A safe haven to preserve samples of biodiversity from climate change, habitat loss, natural disaster, and other threats is recognized as a worthwhile endeavor. Everyone knows good backup practice involves a copy of critical elements at a remote location, leading some to ask: why not the moon?
A biological sample repository already exists in the form of the Svalbard global seed vault, located in a mountain on a remote island in the Arctic circle. Even so, not even Svalbard is out of the reach of our changing Earth. In 2017, soaring temperatures in the Arctic melted permafrost in a way no one imagined would be possible, and water infiltrated the facility. Fortunately the flooding was handled by personnel and no damage was done to the vault’s contents, but it was a wake-up call.
An off-site backup that requires no staffing could provide some much-needed redundancy. Deep craters near the moon’s polar regions offer stable and ultra-cold locations that are never exposed to sunlight, and could offer staffing-free repositories if done right. The lunar biorepository proposal has the details, and is thought-provoking, at least.
The moon’s lack of an atmosphere is inconvenient for life, but otherwise pretty attractive for some applications. A backup seed vault is one, and putting a giant telescope in a lunar crater is another.
That seed vault is used many times a year to retrieve seeds. Moon is extreamly stupid idea because retrieving the seeds would not be practical.
Cold storage
If you talking a long term archive and not an active lending library it doesn’t matter where it is – fill in the request form and be added to the queue awaiting the next transport. I’m not sure the moon makes sense on other grounds unless that seed library is just part of the ongoing peopling of the moon – its a really harsh environment that might just destroy the goods if anything goes even slightly wrong, and long before you can get a repair mission sent from down the well.
Also it gets couple centimeters further apart from the earth each year… chances are it will drift away if you wait long enough :-)
Nothing wrong with 2 vaults. One current for seed retrievals and one on moon for really long term storage. The one on the moon can serve as a backup vault for when something happens to Svalbard storage such as freak heat wave causing the vault to sink and break apart or getting hit with major flood.
A backup is no backup if it’s inaccessible at the time of need.
If the seed vault is supposed to back up for some sort of global catastrophic event and reconstruction effort, then you’re probably going to be suffering from global economic crises and be unable to coordinate moon launches to bring the seeds back.
If economics and working together is the problem getting it back, we dont deserve it.
Economics and working together is the only way to get to the moon.
If you interpret “economics” as “can humanity put together enough resources to build a manned moon rocket?” It’s hard for me to imagine a scenario where there is an urgent need for a lunar seed bank, but the industry and fuel to build a Saturn V is still available.
A better idea would be thousands of mini backup seed banks, kept by county extension services or their equivalent.
NASA remote control robots on mars, Space X land booster rockets vertically, and ICBMs have guidance systems that hit within square meters of intended co-ordinates.
Self launching automated seed pods that can land at designated sites is a likely scenario.
That’s just adding complications to a completely difficult proposition. Now you need some way to remotely maintain rockets on the moon, all fueled up and ready to go on the off-chance that there’s a civilization collapsing catastrophe on earth in the next few centuries.
You would have to have a pre-arranged return facility, such as a robot to retrieve the wanted seeds, and a railgun affair to shoot a capsule into earth’s atmosphere. If set up in advance “all” you have to do is arrange the comms.
Moon is probably way too harsh of an environment for seeds to survive. Plus as others have noted access is not there. And even if it were, how would one make the site easy to find?
Yeah, without an atmosphere isn’t the moon subject to quite a bit of radiation?
Also, as the article points out, weather events like this were thought to be impossible. Fortunately, personnel on-site were available to prevent a “disaster”. Without personnel stationed on the moon’s repository, what happens in the event of the inevitable “unforeseen” event?
It’s somewhat more likely to be a self inflicted disaster but a decent sized chunk of rock hitting the moon could cause us some problems.
We can’t even colonise the moon so why start with mars?
Mars solar day 24 hours, 39 minutes and 35 seconds
Lunar solar day 29.5 Earth days
I’m not too worried. I won’t be going outside very often when I live on the Moon. I’ll just set my interior lights on a timer to keep my little lizard brain from going crazy.
its not a matter of light. Its a matter of thermoregulation. temperature swings from highest to lowest on a daily basis allows for much easier moderation of habitats than a month of ultrafreeze followed by a month in the oven baking your cookies.
