Alarmed by the growing number of endangered species on Earth, a group of scientists believe the solution lies in building a giant freezer on the moon to store animal DNA.
The proposal comes from a team including Mary Hagedorn, a research scientist at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute. save She has successfully cryopreserved endangered coral species, and now she wants to use the technology for something even more ambitious: building a Noah’s Ark on the moon to repopulate extinct species on Earth and other planets through cloning.
The moon is best suited because it is far from man-made disasters and has naturally low temperatures that make it easier to freeze, the group said.
““Such biorepositories would safeguard biodiversity and act as a bulwark against biodiversity loss due to natural disasters, climate change, overpopulation, resource depletion, war, socio-economic threats, and other causes on Earth,” they wrote.
The plan is to build up a cryogenically frozen bank of skin and tissue from animals over time, and eventually plants as well. A range of animal and plant samples will be needed, each with its own unique characteristics.“It will maintain a human-friendly and sustainable ecosystem during spaceflight, on other planets, and even after returning to Earth,” the researchers explained.
They acknowledged that completing such an ambitious project would face many challenges, including creating packaging to protect the DNA from radiation, finding a reliable means of transporting it to particularly harsh parts of the moon, and the uncertain effects that prolonged exposure to microgravity would have on the samples.
Building a lunar freezer would be a “multi-decade project” that would require a huge amount of cooperation between countries, the team said.
Another barrier is cost: The group wouldn’t say how much a lunar cryogenic storage facility would cost, but noted that on a scale of one to five, with one being cheapest and five being most expensive, building such a facility on Earth would be a one, while doing it on the Moon would be a five. Conversely, the cost of maintaining storage on Earth would be a five, while on the Moon it would be a two.
This isn’t the first time scientists have turned to the Moon to save endangered species on Earth. In 2021, a team from the University of Arizona was suggested Build a storage “ark” to store seeds, eggs, sperm and DNA. But whereas that paper called for a facility that would require solar power to operate, the new proposal is a more robust design that would take advantage of the moon’s frigid temperatures to reduce maintenance needs and costs. Parts of the moon’s south pole have a stable temperature that never rises above minus 196 degrees Celsius (minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit), making it easier to cryogenically store materials.
If this sounds a bit far-fetched, there are currently over 1.3 million samples Norway’s “Doomsday Vault” As a defense against both natural and man-made disasters, a lunar repository might be the smartest idea ever, given the current situation on Earth.
