Since late-2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has killed 2.66 million people and counting. If not for scientists and pharmaceutical manufacturers, the death toll could have been much higher. If a vaccine was not created, if lockdown orders were ignored, if variant strains began to spread more quickly—it’s not inconceivable that whole towns and cities could have been left baren.
Add to that the climate change crisis, food chain concerns, wildfires, droughts and the threat of nuclear war, and it’s not so surprising some scientists are considering the implications of life beyond Earth.
In a presentation at the virtual IEEE Aerospace Conference, the University of Arizona’s Jekan Thanga shared his team’s idea to develop a “modern Noah’s Ark” on the subsurface of the moon.
The ark would house the seed, sperms, eggs and DNA of 6.7 million species—5.1 million fungi, 0.3 million plants and 1.3 million animals.
“Humanity has a fundamental responsibility to protect the diversity of life on Earth,” said Thanga, an assistant professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at UA. “A modern ark is more cost effective than trying to protect all the endangered species that are in trouble. It’s also more cost effective than creating an entire artificial ecosystem. In addition, we could still save the species until technology advances enough to reintroduce them. This could be a modern insurance policy.”
Thanga and his team believe the perfect place for this modern ark is in the nearly 200 lunar pits that have been detected on the surface of the moon. The lunar pits, which go about 80 to 100 meters underground, are likely entrances to lava tubes that have been there for 3 to 4 billion years. The pits would provide ready-made shelter from the surface of the moon, which undergoes major temperature swings, as well as protection from solar and cosmic radiation and micrometeorites.
The biological contents of the ark will need to be cryopreserved at -180 to -196 C. Right now, the team is envisioning circular “shells” that will hold the cassettes with the preserved DNA. A series of robots on a mobile system could retrieve and return the cassettes whenever necessary, such as a pre-determined time when the on-site preservation analysis lab needs to test for sample integrity. An airlock system and a series of elevator shafts would take personnel from the surface of the moon to the subsurface laboratories and cryopreservation modules.
According to the researchers, the base would be powered by photovoltaics located on the surface of the moon. The photovoltaics would generate enough power to refrigerate the base over an entire lunar day and night, with the researchers deducing that the ark would need 28,500 kilowatt hours on a daily basis.
However, the team was quick to acknowledge the challenges of working at the temperatures required for cryopreservation.
“We need advancements in cryo-robotics to make this possible, particularly to exploit quantum locking and levitation,” said Thanga. “We also need to explore what is needed to deal with loss of power, interruptions, etc. And we’ll need to see if the seeds can withstand the weightlessness of the lunar environment after they are frozen on Earth first.”
Photo: Proposed layout of a modern lunar ark. Credit: Jekan Thanga/YouTube.