Doomsday insuranceSolar-Powered Lunar Ark as “Modern Global Insurance Policy”
Researchers are taking scientific inspiration from an unlikely source: the biblical tale of Noah’s Ark. Rather than two of every animal, however, their solar-powered ark on the moon would store cryogenically frozen seed, spore, sperm and egg samples from 6.7 million Earth species. The ambitious project proposed by a University of Arizona team aims to preserve humankind - and animal-kind, plant-kind and fungi-kind - in the event of a global crisis.
University of Arizona researcher Jekan Thanga is taking scientific inspiration from an unlikely source: the biblical tale of Noah’s Ark. Rather than two of every animal, however, his solar-powered ark on the moon would store cryogenically frozen seed, spore, sperm and egg samples from 6.7 million Earth species.
Thanga and a group of his undergraduate and graduate students outline the lunar ark concept, which they call a “modern global insurance policy,” in a paper presented over the weekend during the IEEE Aerospace Conference.
“Earth is naturally a volatile environment,” said Thanga, a professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering in the UArizona College of Engineering. “As humans, we had a close call about 75,000 years ago with the Toba supervolcanic eruption, which caused a 1,000-year cooling period and, according to some, aligns with an estimated drop in human diversity. Because human civilization has such a large footprint, if it were to collapse, that could have a negative cascading effect on the rest of the planet.”
Climate change, he added, is another concern: If sea levels continue to rise, many dry places will go underwater – including the Svalbard Seedbank, a structure in Norway that holds hundreds of thousands of seed samples to protect against accidental loss of biodiversity. Thanga’s team believes storing samples on another celestial body reduces the risk of biodiversity being lost if one event were to cause total annihilation of Earth.
Totally Tubular
The idea of developing a lunar base, or human settlement on the moon, has been around for hundreds of years, and the lava tube discovery renewed the space community’s enthusiasm for the concept. But the moon isn’t exactly a hospitable environment where humans can spend extended periods. There isn’t water or breathable air, and it’s about minus 25 degrees Celsius, or minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s also not a very eventful place.
On the other hand, those same features make it a great place to store samples that need to stay very cold and undisturbed for hundreds of years at a time.
Building a lunar ark is no small undertaking, but, based on some “quick, back-of-the-envelope calculations,” Thanga said it’s not as overwhelming as it may sound. Transporting about 50 samples from each of 6.7 million species would require about 250 rocket launches. It took 40 rocket launches to build the International Space Station.
“It’s not crazy big,” Thanga said. “We were a little bit surprised about that.”
Cryogenics and Quantum Levitation
The mission concept
