Why We Need A ‘Moon Ark’ To Store Frozen Seeds, Sperm And Eggs From 6.7 Million Earth Species



Species or planets could be wiped off the face of the Earth any minute—so we need a “Moon Ark” to safely store frozen eggs, sperm, seeds and other DNA matter from all 6.7 million Earth species.

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

Their daring plan is to build a complex in the Moon’s lava tubes staffed by robots and fuelled by solar panels on the lunar surface.

Why do we need such a thing? Volcanoes, earthquakes, civil war, nuclear war, ice ages, rapid climate change and, yes, unpredictable pandemics—that’s our planet. Calamitous events are never far away and a large number of species could be wiped out in a very short time.

Of course, the human race does already has an insurance policy for these kind of events in the shape of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the so-called “doomsday vault” opened in 2008 inside the Arctic Circle in the Svalbard archipelago, Norway.

It holds over a million “back-ups” of duplicate seed samples to protect against any accidental loss of biodiversity.

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

Its “permafrost mountain” home can no longer be relied upon to stay frozen, flooding the entrance in 2017. Svalbard is experiencing rapidly rising temperatures. It’salso built at only 430 ft./130 meters above sea level.

However, the driving force behind the lunar ark isn’t climate change or sea-level rise per se, but the Toba supervolcanic eruption of 75,000 years ago.

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

Happily, we have a Moon just 238,855 miles/384,400 km from Earth where nothing ever happens. It’s empty and it’s cold. It’s the perfect home for a second “ark” to reduce the risk of biodiversity being lost if a catastrophic event were to annihilate certain species on Earth.

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