Always have a backup plan. Some people take this axiom to the highest level and develop backup plans for life themselves. The Svalbard Seedbank is one such backup plan. It is located in an ice cave in Norway and is home to hundreds of thousands of seed samples to help conserve the biodiversity that is currently arranged on Earth. Ironically, when the worst models of sea level rise due to climate change are discovered, the seedbank itself is inundated by the sea and its precious cargo is lost. Now a team led by a professor at the University of Arizona (UA) has proposed a much more radical idea: the same type of ark, but much further away from a possible catastrophic human failure – on the moon.
The concept of such a “moon ark” was developed by Dr. Jekan Thanga and his team in the UA’s Aerospace and Engineering Department recently presented at a meeting of the IEEE Aerospace Conference. Instead of just holding plant seeds, the ark would also contain the precursors for higher functioning life such as eggs and sperm. And all of this biodiversity would be in one of the most stable places in the solar system – in lava tubes on the moon.
Youtube video detailing the Ark concept
Photo credit: Diaz-Florez et al
Scientists discovered a series of around 200 lava tubes in 2013. With a diameter of approximately 100 m, these lava tubes are the largest than most underground tunnels on earth today. And above all, they are extremely stable. Research has shown that they have remained largely untouched by radiation, meteorite impacts, tectonic movements, earthquakes, or other disruptive events over the past three to four billion years.
In addition to the passive environment, the lava tubes have another advantage: They are extremely cold. Preserving the mass amount of biological material would benefit immensely from the cryogenic temperatures, and the moon’s subsurface would already receive some kind of ark, at least in part, on the way there, starting at around -25 ° C. That is still a long way from -196C where stem cells (a suggested component of the ark) must be kept, but at least it’s part of the way to get there.
Concept of the layout of a potential moon ark.
Photo credit: Jekan Thanga
Operating at such low temperatures is actually one of the toughest challenges facing the Ark project. Machines would fail at temperatures where metal could be cold welded together, rendering any storage system inoperable.
However, the UA research team spent a lot of time thinking about the thermal modeling for the project, realizing that they could take advantage of the cold temperatures in ways that would not be possible elsewhere. You could use the principle of superconductivity.
UT video on stage tubes
Superconductors, at least the most common modern ones, operate at temperatures around the cryogenic point required to maintain the biologics in the ark. They also have the nice quality of being able to float when exposed to a magnetic field. The use of superconductors in a transport system would eliminate most of the difficulties in moving around in such cold temperatures.
Transport mechanics are obviously not the only difficulty facing such a mission. However, one possible difficulty is not as severe as the team initially thought. Typically, the start-up cost is the biggest cost of any ambitious mission. It would still be the case for the Ark, but the total number of launches required to obtain a sample of each biologic that would be needed to rebuild the entire earth’s ecosphere would only be about 250.
Images of open lava tubes on the moon. These could turn out to be potential locations for an ark.
Photo credit: NASA / LRO
Admittedly, this is still an order of magnitude more than the most ambitious space project to date – the ISS, which required around 40 launches to build. Given the extra efforts companies like NASA and SpaceX are making to get to the Moon and Mars, 250 launches doesn’t seem entirely prohibitive for a project that could potentially protect all of Earth’s biodiversity for billions of years.
Obviously, there are still many hurdles to overcome before taking a proposed Ark project seriously. Part of the goal of science, however, is to come up with and propose crazy ideas that could have a real future impact on the benefit (or at least protect) of humanity and life in general. While it would be a long time before an ark like the one Dr. Thanga has suggested, at all considered for a mission, ideas like his are what makes the space exploration community so interesting.
Learn more:
UA engineers propose solar-powered lunar arks as a “modern global insurance policy”
UT – Why lava tubes should be our top exploration priority in other worlds
LiveScience scientists want to store DNA from 6.7 million species on the moon just in case
Popular Mechanics – Scientists plan to build Noah’s Ark on the moon
Main image: side view of the proposed Ark concept
Photo credit: Jekan Thanga
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