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Space Biotech Science

ESA's Scientist Suggests A Noah's Ark On the Moon 102

Posted by timothy from the cold-crispy-critters dept.
13.7BillionYears writes "Many are familiar with a supermarket tabloid (whose name eludes me) offering ridiculous headlines, one of the most famous being 'Noah's Ark Found on the Moon!' In an ironic twist, that one may yet come to pass. The BBC reports that the European Space Agency's chief scientist, Dr. Bernard Foing, has said that there should be a Noah's Ark on the Moon consisting of a repository for the DNA of every single species of plant and animal, in case the Earth is destroyed by an asteroid or nuclear holocaust. One wonders how you'd go about indexing every life form including undiscovered species and how you'd protect the DNA from radiation."
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ESA's Scientist Suggests A Noah's Ark On the Moon More

ESA's Scientist Suggests A Noah's Ark On the Moon

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  • Ob Biblical (Score:4, Funny)

    by daeley ( 126313 ) * on Wednesday September 08, 2004 @11:51AM (#10190995) Homepage
    One wonders how you'd go about indexing every life form...

    Two-by-two, of course!
  • How about just reference the patterns without the actual molecules. AKA print out a hard copy.

  • It's not the worst idea (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cephyn ( 461066 ) on Wednesday September 08, 2004 @11:57AM (#10191082) Homepage
    It's not that illogical. It's just a little odd. I mean, so we get a bunch of earth DNA up there. So what? Personally I think it makes more sense to populate the moon and mars and beyond with people, instead of just sending DNA. Who's gonna be able to replicate it and recreate the living earth if we're all dead or bombed back into the stone age? Or what if it gets destroyed in the 2112 moon vs. earth war? Seems like more reasons NOT to do it than to do it. And any ET's that happen upon a DNA stash would probably be very wary of bringing it back to life.

    • Re:It's not the worst idea (Score:5, Funny)

      by eingram ( 633624 ) on Wednesday September 08, 2004 @12:11PM (#10191295)
      And any ET's that happen upon a DNA stash would probably be very wary of bringing it back to life.

      Unless they're like us!

      Jurassic Park 4, anyone? Aliens setup a park to show an extinct race, but when the power fails, the extinct race starts climbing over the walls and killing... each other! 4 billion years in the making!

      Of course, they could probably just load the DNA into Random ET Super Computer, hit the "Go" button, and watch it all unfold in a computer simulation with x number of outcomes. Hmm.
    • DNA alone is not enough. If you were just given a bunch of code for some sort of random alien, you couldn't do anything with it. DNA is only one part of the system - you need to preserve information about the other cellular components (and often their positions, folding states, etc, for a given point of time) as well.

      DNA is not life; it is just one particularly complex part of it.

  • Wow!!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by aeakett ( 561176 ) on Wednesday September 08, 2004 @11:59AM (#10191103) Homepage Journal
    This is the ultimate off-site backup!

  • ESA (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Pi_0's don't shower ( 741216 ) <ethan@isp.[ ]thw ... u ['nor' in gap]> on Wednesday September 08, 2004 @11:59AM (#10191113) Homepage Journal
    I wish that they would publicize the things that the ESA does well, such as the upcoming Herschel mission [esa.int], the upcoming Planck space satellite [esa.int] (the successor to WMAP and COBE), etc. Instead all we hear about in the US is a disappointing garbage idea like this (with no scientific merit) and the disaster of the BEAGLE 2. Come on, people. Don't take this seriously (and if you have the power, don't support this) -- this is basically a time capsule. Whatever we do to our Earth, I'm still sure it will provide a better record of life on Earth than whatever we might drop on the moon.
    • I wonder why ESA's projects are often unknown to pretty much everyone. Is NASA better at informing the media on what they're up to? Or is it because so far, NASA has done the coolest things and that's why everyone only cares about NASA? Or is it ESA who doesn't understand the value of informing the public?

      And what about Japan's adventures in space? Apparently they have a sample return mission en route to the asteroid Itokawa. It's highly interesting because it is a sample return and because it's using an

  • Terrestrial sites? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by betelgeuse-4 ( 745816 ) on Wednesday September 08, 2004 @12:00PM (#10191136) Homepage Journal
    Wouldn't a location (or several) underneath the surface of the earth be better. The rock would protect against a lot of radiation (and getting lead down there would be easier than getting it to the moon) and there are places where the digging has already been done. Any event that can destroy a number of sites located around the world would probably also have a serious affect on the moon wouldn't it?
  • We need something like this soon, anyway.

