"When you get to cryogenic temperatures, strange things happen.
"It's like they're locked in place by strings, but invisible strings," Thanga said. Temperatures that cold would likely freeze metal, so the team has introduced a type of floating shelf made of a cryo-cooled superconductor material and powered by quantum levitation using a powerful magnet. For reference, the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine is stored at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit. The seeds must be cooled to minus 292 degrees Fahrenheit, and the stem cells to minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit. The team's proposal for the ark includes solar panels on the moon's surface for electricity, elevator shafts down into the facility and Petri dishes housed in cryogenic preservation modules. A potential system for creating a hospitable atmosphere for life in a lunar vault would essentially be a three-part process: Machines would generate a mix of. "We were a little bit surprised about that." That's over six times more than it took to build the International Space Station, which required 40 rocket launches. The team's model for the underground ark includes solar panels, at least two elevator shafts and cryogenic preservation modules.īased on some "quick, back-of-the-envelope calculations," Thanga said that transporting about 50 samples from each of 6.7 million species - totaling 335 million samples - would take about 250 rocket launches. While the moon is not hospitable to humans, its harsh features "make it a great place to store samples that need to stay very cold and undisturbed for hundreds of years at a time," they said. 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. "Earth is naturally a volatile environment," Thanga, a professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering in the UArizona College of Engineering, said in a press release. University of Arizona researcher Jekan Thanga and a group of his students proposed the concept in a paper presented during the IEEE Aerospace Conference this week. Instead of two of every animal, the solar-powered moon ark would cryogenically store frozen seed, spore, sperm and egg samples from some 6.7 million Earth species. Scientists are pulling inspiration from Noah's Ark in a new lunar proposal that they call a "global insurance policy." They hope to send an ark to the moon, filled with 335 million sperm and egg samples, in case a catastrophe happens on Earth.
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