GEN-ERIC News

To protect against a nuclear bomb, a plague, a natural disaster, an asteroid collusion or some other doomsday event, scientists are lobbying to have a reserve library of human scientific and cultural achievements built and maintained on the moon. Jim Burke, a retired long-time NASA expert now working at the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, warned that a doomsday asteroid or comet could annihilate global civilization and that something should be done to insure against the wholesale loss of human achievement. Burke suggests a project to create a “lunar biological and historical archive,” which would include samples and a record of human scientific and cultural achievements. The idea for what Burke calls a “space-age Noah’s Ark” is one shared by the Alliance to Rescue Civilization (ARC), which also seeks to include backups of Earth’s biological heritage and diversity in a permanently manned lunar facility.