Doomsday vault on the moon6/30/2023 ![]() Inside the vaults, the seeds would be stored inside cryogenic preservation modules that can provide storage at minus 180 degrees Celsius (minus 292 Fahrenheit) for seeds, and at minus 196 degrees Celsius for stem cells (minus 320 Fahrenheit). Once a suitable location is found, these off-world doomsday vaults can be created, and they will require quite a bit of tech to function, including solar panels on the surface for power needs and elevators to provide access to and from the surface. These are round machines that can be deployed from a lander or a rover to study underground environments using stereo cameras and laser rangefinders. The team calls for these places to be at first surveyed using flying and hopping robots called SphereX - Spherical Rocket Propelled Robots for Extreme Environment Exploration. The paper calls for these lava tubes and caverns to be used as storage locations for seeds, and even cells, not only because they're located on another world, but because that world has the perfect conditions (cold, lack of air, and so on) to ensure the survival of the samples for hundreds of years. The team of undergraduate and graduate students led by University of Arizona’s Jekan Thanga proposed this solution during the IEEE Aerospace Conference back in March – a "modern global insurance policy" needed to ensure the survival of the human species in the face of a global cataclysm. These tubes at times created underground caves, some of them 100 meters (328 feet) in diameter, that could form the perfect location for storing seeds off-world, sheltering Earth’s life samples against solar radiation, meteorites and temperature changes. We’ve known for a while now our planet’s natural satellite has underground lava tubes, created billions of years ago by the then-active lava moving through the rock. And that’s exactly what a team from the University of Arizona is proposing. This is why we should probably start thinking of creating such a doomsday vault on another world. And they’re all in danger, should the cataclysm they’re meant to survive is global in nature, and violent enough to pretty much destroy all we've built on the planet, including the vault. The vault has a capacity of over 4.5 million seed samples, and in June of this year the count of stored seeds was up to over 1 million. There are no animals there, of course, only plant seeds, meaning the food people would need to restart agriculture after a cataclysmic event, or after the disappearance of a certain plant species for one reason or another. It’s the place where much of the world's crop diversity is currently being stored, in the event a disaster, small or great, somehow endangers the world’s food supply. That, we can do, and we’ve already started.īack in 2008, the so-called Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen. ![]() Most of you probably remember the biblical story of Noah, and how he helped save the animal and plant species of the world from a massive flood, by means of a wooden ark and incredible determination. But we are at a stage when we can do something that could ensure the survival of a lucky few in a post-apocalyptic world. We’re not at a stage when we can somehow upload our consciousness in a cloud somewhere, so we can be brought back whenever the danger has passed. We’re not yet at a stage when we can defend the planet against dangerous asteroids (granted, work on this will begin soon). Sadly, even with our current level of technology, we’re probably unable to defend against many of them. ![]() ![]() There are many ways our civilization could end, or at least be drastically changed, and they range from human-made perils to natural ones, born here on Earth or up there in space. ![]()
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