Can some species that die on Earth be saved in space?

Plants and animals are die at an unprecedented rate on Earth. Some scientists are looking to space for a solution.

The idea is called a lunar biorepository, a facility that maintains and stores plant and animal cells. But instead of on Earth, this would be on the moon.

Why the moon?

“There’s no place on Earth cold enough to do that,” explains Mary Hagedorn, senior research scientist at the Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute.

Hagedorn has spent the past twenty years studying and theorizing modern ways to save coral reefs. She is an expert in cryopreservation, the process of freezing biological materials such as animal cells at a temperature so cold that they can remain frozen yet alive for hundreds of years.

“Let’s imagine that climate change has sadly wiped out 90% of the Great Barrier Reef. In a hundred years we might be able to give them all that diversity back,” says Hagedorn.

Her inspiration is the Seed Vault on Arctic Svalbard in Norway. It is a biorepository where seeds are kept at just under 0 degrees Fahrenheit due to the natural temperature of the earth. permafrost. The low temperature and moisture content in the vault keeps the seeds viable for a long time.

“Svalbard has done a really good job of saying, ‘Okay, we need to save seeds. Everything on earth depends on seeds. And how are we going to do that?’” Hagedorn said.

Hagedorn and her team want to do something similar for animal cells, but they need colder temperatures. At the moon’s poles, where deep craters lie in shadow, temperatures reach as low as minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit or colder.

By preserving these animal skin cells, called fibroblast cells, scientists can convert them into sex cells, thus cloning animals in laboratories.

In addition to endangered and endangered animals Like the African elephant, green sea turtle and big cats, the Smithsonian Institute team proposes that the lunar biorepository initially include a range of animal species that serve different purposes, including:

• Those that change their environment, such as coral, beavers, woodpeckers and earthworms.
• Pollinators that support food production, such as bees, moths and bats.
• Animals that live in extremely hot, cold, or acidic environments, such as monarch butterflies, polar bears, and nematodes.
• Organisms that support the web of life on Earth, such as zooplankton, boreal trees and mosses.

Cryopreserved human cardiac stem cells were also recently sent to the International Space Station.

Challenges in space

As an experiment, the Smithsonian Institute collected ten specimens of the Starry Goby, a fish found in Kane`ohe Bay, Hawaii. The vision is that these cells will be cryo-sealed and tested under space-like conditions on Earth, followed by a test flight on the space station.

How the Smithsonian plans to create cryopreserved cells and test them in space:

Teams from the National Science Foundation’s National Ecological Observatory Network also collect nearly 100,000 animal cell samples from 81 locations each year. NEON’s goal is to expand the types of cells used in cryopreservation to include sperm and eggs, which are found in the ovaries.

While a lunar biorepository could be a promising idea for preserving Earth’s biodiversity, there are challenges to this program.

Researchers said one of the most difficult problems of a lunar biorepository would be radiation exposure of samples. Radiation countermeasures may include antioxidant cocktails, as well as providing physical barriers such as water, lead, or cement to block radiation.

The temperatures on the moon’s surface, which allow freezing, are also a concern.

Certain parts of the moon can reach over 200 degrees Fahrenheit during lunar day, which is equivalent to about 14 days on Earth. The much colder temperatures in the craters of the North and South Poles can make the transport of biomaterials more difficult.

Another challenge is that these areas, known as ‘permanently shaded areas’, contain large amounts of ice, conditions that would make human monitoring extremely difficult.

The long-term effects of microgravity on cells can also pose a problem.

Some say that looking for a solution on the moon should not be the first priority.

“I don’t think this is the right idea right now,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity.

“I think we really need to focus on protecting more of the natural world so that we don’t lose species in the first place,” he said.

A decades-long effort

Hagedorn isn’t the only scientist working to create a biorepository on the moon.

In 2021, researchers at the University of Arizona proposed a concept send an ark filled with 335 million sperm and eggs to the moon.

“They’re engineers,” Hagedorn noted. ‘So there are more biologists who are addressing this. We know how to cryopreserve. We started with the sample. But they have a good feeling for using robots.”

Hagedorn said this is a decades-long effort and developing a lunar biorepository will require collaboration from a range of countries, agencies, cultural groups and other stakeholders.

Greenwald said that while climate change is finally getting the attention it deserves, the extinction crisis that’s exactly what it is.

“Species are the building blocks of ecosystems. They clean our air, they clean our water, they moderate our climate, they recycle nutrients. We should all be very concerned, because the fact that we are losing species at such an accelerated rate actually reflects the decline of the ecosystems on which we ourselves depend,” Greenwald said.