Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/08/05/doomsday-vault-on-the-moon-would-hold-back-up-of-earths-plants-and-animals.html
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Kind of hard to imagine a cataclysm that would make Earth—or even any given place on Earth—less hospitable than the moon.
Wouldn’t it be far easier and more efficient to just have multiple vaults all over the Earth in case any one of them was destroyed?
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It would be interesting to pair this with a research station that does something like this:
Plants grown in Apollo lunar regolith present stress-associated transcriptomes that inform prospects for lunar exploration
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-022-03334-8
but on a larger scale.
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Isn’t there a hefty amount of incident radiation on the moon? (“Scientists have long known that radiation levels are relatively high on the moon…” link) Surely someone knows the temporal viability of a pea-seed (non-mutated ‘Audrey II’ form) versus radiation dose? (‘surely’?) So pitch them seeds down a deep deep lunar hole? Or (slowly) ferry up a lot of lead?
(Maybe it would just be more sustainable to record all the DNA sequences and… stash that in a digitally encoded gold-copper alloy wire wrapped around the solenoid in a robot’s thorax …? cf plot of Demon with a Glass Hand)
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If earth is rendered uninhabitable then maybe this would be a good thing. Also for the implied future off-earth/space population (if it ever comes into existence).
But if…
In my mind, it’s meant for catastrophes like severe hurricanes or some disease that impacts the base of our food chain.
…then multiple repositories on earth are a far better option. Who knows if we would be able to get to the moon to retrieve them when we need them?
I’d rather concentrate on back-ups here on Earth where we can use them, and on preventing the need for them.
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Q: How would a lunar biorepository be used?
A: First and foremost, it could be used by astronauts going into space. Lots of plants will need to be grown when they start terraforming Mars.
I agree with you. But Ms. Hagedorn is thinking about the whole terraforming thing. I do note that she’s from the Smithsonian - not NASA - so I’m not sure how much weight her argument will carry…
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“We need to publish a paper. Should we do one about a cool Eternal Space Archive; or one about having people with a whisper of institutional competence use some off-the-shelf commercial technology and relatively low shipping costs to do ongoing refrigerator maintenance?”
Snark aside; I’m baffled by what the implied recovery model is: So, I’ve crawled out of my smoking crater, all the wild and captive populations of ecologically critical species are dead; every terrestrial cryo-vault has been nuked or looted for parts by raider gangs to adorn their combat leathers and barbaric vehicles; but I’m good to go to the moon and recover a substantially sized package squirreled away in a tunnel in a polar crater and safely return it to earth?
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I’m not an expert on the esoteric details of delta-v budgeting; but “a lunar repository will be great because people we send to mars can just drop by to pick up cryo-capsules” seems like a very citation-needed idea.
It’s true that the moon is a much shallower gravity well; but you could probably pack a lot of cryo-samples onto your mars vehicle in the payload space that the hardware and propellant for a lunar descent, sample recovery, and ascent would consume.(plus, of course, the samples would only be on the moon because you already paid the price of pulling them out of the earth’s gravity well and soft landing them on the moon at a prior time; not just by magic)
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The vault would need to be underground anyway to protect it from meteorites in addition to the radiation.
Seeds have been flown to space and back on a lot of missions for decades, even long term-ish on the various space stations.
And there’s been atomic gardening since the 1950ies.
Plenty of data and experience to build up on and a lot that still needs to be figured out.
Interplanetary crewed missions could arguably be significantly improved by growing plants on board; not just for food, air and waste management, but also for psychological reasons.
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I guess I’m banging on Betteridge’s Law twice in one day, but I would suggest that the headline here should be: “Should we build a Doomsday vault on the Moon?”
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If the main impetus for the vault is to serve as a supply depot for long-term space settlements and terraforming projects then that seems like putting the cart before the horse. Sort of like planning a shopping center on the floor of the North Atlantic Ocean just in case humanity ever figures out how to establish a long-term presence there.
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This reminds me of Elon Musk saying that endangered species could be raised on Mars, because… uh, yeah, they didn’t think it through very well. These people should know better, though. I don’t expect Elno to understand anything.
If the Earth is rendered uninhabitable, then this is a useless thing. The people who no longer exist from a civilization no longer capable of rocket flights wouldn’t be able to access it and even if they could (e.g. they already lived on some sort of Moon base), would no longer have any place to grow the things stored here. The very apocalypse this is banking against would make it impossible to make use of it. I can’t imagine any scenario in which this would actually be useful. As you point out, earthly seed vaults are useful under a variety of non-apocalyptic scenarios, on the other hand.
Which makes it extra nonsensical. For one, “terraforming” is basically fantasy bullshit, but also “we’ll need lots of plants and animals on Mars, so we’ll… store them on the Moon?”
After which I will reconstitute whole species from some frozen cells, and then use them to repopulate entire ecosystems that were damaged to the point where these organisms couldn’t exist there anymore (and we didn’t have the ability/will to keep the ecosystem from collapsing in the first place) Yeah, cool.
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If we shit our own life cradle so much we have to try and repopulate it from the Moon, I think we should just give up, admit we are not a survivor species, and die out to let something better come after us.
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This is pure human hubris and narcissism.
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Yes, in addition to what we add.
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In fairness the author seems to understand that part, but doesn’t provide a very convincing explanation of why we would need such a repository on the moon for anything short of a civilization-ending catastrophe either:
A: If we have a massive apocalypse on Earth, it’s going to be impossible to access the repository. In my mind, it’s meant for catastrophes like severe hurricanes or some disease that impacts the base of our food chain. The thing that worries me a great deal is the southern oceans. Our oceans are under siege from being warmed and acidified. And if we start to lose the base of our food chain, we are in a lot of trouble. I could imagine some of those organisms needing to be supplemented within 50 to 75 years.
If our food chain is threatened by hurricanes or ocean acidification then why would it make more sense to rebuild from a stockpile buried deep on the lunar surface than from a few dozen stockpiles buried deep in the Earth?
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They will be shot back to earth in pods. One of which will comically bonk you on the head as it lands.
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Seed pods.
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Just don’t sleep next to one.
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At least on some level, except that the premise is still pretty apocalyptic, because otherwise regular stockpiles would make infinitely more sense. But then there’s also the terraforming Mars nonsense… It makes me suspect someone decided it would be fun to do a thought experiment about storage on the Moon and everything else is this awkward failure to justify it.
The thing is, if it got that bad, we’d not be in any real position to do anything about it anyways. We’d not be able to do much of anything after that kind of collapse, and it’s infinitely easier to deal with ecological collapse before it happens rather than try to reverse it, afterwards (even if your whole society hasn’t fallen apart as a consequence of it).
All these fantasies about letting climate change run unimpeded and then reversing both it and the total collapse of the environment which allows our current civilization to exist, fill me with dread, as they’re all about brainwashing us into allowing the irreversible to happen, while pretending it’s reversible.
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