Building a Lunar Lifeline: The Moon’s Doomsday Vault to Save Humanity

“The crux of our proposal is, to put it bluntly, that once you build it, you don’t have to do anything else,” Parenti says. He points out that although there have been ideas for building storage facilities on the Moon, they all required staff to operate them.

To permanently and passively maintain cryogenic conditions, the team proposes to build a storage facility at the Moon’s south pole. Due to a series of celestial coincidences, the Moon’s south pole is constantly in shadow and the temperature drops to -196 degrees Celsius. In other words, samples can be preserved without the need for humans, simply by using probes and robots.

In theory, this “eternal shadow” would be a perfect candidate for the project, but as Sangha points out, “we don’t even know the basics of this place yet.” Last month, NASA canceled plans to send a probe to explore the Moon’s south pole for the first time, citing technical difficulties. “The irony is,” Sangha says. “It’s probably one of the harshest places in the entire solar system, even though it’s close to Earth.”

But Fitzpatrick is confident that NASA’s evolving lunar exploration roadmap will provide ample opportunities to explore and understand the dark Antarctic region. Later this year, a probe is scheduled to land on a ridge overlooking the shadow of Antarctica. But as NASA explores this region, Sanga points out that it may just prove that operating and surviving the freezing temperatures of the Moon’s south pole is much more difficult than previously thought.

“Working in cryogenic environments is not easy at all,” says Sangha. “The machines will behave strangely. They may freeze, just as they would in space. Even at the moderate temperatures of a vacuum environment, a phenomenon called cold welding can occur.” This is a phenomenon where two metals that come into contact fuse together.

So Sanga proposes a more sensible approach: creating a moonbow inside a lava tube. Scientists studying the planet predict that the Moon’s lava tubes will be very similar to those on Earth, but with much lower temperatures, and that’s what engineers and researchers expect to find there. We are evaluating what is possible and how we should plan for it.

However, similar to Hagedorn’s vision, the Sangha team will still have to work out the budget and schedule. Meanwhile, Sangha predicts that once the project is completed (however many years it will take), the actual construction will take less time and cost less than it would have taken to build the ISS.

Risks posed by climate change to storage

That said, it will no doubt end up costing billions of dollars. If you have that much money, you can expect someone to say that it should be spent on more reliable solutions across the planet. At the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the 2016 floods left the samples unharmed, but confidence in the facility’s ability to protect itself has begun to waver. The facility’s designers admit that the original design did not take into account the possibility of thawing permafrost or extreme weather events. Millions of dollars were spent on preventative measures after the floods.