What is the Norway seed bank REALLY for?

Most seed banks store seed for planting in case other seed reserves are destroyed. The Svalbard Global Seed Bank in Norway is no different. It holds extra copies of seeds in case of large scale global or regional crisis.

However, it's only a preventative measure. Nothing is expected to happen.

And lastly ... there is no such thing as Planet X and/or Nibiru.

Nibiru is just another name for Jupiter, used by the ancient Babylonians.

Planet X was a placeholder name given to a hypothesized planet.
Astronomer Percival Lowell proposed the Planet X hypothesis because Uranus had a weird orbit, and the gravity of a large planet further out would explain it.

When Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930, everyone thought Planet X had been found. Then Pluto was found to be too small to be the cause.

For awhile astronomers searched for a tenth planet. But then in the 1990's the Voyager 2 spacecraft measured Neptune's mass and discovered it was less than what we had thought. With Neptune's mass correctly calculated, there were no disturbances in Uranus' orbit and thus there was no need to find a Planet X.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_X

Since Planet X doesn't exist, and Nibiru is hypothetical (another word for "doesn't exist"), the Seed Vault is not for keeping people safe from non-existent or hypothetical worlds.

With human destruction of forests escalating, with global warming destroying habitat, and with hybridization of plants at an all-time high, many of the traditional or ancient plant strains are in danger of vanishing from the Earth (just like so many animal and insect species have).

And if some catastrophe were to occur - this could be anything from a supervolcano to an asteroid impact - the seeds kept in that vault (and other smaller ones elsewhere on Earth) would provide genetic material to re-plant much of the world.
Some plants are found only in small regions, and many of these are threatened by humans, pollution, habitat loss, and other factors.

Seeds are much easier to keep safe - they don't require food, they don't need light or space to move around or anything other than an inert and cool environment.

Noah's Ark was a metaphor, a story that may or may not have actually occured historically.
But its a good one - if catastrophe strikes the Earth, if someone hasn't "rescued" species of life what do we use to restart things?

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault's mission is to provide a safety net against accidental loss of diversity in traditional genebanks. While the popular press has emphasized its possible utility in the event of a major regional or global catastrophe, it will certainly be more frequently accessed when genebanks lose samples due to mismanagement, accident, equipment failures, funding cuts and natural disasters. Such events occur with some regularity.

In recent years, some national genebanks have also been destroyed by war and civil strife. There are some 1,400 crop diversity collections around the world, but many are in politically unstable or environmentally threatened nations.

The seed vault is to preserve types of seeds. The connection with Noah's Ark is because the story of Noah's Ark is about preserving particular animal species and the seed vault is about preserving particular plant species.
There won't be any Planet X (Nibiru) controversy for the simple reason that no such object exists. If it were the size described by the conspiracy theorists and following the trajectory they indicate, it would now be visible in binoculars to anyone who cared to look. Do your research and see if any websites tell you its coordinates in the sky for tonight. I can guarantee that none of them will tell you that information for the simple reason that if someone looked at the position indicated, they would see precisely nothing.

We need to be kept safe when a controversy occurs? That's a novel idea.

Which Nibiru are you referring to? There are several crackpot (oh, sorry, I mean 'scientifically plausible) ideas floating around. Did you mean 'the aliens that are coming back to enslave us all', or did you mean 'the Planet X which will crash into the earth'.

If the aliens are coming, I'm not sure what good the seed bank will do, unless we're all going to go hide in the vaults? They are really too small for that, so I hope that isn't the plan.

And if Planet X crashes into the earth, I sure hope it misses Norway....

Your dad needs to learn to differentiate science from fantasy, and especially teach you to tell the difference.

try to find a beluga whale that doesn't have a tumor.

we are busy trying to pollute ourselves into extinction and YOU think the seed bank is about some non-existent planet dreamed up by a moron that couldn't even read the languages he claimed to translate?

silly.

it is to preserve the food supply for humans
we are using genetic engineering to modify them now
we might make mistakes on that and will need the originals to fix them
or we could just die from making our food supply bad for us.