Solar day is not really an argument. I used to work night shift and during winter I’ve seen sun for like 2h a day and during summer (day shift) I fall asleep before sunset and woke up after sun rise. Than I worked on ship and sometimes saw sun every few days. My shift was 7-19 but other people worked 7-15/15-23/23-7. Really – position of sun meant nothing for us.
Polar days and polar nights are not popular but happen and people learned to live in this condition. And then are pilots who change time zones few times per month and those who work in submarines.
Other thing is measuring time – do you really use sun these days? Except some tourists, people mostly say “we need to finish before 3pm” but rarely “it’s already high noon”. In cities you often can’t see exact position of sun and it doesn’t matter because of street lights.
Finally – while on Mars or Moon, how often are you going to be outside? How often you are going to look through the window? How much of that sun energy your skin is about to receive to produce some vitamin D? It’s not that you are going to sunbath like on earth right?
“Make hay while the Sun shines”.
A lot of agricultural workers depend on sunshine.
Fields can be harvested after the Sun sets, but that work stops when cooling temperatures cause dew to form on the crop.
>I thought a Martian sol was 20 hours.
https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/how-long-day-on-mars
“Its sidereal day is 24 hours, 37 minutes and 22 seconds, and its solar day 24 hours, 39 minutes and 35 seconds. A Martian day (referred to as “sol”) is therefore approximately 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth. “
Hmm lets see,
28 days of battery storage vs 12 hours
28 days of thermal mass storage vs 12 hours
theres a lot more science involved in supporting life off world than mere psychology.
I thought a Martian sol was 20 hours.
If you are near the poles you can just have part of the complex stick above the horizon such that it is ‘always’ in the sun and solar tracking quite easily – the only time you’d need your battery stores is while the sun is eclipsed by the Earth from the moons perspective.
The thermal management could be more problematic as that is a very very long time to be baking in direct sunlight with pretty much only the direct conduction of the construction material to distribute the heat. However between the simple expedient of an ‘air’ gap or shade, the highly sunlight rejecting coatings and ceramic technologies I’d doubt it would actually be that costly a problem to solve, at least in comparison – the expensive part would be getting the raw materials, foundry and construction crew up there more than the actual engineering I suspect.
On both of them you’d hardly ever see the sun, day cycles wouldn’t matter. It would be like living in Svalbard only you go outside far less often
Despite long periods of continual dark or light, Svalbard’s temperature typically varies from 3°F to 47°F and is rarely below -19°F or above 53°F.
Temperatures near the Moon’s equator can spike to 250°F (121°C) in daylight, then plummet after nightfall to -208°F (-133°C). Thats 14 days of extreme cold followed by 14 days of extreme heat.
A summer day on Mars may get up to 70 degrees F (20 degrees C) near the equator, but at night the temperature can plummet to about minus 100 degrees F (minus 73 degrees C). But this fluctuation occurs over 24 hours, 39 minutes and 35 seconds.
Svalbard would be much easier than mars to adapt to
Mars would be much easier than the moon.
I’m glad they acknowledged the radiation hazard right up front.
Curious they picked the temperature of -196 C though. That’s the boiling point of nitrogen at 1 atm. An odd pick for the moon.
Totally agree wide Dude’s observation that if we get in a state that we really need it, we probably can’t get to it on the moon.
But what is “long term?” And how stable is the moon, really? How long can we expect the “permanently shadowed” polar regions to remain polar regions, and remain cold?
Getting them back is not really a problem. You need some simple Apollo sized vehicles, or even much smaller, as part of the system. For radiation, on the Moon you can tunnel as deep as 15km. Pick a depth with enough protection.
(Alien scientist)….After all life was wiped out on the third planet we have located their life preservation vault on it’s moon. We have successfully re-animated their species. The inhabitants were known as something called Tomato people and they taste delicious.
Wait till they find the animal embryo vault and the mayonnaise vault, the BLTs will blow their minds!
>But what is “long term?” And how stable is the moon, really? How long can we expect the “permanently shadowed” polar regions to remain polar regions, and remain cold?
Over 4.53 billion years meteor impacts and to a lesser degree volcanic eruptions have shifted the lunar poles an estimated 10 degrees in latitude or 186 mi/300km.
