in time than 2012, lets say 50 to 100 years after 2012, and the catastrophe was one of a detectable nature, yet unavoidable, so there'd be time to "prepare" , but no solution to stop it from happening.

For the sake of discussion, lets say .. its just something to cause global catastrophe, not necessarily "planet X", it could be anything. This or a massive meteor/comet impact. The whole planet was going to be screwed for a period of time, maybe a few weeks, no more than a couple of months.

If the disaster was of such a nature that staying underground in deep bunkers would not be advisable or even feasible to all of the important people of the world (massive shifting of tectonic plates, earthquakes, deep floods, volcanic eruptions), wouldn't a low orbiting "space barge" slammed full of people, that I would imagine drifts in near earth orbit -but sufficiently far away- and not in the path of whatever may be causing the disaster, be a pretty good idea or option for survival?

I myself am not trying to go into the science of it too much, because I don't know what we'd have 100 years from now. But I'd imagine the barge would need to be lifted up close to low orbit, maybe with a set of rockets on all sides of it? And it would need accessability ports for small, simply, soyuz capsule esque space craft to dock with it and unload people/material, before being detached from the barge and falling back to Earth at a pre-destinated path and landing site. They could be one time use and disposable, or multiple use craft, or even self-propelled if you want to get techy. These would be for the people to evacuate Earth, the "chosen people" , or perhaps just the important people of a number of "important countries" directly in the center of the pre-determined disaster or catastrophe.

Or it might be like the Noah's Ark literally except besides just animals / animal dna and the ability to create/clone the animals/dna, there'd be massive amounts of people, men and women, of different genetic stock. This is because genetic diversity is actually better for a species than mating constantly within the same small group of fellow mammals. I know someone might chime in and say, "you need 144,000 of a species to ensure its survival" or some such. I don't know if this has been proven, and if so right on for the book of Revelation hitting the nail on the head, but if its true, lets say the craft would be large enough to have very small living quarters for 144,000 people. Or if one ship would simply be too massive, there could be a number of ships. Infact, each Nation could have its' own space barge while they waited out the disaster, except in low orbit space instead of water like in the olden days..

Odd theory / idea, I know .. but curious what your thoughts are on it?

[edit on 12/23/2007 by runetang]

I like that mind of yours, runetang- very cool idea about a space ark.

If the major catastrophe isn't a virus, or world war III, I believe it would
be a celestial impact from a meteorite, asteroid, or comet. Chances are,
it would strike some part of the ocean; since there's more water surface
than land, huh?

That's what got me thinking. After the sunami 2 years ago, I realized how
devastating a large wave or series of waves can be... But what about a
'displacement wave'? A large enough chunk hitting the ocean would make
a sunami look like a bathtub ripple...

Off the east coast, things would be worse than horrible. But the west coast
seems like there would be better survivability, with all the inland mountain
terrain.

Personally, I think Eugene Schumaker was the most important scientist of
the 20th and 21st centuries, in that he discovered "mechanics of impact",
and pointed out how this dwarfs all other disasters by "a large measure".
He and his wife, and David Levy prepared us for watching that string of
pearls slam into Jupiter. One of those impacts resulted in a fireball twice
the size of our Earth.

The N.E.A.R. project is extremely interseting to me... Dedicated scientists
tracking near earth asteroids that routinely cross earth's orbital path. They
say not "if" . . . but WHEN one will hit. I think they said only 5% have
been found so far.

I wonder if the powers that be would even inform us of an impending
doomsday rock from space.

Heavy stuff to think about.

Sometimes I wonder..

Was the Shoemaker-Levy comet impact the "final warning" spoken of in Revelation? (I wonder if Shoemaker is an Americanized version of Schumacher?)

Basically, "This is whats gonna happen to you if you dont stop?"

[edit on 12/25/2007 by runetang]

Originally posted by runetang
I wonder if Shoemaker is an Americanized version of Schumacher?

Shoemaker in english IS Schuhmacher in german.

Why?