    The next ice age (or whatever you call it when the glaciers are coming, because we've been in an 'ice age' for the past 2-1/2 million years) has been modeled to be in full swing by 2900. Unlike the last one, which lasted a mere 20,000 years, you can bet the Yellowstone supervolcano will go off and deepen this one, and maybe it'll last 100,000 years or more.

    In the next 80-150 years, due to global warming, the carrying capacity of the earth is going to be drastically
    • Sure, but we also need to have a second planet to live on. If our only inhabitable planet is horked, what good is the bucket o' DNA?
      • I think building artificial "planets" will happen a lot sooner than finding another inhabitable planet. If you've got a Sun and an asteroid belt to mine for materials, what more do you need? Build a solid ring of space stations at close to earth's orbit, and it would support several thousand times the carrying capacity of the Earth. Plus, you get built-in redundancy; sort of hard to wipe them all out with anything short of a supernova. In the meantime, yes, storing DNA repositories at the center of some of
        • A supernova is kind of unlikely, but the sun going red giant would be enough to destroy stations at 1AU. Of course, we have about 5 billion years before that, but why leave everything till the last minute?
          • Another possiblity is a large mass screaming through our solar system. I've heard before that it is possible that Pluto was a moon of Uranus and got shot out into a wierd orbit by a passer-by. That also may explain the recurring exinction cycles on Earth. But I don't buy into it much. It still wouldn't be good if something like that passed by Earth.
          • A supernova in our Sun is impossible, but a supernova of a nearby star would do a hell of a lot of damage.

      • Re:Need something like this soon (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        > what good is the bucket o' DNA?

        Really, man. I've got a bucket o' DNA right next to my porn collection. Trust me, it's not doing anybody any good.

    • > ... The next ice age ...
      > ... global warming ...

      Could you be a little less self-contradictory in your disaster scenarios?
    • hear, hear. A comprehensive prediction of earths climate for a minimal span of 100,900 years. Probably from a person not sure if there is clean underwear left for tomorrow.
  • A significantly large Earth-destroying asteroid could be large enough to cause debris to escape our atmosphere and end up hitting Luna. Large enough, it could cause orbital eccentricities such that Luna would spiral in over time.

    Even if we do have some kind of ark, what would be the point, if we don't know that anyone will be along to use the material, or any place to put it?

    The article quotes the scientist saying that we could repopulate the earth after an event of this magnitude, but I don't think he's
    • I agree...if you intend to go to the trouble to archive humanity, you may as well get some separation there. However, I doubt this plan could really be seen as practical. Given the apparent lack of evidence for other life forms, the odds that any given "ark" would ever be brought to life(let alone the strand of human DNA out of the myriad forms of life in the capsule) before being destroyed are extremely slim. Use the resources to help spread humanity itself, making us more resilient as a species. I don't
    • At least Pluto. Such a record wouldn't be Nova proof, it's too close to the sun.
      • Sorry for being redundant (but so is your post - there appears to be many similarly misinformed "astronomers" on /.).

        According to our current understanding of Astrophysics, the Sun will not be going supernova.
        This Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] seems to indicate the sun would need to be >12 solar masses to form a Type II Supernova (with Type 1 only being possible with a companion star).
        This page [nasa.gov] from NASA's website claims the lower limit is 8 solar masses.

        Point is, we don't need to worry about the sun going
        • Interesting. I had not heard that before. Suddenly the sun as a place to dispose of nuclear waste seems a lot more usefull- seeing as how it will be a long, long time before we use 8x the amount of nuclear material as the SUN has!
          • AFAIK, the biggest hurdle to disposing of nuclear waste (or nukular as W would say) is safely launching it. And it would be expensive.

            There is a large enough risk that it could blow up in the atmosphere (same fear that some people have over nuclear powered satellites, but it is much more realistic of a danger) or that it could reach space but reenter earth or some other planet.

            Using something like a space ladder would be great, because if something went wrong, the radiation wouldn't be released in an
            • Either that, or use the HG Wells method (very big gun, purely ballistic beyond that). After all, you only need shielding and the waste itself, no need to launch a bunch of fancy electronics and the rocket motor into the sun. All you need to do is figure out how to reach escape velocity from Earth and fire it in the opposite direction that the Earth is going. Since it will then be (by definition and Newtonian physics) in the same orbit but at a slower speed, the sun's gravity will do the rest, and it will
              • There are a lot of people that don't believe that life exists in any fashion on Venus, but just in case do not want to contaminate it. Also, what if we decide to colonize it one day (it is possible, though unlikely in the next few centuries)? Hate to shoot ourselves in the foot before getting a chance.