>“Based on the Moon’s cratering history, polar wander appears to have been moderate enough for water near the poles to have remained in the shadows and enjoyed stable conditions over billions of years.”
Don’t want to worry about the end of the world? Read these passages first, then the rest of the Bible:
Genesis 6:22
2 Peter 3:10
John 3:16
Romans 3:23
Acts 2:37-39
That’s a bit of a mixed assortment. Must be from the ADHD Ministries?
1 Enoch 9 –
And behold! He cometh with ten thousands of His holy ones
To execute judgement upon all,
And to destroy all the ungodly
The Epic of Gilgamesh –
Milk of the cattle
he drank.
Food they placed before him.
He broke bread
gazing and looking.
But Enkidu understood not.
Bread to eat,
beer to drink,
he had not been taught.
There are lots of ancient writings to reference beyond the ones Protestants have collected. Even the Roman Catholics have a few bonus books in their Bible.
Matthew 7:6
Dam Jebbies wanted us to read the whole incoherent thing.
I can say with confidence that I slept on every page of the King James Bible, Jr year in HS.
Perhaps not every page…It’s a big old pile of BS, I didn’t wake up to flip the page.
Cheated on the tests, got B.
The thing about slow grifts. If you subject someone to step 4 before they have internalized and accepted steps 1-3 it produces the opposite of the intended result.
I was in the homeroom of the ‘Latin scholars’ (call it priest track), so I saw a bunch of smart kids nodding their heads in agreement with complete nonsense.
As indoctrinated as commies.
Years later, we found out that one of the theology teachers was a Chester.
Not that we didn’t suspect, was obviously, flamboyantly queer.
Jesuits are one f-ed up group.
@HaHa. God I like reading your posts. I’d come here just to read them if I could (without any hacks necessary!)
This proposal seems like a testament to people’s enthusiasm for novelty over maintenance.
It’s certainly true that something on earth isn’t going to remain at cryogenic temperatures without ongoing attention; and it’s much more accessible to hostile action or disaster of one flavor or another; but the technology required to keep something(especially if it’s well insulated and you don’t open and close it often) at a reasonably stable temperature in the liquid nitrogen range is pretty prosaic and widely distributed at this point; and you can afford a lot of redundant sites and techs periodically maintaining the refrigeration with the savings you get by being able to build on earth and deliver parts by truck rather than having to ship to the moon.
Would I want to be responsible for ensuring that a single vault on earth remains viable under all foreseeable scenarios? Obviously not. Hardened against both nuclear armed nation state adversaries and the host country collapsing economically and just cutting the project budget would be a very, very, tall order. Is that how you would implement a backup system on earth? Obviously not. You’d take advantage of the relatively low construction costs(plus the low cost of adding and removing samples) to distribute them relatively widely on the assumption that not everyone will screw it up.
Plus, obviously, there’s the recovery issue: What’s the threat model for a situation where human civilization loses all the wild and captive live populations and all the terrestrial cryo vaults; but is good to just dust off a space program capable of recovering a pretty substantial payload squirreled away in the shadows of a lunar crater?
>What’s the threat model for a situation where human civilization loses all the wild and captive live populations and all the terrestrial cryo vaults; but is good to just dust off a space program capable of recovering a pretty substantial payload squirreled away in the shadows of a lunar crater?
One in which the planets devastation is seen in advance and either an ark of humanity is placed in orbit to await the surfaces return to habitability, or alternatively one in which we have mastered ex utero propagation and a android run repopulation clinic with an extensive human genebank is programmed to hatch, educate, and dispatch a resettlement ship when the time comes.
Human 2.0 genomes sponsored by Gates, Bezos, and Zuckerberg…
Pico Base, as written about by Arthur C Clarke in 3001: The Final Odyssey. Not just for seeds, but for stuff we don’t want fast access to.
Oh god, not another Climate Change doomsday article with no hacks….
Nuf said….
If a disaster happens that end all life then I don’t think we have moonfaring rockets in the aftermath to pick up material for re-seeding.
But the bigger question right now is: Is China or india willing to ship them to the moon in the first place? Maybe we can trick China by putting the seeds on aliexpress and then setting up a postbox on the moon and ordering them with that as a delivery address!