and nobody usually bother to even read the summary, but: the solar panels are to provide electricity to the elevators accessing the shaft. Even if you increase this by an order of magnitude, it will not last long enough. Solar panels have a finite life - 25 years on Earth I think. Put the seeds, eggs, sperm, and spores on the moon, then check on them in 5-10 years to see if radiation got into the vault, etc.ģ. We want to do it now while there are still specimens on earth in case it doesn't work. By that point we're not even going to be hanging around SOL anymore. RIght now it's just a fanciful idea.Īnd if this is for later in earth's life where the sun is expanding out and wrecking the climate, again you won't be planing there anymore, AND the moon is probably not that safe of a place anymore either. This can definitely wait, and will be a heck of a lot easier to do down the road. Sure, this makes sense for later, when we leave earth, but that's way down the road, and putting together a seed vault isn't something that takes very long to do, so it's not like we need to "get started now". where do they think they're going to plant the seeds? if earth is so destroyed that even the hardened seed vaults on earth didn't survive. "What amazes me about projects like this is that they make me feel like we are getting closer to becoming a space civilization," said the University of Arizona doctoral student leading the thermal analysis for the project, "and to a not-very-distant future where humankind will have bases on the moon and Mars." The team's proposal for the ark includes solar panels on the moon's surface for electricity, elevator shafts down into the facility and Petri dishes housed in cryogenic preservation modules. "We were a little bit surprised about that." That's over six times more than it took to build the International Space Station, which required 40 rocket launches. While the moon is not hospitable to humans, its harsh features "make it a great place to store samples that need to stay very cold and undisturbed for hundreds of years at a time," they said.īased on some "quick, back-of-the-envelope calculations," Thanga said that transporting about 50 samples from each of 6.7 million species - totaling 335 million samples - would take about 250 rocket launches. These tubes have remained untouched for three to four billion years, and scientists suggest they could provide much-needed protection from solar radiation, meteors or temperature changes on the surface. The idea is to store the ark within a network of lava tubes - about 200 of which were discovered beneath the moon's surface in 2013.
University of Arizona researcher Jekan Thanga and a group of his students proposed the concept in a paper presented during the IEEE Aerospace Conference this week.Įstablishing the ark would involve sending the 6.7 million samples to the moon in multiple payloads, then storing them in a vault beneath the surface, where they would be safe. Instead of two of every animal, the solar-powered moon ark would cryogenically store frozen seed, spore, sperm and egg samples from some 6.7 million Earth species. Scientists are pulling inspiration from Noah's Ark in a new lunar proposal that they call a "global insurance policy." They hope to send an ark to the moon, filled with 335 million sperm and egg samples, in case a catastrophe happens on Earth.
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