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Scientists plan to put a “doomsday vault” at sites near the moon’s north and south poles, deep freezing samples of life on Earth for future generations.
The scientists outlined their plan and the reasons behind it in a new case study published in the journal Bioscience.
“Earth’s biodiversity is increasingly threatened and at risk,” the authors wrote. “We propose a passive lunar biorepository for long-term storage of prioritized taxa of live cryopreserved samples to safeguard Earth’s biodiversity and to support future space exploration and planet terraforming.”
The Smithsonian Institute-led research group tested their ideas out on a fish called the Starry Goby, a bony fish they say is “an ideal subject on which to test cryopreservation and packaging protocols.”
It will be among the numerous creatures they plan to send trial samples of to the International Space Station to test transport conditions before actually sending the final samples to the moon.
So, why the moon?
There is already a “doomsday vault” located approximately 800 miles from the North Pole in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago (pictured above). And whatever happened to sending sperm samples to the moon as a “modern global insurance policy?”
“There is nowhere on Earth cold enough to store animal samples without human intervention,” the researchers wrote. “But there are places on the moon that reach –196°C (including some that remain constantly below –225°C), which is cold enough for stable storage. This is especially true at the lunar poles, where deep craters are permanently shadowed.”
The scientists also explained, “Many institutions globally maintain cryopreserved biological collections, especially those concerned with human health, but fewer biorepositories hold live wildlife samples in a frozen state.
“Nevertheless, all these biorepositories require intensive human management, electrical power, and an ongoing supply of liquid nitrogen, which makes them susceptible to unpredictable natural and geopolitical disasters.
“Today, many frozen collections are stored in urban centers, making them even more susceptible to destabilization threats.”
The moon, they assume, won’t have these limitations or threats.
So how are they going to do it?
“Samples will be expanded into fibroblast cells, recryopreserved, and then tested in an Earth-based laboratory for robust packaging and sensitivity to radiation. Two key factors for this biorepository are the needs to reduce damage from radiation and to maintain the samples near –196° Celsius.”
They propose storing these samples in a lunar biorepository “that does not depend on generating power to maintain ultralow temperature because it would be near the poles,” but admit that this project is going to be “a decades-long program.”
Then again, since humans will be living on the moon by the end of this decade, maybe it won’t take as long as they think, right?