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Lunar Biorepository Proposed For Cryo-Preservation Of Earth Species
How far should we go to preserve Earth's precious biodiversity? Until now, we've only been willing to go to Norway (see Svalbard Seed Vault (aka Doomsday Vault) Gets Upgrades).
Today, we apparently stand read to go to the Moon if necessary.
(Cheesy illustration from The Guardian)
[which I like because it reminds me of my cheesy illustration
for my 2008 story about terminator seeds]
Biodiversity on Earth is increasingly threatened and at risk. Even under the most optimistic models of global climate change, a staggering proportion of Earth's biota will go extinct... There is an urgent need to envision innovative strategies to conserve Earth's biodiversity to protect ecosystems of the future.Cryopreservation technologies provide one such innovative strategy whereby cells can remain frozen but alive for hundreds of years. With increasing success, collections of cryopreserved materials can be thawed to recover DNA, intact cells, and even whole functional organisms. Many institutions globally maintain cryopreserved biological collections... Today, many frozen collections are stored in urban centers, making them even more susceptible to destabilization threats.
In the face of potential catastrophic ecosystem loss, such as coral reefs from climate-related warming, we propose the creation of a lunar biorepository to maintain samples in a cryopreserved state with little human intervention. In 4.5% of the Moon's southern pole, seasonal temperature variation is stable year-round at or below –196° Celsius. Such a biorepository would safeguard biodiversity and act as a hedge against its loss occurring because of natural disasters, climate change, overpopulation, resource depletion, wars, socioeconomic threats, and other causes on Earth... Our goal is to cryopreserve most animal species on Earth.
(Via Safeguarding Earth's biodiversity by creating a lunar biorepository.)
I don't know of an earlier mention of this idea (in science fiction or anywhere, for that matter) than this one in The Ophiuchi Hotline, a 1977 novel by John Varley. He calls it a Life Bank:
There had been a time when wheat, soybeans, potatoes, corn and rice had been the major foods of the human race. Now there was no one alive who had ever seen them.But they existed in the Life Bank, as did virtually every plant and animal that existed on Old Earth.
(Read more about the Life Bank)
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