As Earth becomes a less hospitable place for many species, some scientists are now suggesting an extreme way to safeguard the planet’s miraculous biodiversity: Send species to the Moon.

As research advances our ability to preserve tissue at ultra-low temperatures, the darkest parts of the moon, where temperatures hover below -200°C, offers an ideal freezer. Think of it like the planetary equivalent of having your computer backed up on a remote server.

“Life is precious and, as far as we know, rare in the universe. This biorepository provides another, parallel approach to conserving Earth’s precious biodiversity,” said Mary Hagedorn, a pioneer in cryopreservation at the Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, and lead author of a new paper in BioScience spelling out the idea.

Some of the same qualities that make the Moon such a hostile place for human life also, ironically, makes it an ideal place to serve as a kind of ark for life on Earth. The lack of an atmosphere on the Moon means there is no risk of climate change there. The naturally low temperature in some spots means there’s no need for electric power or other equipment that can go on the fritz. The remoteness would even keep it far from the kinds of social upheaval that might threaten an Earth-based repository.

The vulnerability of Earth-based biological libraries was underscored in 2017 when thawing permafrost threatened to flood the world’s largest collection of seeds, the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, Norway. There, seeds from thousands of plant species including critical food crops are stored deep underground in the Arctic, where the low temperature is supposed to provide a natural refrigerator without the need of outside power.

But even without the threat of global warming, sites like Svalbard aren’t cold enough for animal tissue, which needs to be stored below -196°C to halt biological processes that would eventually degrade cells.

To get to those temperatures on Earth requires a lot of equipment and liquid nitrogen—not exactly a low-tech, fail-safe way to store biological samples for centuries or millenia. But there are places on the Moon where scientists think such temperatures are the norm. That includes deep, shaded craters at the Moon’s poles and underground lava tubes, Hagedorn and her colleagues note.

In their paper, they envision a repository where tissue from most species on Earth would eventually be stored, starting with the most endangered creatures and then expanding to species that fill key ecological niches, including primary producers, pollinators, “engineers” such as termites that transform landscapes, wild relatives of domesticated species, organisms that can survive in extreme environments, and temperate and cold-water fish.

This doesn’t mean entire organisms will be stored in some kind of suspended animation, like so many specimens in a museum. Rather, the scientists propose preserving key cells that can then grow into an animal. One type is a fibroplast, a type of skin cell that, much like a stem cell, can be coaxed into growing into a variety of different kinds of cells.

This stash could serve a number of purposes. It might be tapped to replace species lots in a catastrophe, or as a kind of cache for humans colonizing other planets. “We aren’t saying, ‘What if the Earth fails?’ If the Earth is biologically destroyed this biorepository won’t matter,” Hagedorn said. “This is meant to help offset natural disasters and, potentially, to augment space travel.”

Science is still a long way from hanging a “Vacancy” sign above a frigid lunar crater. Among some of the key unanswered questions are how the Moon’s low gravity might affect these cells, how to protect them from the higher levels of solar radiation and how to organize and govern this cell bank.

The scientists have already had success cryopreserving fibroplasts of the starry goby, a common pinky-length reef fish. The species could provide a ready-made test subject for experiments to design radiation-blocking packaging. Experiments could then graduate to the International Space Station to learn more about the effects of low gravity and test the packages.

So who would pay for and run all of this? They researchers point to the seed bank in Norway as a potential model. It’s a public institution created and funded by the Norwegian government, with an international advisory panel to help direct operations. A lunar facility could include public and private funders and multiple countries.

The number of countries leaving their mark on the Moon has increased in the last few years. NASA’s Artemis program is aimed at developing a more sustained presence there. But this lunar life bank is a long, long way from becoming a reality. The authors describe it as a “decades-long” program that will require extensive collaboration and scientific advances. But this paper could be one of the first steps towards seeing a tiny reef fish—and an entire menagerie – go to the Moon.

Hagedorn, et. al. “Safeguarding Earth’s biodiversity by creating a lunar biorepository.” BioScience. July 31, 2024.

©Anthropocene Magazine (original photo by NASA)