David Bridges
Alarmed by the rising variety of species dealing with extinction right here on Earth, a gaggle of scientists imagine the reply lies in constructing a big freezer for animal DNA on the Moon.
The proposal comes courtesy of a workforce that features Mary Hagedorn, a analysis scientist on the Smithsonian’s Nationwide Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute. Hagedorn has beforehand labored on profitable efforts to protect threatened coral species by cryopreservation. Now, she needs to make use of the know-how for one thing extra formidable: constructing a lunar Noah’s Ark that might ultimately be used to repopulate misplaced species on Earth or one other planet by way of cloning.
The Moon makes most sense, the group says, on account of its remoteness from human-made disasters and its naturally low temperatures, which make freezing simpler.
“Such a biorepository would safeguard biodiversity and act as a hedge in opposition to its loss occurring due to pure disasters, local weather change, overpopulation, useful resource depletion, wars, socioeconomic threats, and different causes on Earth,” they wrote.
The plan requires a financial institution of cryogenically frozen animal pores and skin and tissue to be constructed up over time, ultimately increasing to incorporate vegetation. A variety of fauna and flora samples can be wanted, every of which might play a task in constructing “human-friendly sustainable ecosystems throughout area flight, on one other planet, or again on Earth,” the researchers defined.
There can be many challenges to finishing such an formidable challenge, they acknowledged, together with constructing packaging to guard the DNA from radiation, discovering dependable transport to notably hostile parts of the Moon, and the unsure impact prolonged publicity to microgravity may have on the samples.
Creating the Moon freezer can be a “decades-long program,” based on the workforce, requiring huge quantities of cooperation between nations.
One other barrier is price. The group didn’t put a price ticket on the lunar cryostorage facility, aside from noting that, on a scale of 1 to 5, by which one is the most cost effective and 5 is the costliest, constructing such a facility on Earth can be a one and doing it on the Moon can be a 5. On the flip aspect, the price of sustaining a repository on Earth is a 5 whereas on the Moon, it’s a two.
It’s not the primary time that scientists have appeared to the Moon to avoid wasting Earth’s endangered species. In 2021, a workforce from the College of Arizona proposed establishing a preservation “Ark” to protect seeds, eggs, sperm, and DNA. However the place that paper known as for a facility that required solar energy to run, the brand new proposal has a extra foolproof design that may harness the Moon’s frigid temperatures to cut back the upkeep wants and prices. A portion of the lunar south pole has a secure temperature that by no means rises above -196 Celsius (-320 Fahrenheit), which might make cryogenically preserving the supplies simpler.
If this all sounds somewhat on the market, needless to say samples of over 1.3 million samples are presently in a Norwegian ‘Doomsday Vault’ as a hedge in opposition to calamities each pure and synthetic. Given the state of issues on Earth, a lunar vault may simply be the neatest concept but.
Daniel Mercer
