If, like Elon Musk, you believe that Earth will one day be destroyed by a third world war, you may be reassured to learn that most of life on earth will have been saved from the apocalypse.
A research team from the University of Arizona plans to build a “Lunar Noah’s ark” where the eggs, sperm, seeds or spores of 6.7 million species would be cryogenized for safe storage.
Jekan Thanga, who presented this project lors de l’IEEE Aerospace Conference, suggests installing this giant warehouse in one of the 200 lava tunnels that can be found on the Moon.
These kinds of caves of about 100 meters in diameter, formed by ancient volcanic activity, would protect the samples from solar radiation, meteorites and temperature changes, details the site Interesting Engineering.
The structure would include two elevators to descend into the tunnel, where the samples would be stored in cryogenic modules cooled to -196 ° C thanks to solar panels installed on the surface.
In the moon
“The Earth is a very volatile environment”, explique Jekan Thanga, professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at the University of Arizona. “75,000 years ago, humanity experienced a great loss of diversity after the Toba super-eruption, which caused the Earth to cool for a thousand years”, relates the researcher, although the theory of this disaster is however controversial.
Jekan Thanga is also concerned about climate change and rising sea levels, which could engulf large parts of continents and therefore species.
There is already a Global seed bank in Norway, in Svalbard, where more than one million seeds of 1,116 varieties of plants from all over the world are stored in cold rooms. Problem: this gene bank is itself threatened by climate change and melting permafrost.
Storing biodiversity on another planet would therefore be much safer, says Jekan Thanga. According to his calculations, it would take more than 250 trips to transport fifty samples of each of the 6.7 million species. A challenge, when we know that it took forty launches to assemble the International Space Station, yet located only 400 kilometers from Earth.
The idea of exporting part of humanity to space safe from a future disaster is not new. In 2019, the Israeli probe Beresheet took on board a lunar library containing 30 million pages of information, samples of human DNA and thousands of tardigrades, microscopic organisms capable of surviving space conditions.
Unfortunately, the probe crashed to the surface and it is unlikely – but not uncertain – that the poor critters survived. It just goes to show that space is not necessarily such a safe haven of peace.
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