The Earth's biodiversity is at risk, and scientists want to do something about by taking advantage of the Moon.
The ESA lunar base, showing its location within the Shackleton Crater at the lunar south pole. New research proposes building a repository at one of the lunar poles to safeguard Earth's biodiversity. Credit: SOM/ESAWe’ve risen to prominence on a world that’s positively “rippling with life,” as Carl Sagan described it. The more we study our planet, the more we find life eking out an existence in the most unlikely of places.
Camus and Vonnegut are both dead, so it’s up to living scientists to prepare for the odious task of preventing a catastrophic reduction in Earth’s biodiversity. They’re taking it seriously. Their proposal is to build a biorepository on the Moon that can hold “prioritized taxa of live cryopreserved samples.” Not only would the biorepository protect Earth’s precious, wondrous biodiversity, but it would also serve space exploration and terraforming.
showed similar success. These efforts were both aimed at preserving Earth’s coral biodiversity. The scientific community is clearly concerned, and momentum is building. This shaded relief image shows the Moon’s Shackleton Crater, a 21-km-wide crater permanently shadowed crater near the lunar south pole. The crater’s interior structure is shown in false colour based on data from NASA’s LRO probe. Like other craters in the region, Shackleton’s floor is in perpetual darkness, and the temperature is extremely low. Image Credit: NASA
This list from the research shows what samples would be included initially in the Lunar Biorepository. Image Credit: Hagedorn et al. 2024.
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