Shackleton Crater on the south pole of the moon is an area in permanent shadow
LROC/Shadowcam/NASA/KARI/ASU
A backup of Earth-based life could be safely stored in a permanently dark spot on the Moon’s surface, without the need for power or maintenance, and could potentially be restored if life becomes extinct.
Mary Hagedorn of the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute in Washington, DC, and her colleagues proposed building the lunar biorepository as a response to extinctions occurring on Earth.
The plan has three main goals: to protect the diversity of life on Earth, to preserve species that may be useful for space exploration, such as those that can provide food or biological materials for filtration, and to preserve microorganisms that may be needed in the future to terraform other planets.
Hagedorn said the team wanted to identify a place that wouldn’t require people or energy to store cryogenically frozen living cells at temperatures below minus 196 degrees Celsius, the temperature at which nitrogen becomes liquid and all biological processes stop.
“There’s no place on Earth cold enough to put passive storage, which has to be kept at minus 196 degrees Celsius, so we thought about space or the moon,” Hagedorn said.
She said the team chose the lunar south pole because of a deep crater with a cold area that’s permanently in shadow. Burying the samples about two meters below the surface would also protect them from radiation, she said.
Previous attempts to build safe biovaults have met with mixed success. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway is located in the Arctic and was built to be permanently kept at or below -18 degrees Celsius by the surrounding permafrost, but climate change and rising temperatures threaten its long-term safety.
Biorepository facilities in other parts of the world, especially those located close to cities, are human-power dependent and vulnerable to geopolitical upheaval.
Andrew Pask, who is building the Australian Seed Repository at the University of Melbourne in Australia, is enthusiastic about the idea. “We want to store the same samples in the same facility to ensure their safety, and at the moment the Moon seems like the safest place,” Pask says.
But Rachel Lapin of Monash University in Melbourne says using the moon comes with many challenges and drawbacks, including accessing it to add or retrieve samples, and that storing samples on Earth might be wise to have enough redundancy so that if one repository fails, the other one is available, she says.
“I want to see compelling evidence that storage will be available if needed,” she said.
Even if the lunar repository is never used, Alice Gorman of Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, thinks there’s value in storing human artifacts in space, because perhaps alien civilizations might one day have access to them.
“Whether it’s cryogenically frozen biological tissue or DNA, or the full text of Wikipedia stored on a high-density nickel disk, the repository will be similar to the Voyager Golden Records,” Gorman says, referring to the metal disks containing humanity’s story attached to the spacecraft currently leaving the solar system.
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