Alarmed by the growing number of species facing extinction here on Earth, a group of scientists believe the answer lies in building a large freezer for animal DNA on the Moon.
The proposal comes courtesy of a team that includes Mary Hagedorn, a research scientist at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute. Hagedorn has previously worked on successful efforts to preserve threatened coral species through cryopreservation. Now, she wants to use the technology for something more ambitious: building a lunar Noah’s Ark that could eventually be used to repopulate lost species on Earth or another planet via cloning.
The Moon makes most sense, the group says, due to its remoteness from human-made disasters and its naturally low temperatures, which make freezing easier.
“Such a biorepository would safeguard biodiversity and act as a hedge against its loss occurring because of natural disasters, climate change, overpopulation, resource depletion, wars, socioeconomic threats, and other causes on Earth,” they wrote.
The plan calls for a bank of cryogenically frozen animal skin and tissue to be built up over time, eventually expanding to include plants. A wide range of fauna and flora samples would be needed, each of which would play a role in building “human-friendly sustainable ecosystems during space flight, on another planet, or back on Earth,” the researchers explained.
There would be many challenges to completing such an ambitious project, they acknowledged, including building packaging to protect the DNA from radiation, finding reliable transport to particularly hostile portions of the Moon, and the uncertain effect lengthy exposure to microgravity could have on the samples.
Creating the Moon freezer would be a “decades-long program,” according to the team, requiring enormous amounts of cooperation between nations.
Another barrier is cost. The group didn’t put a price tag on the lunar cryostorage facility, other than noting that, on a scale of one to five, in which one is the cheapest and five is the most expensive, building such a facility on Earth would be a one and doing it on the Moon would be a five. On the flip side, the cost of maintaining a repository on Earth is a five while on the Moon, it’s a two.
It’s not the first time that scientists have looked to the Moon to save Earth’s endangered species. In 2021, a team from the University of Arizona proposed constructing a preservation “Ark” to preserve seeds, eggs, sperm, and DNA. But where that paper called for a facility that required solar power to run, the new proposal has a more foolproof design that would harness the Moon’s frigid temperatures to reduce the maintenance needs and costs. A portion of the lunar south pole has a stable temperature that never rises above -196 Celsius (-320 Fahrenheit), which would make cryogenically preserving the materials easier.
If this all sounds a little out there, keep in mind that samples of over 1.3 million samples are currently in a Norwegian ‘Doomsday Vault’ as a hedge against calamities both natural and artificial. Given the state of things on Earth, a lunar vault might just be the smartest idea yet.
