Well, it takes about 5 minutes and a fraction of a BTC to set such a thing up so that does not in-and-of itself imply great seriousness...

But ya.  I'm somewhat serious about the project.  Some of the potential future directions of the Bitcoin project seem risky to me and there is no reason not to have some sort of a fall-back in case the worst happens.

The project could be relatively simple and inexpensive.  It should not rob resources from Bitcoin in a real way, and has the potential to feed back useful information and techniques to Bitcoin proper.  As much as anything it could simply be interesting and there would be a lot more flexibility to work on goals thought by the participants to be important.