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posted by martyb on Sunday March 14 2021, @05:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the ♫sowing-the-seeds-of-love♫ dept.

[Nearly 4 years ago, we covered flooding at the "doomsday" seed bank at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Fortunately, there was no harm to the seed samples stored there. For further background, consult the Wikipedia entry on the seed vault. --Ed]

Why We Need A ‘Moon Ark’ To Store Frozen Seeds, Sperm And Eggs From 6.7 Million Earth Species:

Species or planets[sic] could be wiped off the face of the Earth any minute—so we need a “Moon Ark” to safely store frozen eggs, sperm, seeds and other DNA matter from all 6.7 million Earth species.

That’s according to students and staff at the University of Arizona, who at the IEEE Aerospace Conference last weekend divulged details of an ambitious “modern global insurance policy” for our planet.

Their daring plan is to build a complex in the Moon’s lava tubes staffed by robots and fuelled by solar panels on the lunar surface.

[...] The incredible plan to build a lunar base that includes an underground ark goes something like this:

  • Ball-like SphereX robots—each weighing about 11lbs/5kg and able to fly and hop—to enter, explore and map the Moon’s recently discovered (in 2013) network of underground lava tubes, each about 328ft./100 meters in diameter.
  • Design, and then construct, underground ark in the lava tubes, with solar panels on the lunar surface and elevator shafts that access the facility.
  • Launch 250 rockets to the Moon, each taking 50 samples from each of 6.7 million species (it took about 40 to build the International Space Station).
  • Store the petri dishes of seeds in cryogenic preservation modules inside the lava tubes, which would shield the seeds from solar radiation, meteorites and temperature fluctuations.
  • The seeds would be kept at around -292ºF/180ºC, temperatures that would likely cold-weld together metal parts of the base. Cue “floating shelves” made from cryo-cooled superconductor materials that enable quantum levitation above a powerful magnet.
  • Staff the facility with robots that navigate through it above magnetic tracks. Robots that can operate under cryo-conditions don’t yet exist—though the proposers admit that new technologies will be needed to make the “Moon Ark” a reality.

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  • (Score: 1) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday March 14 2021, @06:11AM (4 children)

    My first concern would be Cosmic Rays. Honestly though, Cosmic Egons would be a much bigger problem.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Sunday March 14 2021, @06:38AM

    by Beryllium Sphere (r) (5062) on Sunday March 14 2021, @06:38AM (#1123922)

    Inside a lava tube they should be well shielded.

    The other way to get fault tolerance is lots of copies, geographically dispersed. There would be lots of ways possible to keep track of which samples were in which repository if (as I would do it) each repository is a subset.

  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday March 15 2021, @06:41PM (2 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 15 2021, @06:41PM (#1124526) Journal

    I think it is great that they are storing so much sperm, eggs and seeds of so many species.

    One thing that was not clear thought. Were they going to store any human genetic material?

    --
    If a lazy person with no education can cross the border and take your job, we need to upgrade your job skills.