University of Arizona researcher Jekan Thanga has proposed a solar-powered “moon ark” to become a “modern global insurance policy” for humanity.
The concept would store cryogenically frozen seeds, spore, sperm, and egg samples from 6.7 million Earth species.
Thanga and a group of his undergraduate and graduate students unveiled the concept of a moon, in a paper on display over the weekend during the IEEE Aerospace Conference.
The group suggested that the ark could be placed inside any 200 lava tubes just below the surface of the moon – first discovered by the scientific community in 2013.
Formed billions of years ago, and without rubbing for about 3-4 billion years, these caves would provide shelter from solar radiation, micrometeorites, and changes in surface temperature.
Because the lunar lava tubes measure about 100 meters in diameter, they also offer enough space for millions of samples of the proposed project.
At temperatures of -25 Celsius (-15 degrees F), the team explained that the Moon provides ideal conditions for storing samples that need to stay very cold for a long time.
Why a ‘modern global insurance policy’?
Of course, such a project would incur the huge costs involved in space travel, and it would probably not be possible until NASA establishes the lunar station it has proposed for years. from here. However, the researchers say that such an “insurance policy” is nonetheless an important goal to combat.
“Earth is naturally a volatile environment,” said Thanga, a professor aerospace and mechanical engineering in Arizona College of Engineering, explained in press release.
“As humans, we were intimately acquainted about 75,000 years ago with the Toba supervolcanic eruption, which caused a cooling period of 1,000 years and, according to some, coincided with an estimated decrease in human diversity. Human civilization, if it fell, could have such a devastating effect on the rest of the planet. “
Thanga also said that the climate crisis has the potential to raise sea levels enough to submerge Svalbard Seedbank, a structure in Norway that holds hundreds of thousands of seed samples to protect against unforeseen biodiversity loss. .
In essence, Thanga and his team believe that storing samples on the Moon, or any other cloud group, provides insurance against the event of the end of civilization on Earth.
In 2019, Israel planned to send a smaller lunar archive to the Moon of a slightly different nature with the Beresheet Lunar Lander – the ‘mission’ Lunar Library containing an archive of 30 million pages of human history. Unfortunately, the laird failed and got lost when he fell on the surface of the moon.
Thanga says, based on a quick calculation, it would take about 250 rocket launches to carry about 50 samples from each of 6.7 million species. For reference, the International Space Station launched 40 launches for its construction.
The team say there is still a lot of work to be done to determine exactly how the samples would be stored to protect them in adverse conditions – they have considered locking the seeds using quantum levitation. Then again, they have plenty of time before a project like this will be able to reach the lunar surface.