I think they had the right idea in "The Hitchhikers's guide to the Galaxy" - when the earth was supposedly doomed, they launched a spacecraft containing an "advance party" of hairdressers, personnel officers, management consultants and telephone sanitisers to go and colonise a new planet .......
If I remember rightly, the rest of mankind back on Earth was then wiped out a few years later, by a virus contracted from a dirty telephone ........
