![]() Elsewhere, the US has plans for its own lunar base called Artemis after it lands astronauts back on the moon in 2024. Just the other day, China and Russia announced that they have plans to build a lunar outpost together. It’s just a matter of directing resources and gaining public support. Maintenance would be ensured by robots navigating above magnetic tracks.Īll of this may sound wack, but it definitely is in the realm of possibility - we already have the technology at our disposal after all. Inside the modules, the samples would float above metal surfaces thanks to a phenomenon known as quantum levitation. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault the so-called doomsday vault on Spitsbergen in the Arctic Circle currently houses 992,000 unique seed samples to protect against biodiversity loss. Two or more elevator shafts would lead down to the facility where biological samples would be housed in various cryogenic preservation modules. These samples would be housed in an underground facility powered by solar panels positioned on the moon’s surface. Scientists want to build a doomsday vault on the moon By Amy Woodyatt, CNN 0 Engineers want to build an underground lunar ark, filled with millions of seed, spore, sperm and egg samples from Earth's species, hidden in a network of tubes on the moon to provide a genetic backup for the planet in the event of a doomsday scenario. For comparison, it took about 40 rocket launches to build the International Space Station. By Thanga’s calculations, it would take at least 250 rocket launches to carry about 50 samples from each of the 6.7 million species on Earth. Of course, building an ark on the moon is a huge undertaking. Because human civilization has such a large footprint, if it were to collapse, that could have a negative cascading effect on the rest of the planet. As humans, we had a close call about 75,000 years ago with the Toba supervolcanic eruption, which caused a 1,000-year cooling period and, according to some, aligns with an estimated drop in human diversity. ![]() Jekan Thanga, a professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at the University of Arizona College of Engineering, explains:Įarth is naturally a volatile environment. The Lunar ArkĪrtist impression of the proposed underground lunar ark. The lunar caverns are much better suited to acting as a genetic vault. Untouched for the last billions of years, these lava tubes provide the perfect shelter from punishing solar radiation, which is why they’ve been identified as sites for future human bases.īut if we ever colonize the moon in a lava tube, why not take the extra step and build a genetic ark? Besides the ample space and radiation shielding, the temperature inside the lava tubes hovers around a constant -25° Celsius (-15° F), which is ideal for storing sensitive biological samples.Įarth also has lava tubes formed during its early years, but these are much smaller, about the size of subway tunnels, and have been eroded over time by earthquakes, plate tectonics, and other natural processes. These yawning, subterranean caverns can have heights that dwarf Dubai’s Burj Khalifa. A lava tube, or pyroduct, is a natural conduit formed by flowing lava from a volcanic vent that moves beneath the hardened surface of a lava flow.
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