                But really, I wish we could just shoot it all into the sun and use nuclear power instead of oil, coal, wood, etc.
                • Why would we want to colonize a planet where the average temperature is 600C and it rains sulfuric acid? We'd have to have some pretty good materials for that one- none of the Russian probes lasted more than an hour. Now I'll agree that it's possible life may exist under those conditions, but why would we care about contaminating a few bacteria that manage to thrive in that atmosphere?

                  Shoot, that's the real keyword isn't it? Can't use a rocket- too damn finicky. But fire it out of a rail gun heading Ea
                  • I was hoping not to keep this off-topic thread going for too long, but....

                    It is believed that by dropping enough limestone, the atmosphere can be broken up. I think it has something to do with reacting with the CO2. With the CO2 absorbed and the clouds dissipated, the temperature would hopefully drop to a much more hospitable range (no more greenhouse effect). The entire process would take a very long time.

                    I have also heard theories about using certain plants/bacteria in place of/in conjunction wit
    • We don't know if anyone would be able to use it, correct, but I know one thing for sure.

      If we don't put it there, then they definatly can't use it.
    • we need self-sufficient colonies far enough away that they're not affected when Sol becomes a red giant and eats all the inner planets

      I was born a thousand years too early/have read too many science fiction books... It would be a dream to go on such a trip... sigh... If the world could just be a little more like Songs of Distant Earth (after they got out there, that is, not while the solar system was going to hell... :)


  • I hope he also suggested a way for growing money on trees.

    Elephants supposedly eat about 400 pounds of food per day. Anyone want to calculate the annual cost of merely keeping a pair of elephants fed? Let alone the initial transport and the construction of their pen?

  • One wonders how you'd go about indexing every life form including undiscovered species...

    Step one: discover all the undiscovered species.

    Step two: index every life form by eye color.

    Simple enough. Pshh, I can't believe I have to lay all this out for you.

  • Simple (Score:2)

    by El ( 94934 )
    "...how you'd protect the DNA from radiation." Uh, try putting it in the moon instead of on the moon. Bury it deep enough, and it should also solve the problem of being hit by space debris.
  • Well, it's not a bad idea...so long as we don't fly it in as we did Genesis this morning...we want to make a soft landing, not make a core sample.
  • One wonders how you'd go about indexing every life form including undiscovered species and how you'd protect the DNA from radiation.

    I think I'll go drink a soda... but how can I drink the molecules that evaporate? or stick to the lining of the can?

    One wonders how you'd go about drinking every drop of soda incuding evaporates and how you'd clean the inside lining.

    You do the best you can, jackass.
    That may be one of the dumbest, most smartass trolls I've seen on /. so they went and made everybody read

    • One wonders how you'd go about indexing every life form including undiscovered species and how you'd protect the DNA from radiation.

      No kidding. Too much coffee or not enough. Oh, I hear lead works pretty well for that radiation thing. (Your Mitochondria May Vary)

  • My guess is.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Klowner ( 145731 ) on Wednesday September 08, 2004 @12:28PM (#10191545) Homepage
    That Dr. Foing was watching the animated film TITAN A.E. while half asleep and upon waking, thought he had some amazingly original idea.

    Think again Docta Foing!!
    (wow that's fun to say out loud)
  • IANAAP (I am not an astro-physicist) but surely anything powerful enough to take the earth out will wreak havoc on the moon too?
  • By Putting it on the Dark Side of the moon.
    • What's with the funky capitalization? Maybe I'm missing out on some kind of joke, but assuming that you're serious, the "dark side" of the moon isn't dark all the time; it still receives light from the sun. It's just the side that doesn't face Earth.

  • Low-cost indexing method (Score:3, Funny)

    by vasqzr ( 619165 ) <vasqzr@@@netscape...net> on Wednesday September 08, 2004 @12:48PM (#10191845)
    Just get a bunch of mosquitos, and a bunch of tree sap...Then we just need someone to extract them in 65 million years!

