Scientists are looking to send frozen seed, spore, sperm, and egg samples to the moon to create a lunar Noah’s Ark.
Instead of two of every animal, University of Arizona researcher Jekan Thanga and a group of his students want to send the samples from about 6.7 million Earth species to the moon in preparation for a possible Earth collapse. The team proposed the “global insurance policy” in a paper presented during the IEEE Aerospace Conference.
Climate change was the main reasoning behind the proposal. Other scenarios such as nuclear war and a global pandemic are also reasons why having Earthly samples on the moon was deemed to be a good idea.
Noah’s Ark’s space version will be created by sending the samples to the moon in multiple payloads. They will then be stored in a vault beneath the moon’s surface in lava tubes.
According to the paper published by the group, the moon’s atmosphere “makes it a great place to store samples that need to stay very cold and undisturbed for hundreds of years at a time.”
Transporting nearly 50 samples from each of 6.7 million species, which totals 335 million samples, could be completed in 250 rocket launches.
