The Noah’s Archive Project will provide a safety net against accidental loss of diversity often seen with traditional physical object preservation. While the popular press has emphasized its possible utility in the event of a major regional or global catastrophe, it is certainly more common to lose rare artifacts due to disintegration of time, mismanagement, accidents, mold, paper rot, funding cuts, then to natural disasters. In recent years, countless national museums and libraries have been destroyed by war and civil strife. Our best estimate is that approximately 5,000,000 one-of-a-kind books, manuscripts, and scrolls that have been lost this century are never to be seen again. With so many threats, politically unstableness or environmental, to artifacts of knowledge, it is an eventual certainty that unless such an Arc of knowledge is created we could be in danger of losing millions more irreplaceable objects.

The location for the World Library Foundation Noah’s Archive server vault has been selected to be in a decommissioned WWII military underground bunker, deep in the hills of above Kaneohe Military Base in Hawaii. It was built to protect Kaneohe Marine Core Base from the re-invasion of the Japanese. The walls are 23 inches thick, the ceiling is 19 inches thick and the entire facility sits on a 4 foot thick cement slab 175 feet above sea level, 150 feet into the mountain and 230 feet under the mountain.

The island of Oahu is the ideal location for The Noah’s Archive. It is a stable environment, remote but still readily accessible. In 2003 the island became the hub for all fiber optic cabling across the Pacific Ocean. These cables represent the internet connection between Asia and America.