  • Anna Kournikova & I (Score:4, Funny)

    by DeadBugs ( 546475 ) on Wednesday September 08, 2004 @12:51PM (#10191879) Homepage
    I would like to nominate myself and Anna Kournikova [google.com] as canidates to re-populate the earth. Once funding has been approved the practice sessions can begin.
  • I can one up this ESA guy and suggest terreforming Mars and populating it with all of Earth's species. Where does one sign up to be a professional suggester?
    • No reason not to do both. The thing is with the ark plan, you can do it in a few years assuming you have some database of wet or dry DNA to send up. Hell, you could put one on the moon, one on mars, every world in the solar system either in orbit or on the surface. Even send one on course for another star system. Again, all in just a few years.

      Terraforming Mars will take at least hundreds and probably thousands of years. I'm all for terraforming Mars but you've got to admit, the ark plan has a bit mor
  • IIRC, the lead scientist for the ESA in the 80's, Peter Schilling, already had a similar plan [asklyrics.com] drawn up.

  • How useful is DNA, really? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bastian ( 66383 ) on Wednesday September 08, 2004 @01:25PM (#10192370)
    DNA by itself does not a creature make. You still have to have a cell to put that DNA in, and that cell has to be able to repsond properly to the protiens that that are transcribed from that DNA, and also be able to produce the proper chemical signals to cause the correct parts of that DNA to be transcribed at the right time.

    Until bringing back the Dodo and the Passenger Pigeon becomes feasible, I fail to see how sending DNA from every animal to the moon is any better a way to spend research money than sending a box full of the covers to every O'Reilly book ever publshed tot he moon.
  • ...how you'd protect the DNA from radiation.

    The same way that a human habitat on the moon would be protected. A metric shitload of rock.

  • Remember those stories about finding lunar and martian rocks down in Anartica? Those come by a process called interplanetary transfer.

    When an impact happens on a body, the crash sends debris up, sometimes with enough force to exit the gravitational pull of the planet. Through interplanetary transfer, that debris may land on the Earth, or really anywhere else in the solar system.

    The process also works in reverse, if the Earth was struck by a large meteorite, debris would fly up and exit the Earths gravita


    • If there is a chance that bacteria from Mars can land on the Earth, then there is a chance that bacteria from the Earth could land on Mars. DNA is a little bit of a stretch, but with the scales and timeframs you work with in Astronomy, it is possible.

      Actually, it's the gravitation pull of the Sun that allows material from Mars to reach Earth. For Earth material to reach Mars it would have to travel against the pull of the Sun, which it can't do without propulsion.

      I would think inter-solar transfers w

      • They really dont need acceleration during the transfer, they just need a great enough inital velocity to escape. If its not great enough, your right, theres not much of a chance of it getting out to a further orbit.

        I am not sure if this would have any effect, but what about if its initial orbit was highly elliptical, and it used a type of 'sling-shot' boost off the sun or an inner planet?

      • No, it's not as simple as that. Take, for instance, one of my favorite short stories by Arthur C. Clarke (I conveniently forget the title, but it's about an extraterrestrial, artificial moon of Jupiter). In the story, one group holds the captain of the other group hostage in hope of trading him for a statue of an extraterrestrial - if they didn't get the statue back, they'd throw the captain off the moon and have him fall to Jupiter. The other group calls their bluff, believing they wouldn't kill him. S

  • We need populations, not just genomes (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Chilltowner ( 647305 ) on Wednesday September 08, 2004 @01:40PM (#10192586) Homepage Journal
    It's no good to just throw a sample of DNA up on the moon. We must have some kind of way to represent the genetic diversity within a species. The diversity itself is the mark of a species and its ability to prosper.

    There've been recent articles that indicate that climate change is causing an overall loss in diversity among the world's species. Once the diversity decreases to a certain point, the populations will crash (I've read about computer simulations done on Atlantic salmon populations that bear this out.) In short, simply saving the DNA, either the actual molecules or a printout, will not do anyone any good in the future. Not only will it be impossible to resurrect the species, they future researchers will have only the very limited insight into just one example of a creature that once numbered in the thousands, millions, or billions with the genetic diverity to match.

    The project, conceived this way at least, is doomed to failure. The best way to preserve what we've got is to reduce the threat of mass extinction with proper management of the planet we have now.
  • It would be useless unless it was later discovered by sufficiently intelligent beings.
    And it "they" did discover it, why should they consider us so special as to be worth regeneration?
    For that matter, why should they consider it SAFE to regenerate us?
    "Good riddance!" I say; let them regenerate everything except the primates.

  • Why? (Score:2)

    by dchamp ( 89216 )
    If the earth gets destroyed by an asteroid... it's pretty much a moot point. There's not any place else where all of the plants & animals can survive that we know of, much less feasably use.
    It's very egocentric to think that millions of years later some alien race would want to resurrect the creatures of a planet that was destroyed.

