Why we need a ‘Moon Ark’ to store seeds, sperm and frozen eggs from 6.7 million earth species

Species or planets could be removed from the Earth’s surface at any moment – so we need a “Moon Ark” to safely store frozen eggs, smears, seeds and other DNA material from every 6.7 million species on the Earth.

That’s according to students and staff at the University of Arizona, who unveiled at last weekend’s IEEE Aerospace Conference details the details of an ambitious “modern global insurance policy” for our planet.

Their sad plan is to build a building in the lunar tubs of the moon with robots and fired with solar panels on the surface of the moon.

Why do we need such a thing? Volcanoes, earthquakes, civil war, nuclear war, ice ages, rapid climate change and, yes, invisible pandemics – that is our planet. Calamitous events are never far away and a large number of species could be eradicated in a short time.

In fact, the human race doing there is already an insurance policy for such events in the form of Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the so-called “doomsday cellar” of 2008 inside the Arctic Circle in the islands of Svalbard, Norway.

It maintains more than a million “backups” of dual seed samples to protect against accidental biodiversity loss.

But it’s not as safe as we have to be.

His “frost-free mountain” home cannot be relied upon to stay frozen, flooding the entrance in 2017. Svalbard suffers from rapidly rising temperatures. Italso was built at just 430 ft./130 meters above sea level.

However, climate change or sea level rise is not what is behind the moon ‘s ark per se, but the Toba supervolcanic eruption 75,000 years ago.

The massive eruption, where Lake Toba is now located in Sumatra, Indonesia, caused a global volcanic winter that lasted up to a decade. “It also caused a 1,000-year cooling period and, according to some, coincides with an estimated decrease in human diversity,” said Jekan Thanga, professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at UArizona College of Engineering and SpaceTREx Laboratory. , who presented the paper. “The earth is naturally a turbulent environment.”

Fortunately, we have a Moon just 238,855 miles / 384,400 km from Earth where nothing ever happens. It is empty and cold. This is the right home for a second “ark” to reduce the threat of biodiversity if a catastrophic event destroys some species on Earth.

The amazing plan to build a lunar foundation that incorporates an underground ark goes something like this:

• Ball-like SphereX robots – each weighing around 11lbs / 5kg and capable of flying and hop – to enter, survey and map a recently discovered network of underground lava pipes ( in 2013), each about 328 feet./100 meters in diameter.
• Design, and then build, an underground ark in the lava tubes, with solar panels on the lunar surface and elevated beams that will access the facility.
• Launch 250 rockets to the Moon, each taking 50 samples from each of 6.7 million species (it took about 40 to build the International Space Station).

• The petri vessels store seeds in cryogenic preservation models inside the lava tubes, which would protect the seeds from solar radiation, meteorites and temperature fluctuations.
• The seeds were kept at around -292ºF / 180ºC, a temperature that would tend to cool together metal parts of the base. Cue “floating shelves” made from cryo-cooled superconductor materials that enable quantum reduction over a powerful magnet.
• Workers of the facility with robots that navigate through over magnetic paths. Robots that can operate under cryo conditions do not yet exist – although proponents acknowledge that new technologies will be needed to make the “Moon Ark” a reality.

“Projects like this make me feel that we are getting closer to being a space civilization,” said Álvaro Díaz-Flores Caminero, a UArizona doctoral student who is in charge of thermal analysis. project. “And for the not-too-distant future where humanity will have foundations on the Moon and Mars.”

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.