  • Craig Venter (yes, the Craig Venter of Celera/Human Genome fame) is undertaking a mission to do just that - catalog every species on earth's DNA. He's starting with the largely under-explored ocean species.

    Here's the Wired News article about it [wired.com].

  • On the Moon? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hike2 ( 550205 ) on Wednesday September 08, 2004 @03:01PM (#10193699) Homepage
    And the real purpose would be?
    Say the Earth is destroyed or afflicted by one of the things mentioned, then WHO is going to take advantage of that repository?
    Say somehow some people survive. The next question is HOW are they going to use that to rebuild?
    Interesting idea but I think just a *little* bit early for its time

    A
    P.S.: If the Sun goes then that was pointless anyway. I say make it hang-out a nova-safe distance somewhere in space ...

  • Why? (Score:3, Informative)

    by cr0sh ( 43134 ) on Wednesday September 08, 2004 @05:10PM (#10195265) Homepage
    Last week at Burning Man 2004, I spent time listening to a series of talks at John Smart's camp, "Singularity Point", from a variety of speakers, including a couple of talks (one impromptu) by John Smart.

    I found his speaking style engaging and intelligent, and his theories to be enlightening. You each owe it to yourself to read an interview with him [singularitywatch.com], which he gave out copies of to participants in the talks at the camp.

    The interview details his theory on the whys and hows of what has been termed "the coming technological singularity". Transhumanists here will know what I speak of - all others, please look into it - google is your friend.

    One of the ideas presented in the above interview referenced, John Smart lays out the idea that natural disasters do little to impeded evolutionary development, in fact, he contends that such disasters cause leaps in development:

    from the above interview

    "Catastrophes are to be expected, and they accelerate change whenever immune systems learn from them. In my own research, there has never been a catastrophe in known universal history (supernova, KT-meteorite, plague, civilization collapse, nuclear detonation, reactor meltdown, computer virus, 9/11, you name it) that did not function to accelerate the average distributed complexity (ADC) of the computational network in which it was embedded." - John Smart

    The ideas and theory he sets forth in the above interview make a lot of sense. He does, however, always hold that it is a theory, and may be wrong - several times during his talks at Burning Man he was adament in stating this. However, I think his ideas highlight and explain certain domains within the idea of a technological singularity in a logical and consistent manner.

    Please note that I am open to debate on this entire issue. If anyone can offer me detailed analysis or references to papers or writings regarding the unlikelyness or impossibility of a technological singularity occurring, I am all ears, so to speak. I want to hear the other side of the story, from the dissenters. All of it is fascinating, but it is hard to determine what the likelyhood of any of it is if you have only heard one side...

  • um. (Score:2)

    by syukton ( 256348 )
    Something tells me that in the event of a catastrophe, the farthest thing from our minds will be to come together as a people in order to build the requisite spacecraft in order to retrieve the DNA. We'd have better luck with something buried in a mountain; for some reason I think it's more likely for people to pick up shovels and start digging than pick up pens and papers to calculate the proper re-entry vector.

  • Don't laugh... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Embedded Geek ( 532893 ) on Wednesday September 08, 2004 @07:33PM (#10196406) Homepage
    The unicorns thought the original was a foolish idea, too.
  • From the Sci-Fi book _Terraforming Earth_, which is based on this premise.

  • Space and survival: links (Score:3, Informative)

    by colonist ( 781404 ) on Thursday September 09, 2004 @12:52AM (#10198213) Journal

    CNN is also covering the story [cnn.com].

    More information:

    The relationship between space and survival [wikipedia.org] has been expressed by many others [spacequotes.com], such as Carl Sagan [daviddarling.info], Stephen Hawking [telegraph.co.uk], Martin Rees [issues.org], William Burrows [arc-space.org] and Robert Shapiro [edge.org].

  • The CNN article [cnn.com] quotes Dr. Bernard Foing talking about a permanent, manned lunar colony with a tissue/DNA repository:

    We hope to have the first manned mission to the moon by 2020.

    Perhaps five years later it would be possible to establish a permanent lunar base with a closed biosphere where a crew of 10 people could live for 100 days at a time.

    There we could conduct experiments and learn to be independent of Earth by living off the moon's resources: by using solar energy and the minerals from the soil.

  • I can provide large quantities of DNA. If I wait a few days I could probably even build up enough pressure to shoot it to the moon.

    Alternatively, we could just send my bedsheets up there.

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