Preserving Earth Life

Opened in 2008, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, located on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen far north of the Arctic Circle, is the world's largest store of seeds. It was built as a way to preserve seeds from global catastrophes, and is a backup for the hundreds of other seed vaults around the world, some of which have already been lost due to war and natural disasters.

The modest entrance to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen. The actual vaults are deep within the mountain. The vault holds close to a million samples of seeds.

The seeds are stored in vaults deep in the permafrost, which helps to keep the seeds cold enough for preservation. But despite being built to protect seeds from potential disasters such as climate change, climate change is already threatening the vault itself. The Norwegian government is having to make modifications just a decade after it was built. This is an ominous sign that whatever we do to preserve life and all that we have achieved on our planet (the Arctic World Archive opened nearby in 2017 as a data and knowledge store) it is going to be a losing battle.

We need to think bigger if we are to protect life and our knowledge and achievements from oblivion.

The colder the better is the key to very long term preservation, and natural environments that offer such low temperatures for 'free' are highly abundant within our Solar-System.

Inner Solar-System Vaults

The Moon has areas of permanent shadow at its poles, and a NASA instrument on board India's Chandrayaan-1 probe confirmed the presence of water ice in those regions. Those areas, as well as being ideal locations for human colonies, would make excellent locations for preservation vaults. The close proximity to Earth would make the vaults relatively easy to access if/when Earth's climate causes major problems that require access.

A vault so close to Earth would also be vital if our current civilisation is wiped out by a catastrophic event, such as a nuclear war or an asteroid impact. It could take centuries, even millennia, for a new civilisation to advance to the point where space travel is possible.

On Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, there are also areas on the planet's surface that are in permanent shadow in craters at its north pole. The Messenger probe that orbited Mercury between 2011 and 2015 discovered billions of tonnes of water ice in those areas. It proves that preservation vaults can be built on bodies very close to a star, providing there is no atmosphere to distribute heat to those areas of permanent shadow.

The planet Mercury. Despite being so close to the sun the planet still has a large amount of water ice on its surface. The ice is located in craters in areas of permanent shade. It would be possible to construct preservation vaults that would provide protection for life and knowledge for millions of years.

A vault on Mercury would only prove sensible if sizeable human colonies were to be established there, which is unlikely. Venturing so close to the sun is not something that I predict will happen for humans. Perhaps colonies in the clouds of Venus will be as as near as we will get.

Human colonisation of Mars is almost certain to happen this century. There is abundant ice on Mars, which will be heavily exploited by the colonists to provide water, oxygen and fuel. Those colonists should create preservation vaults as a matter of urgency. It should be one of their top priorities once the essential activities for their survival are established and running smoothly. Areas within the ice mines could be designated for such a purpose.

Outer Solar-System Vaults

There are many large bodies in the Kuiper Belt, such as Eris, Haumea and Makemake, that would be worthy locations for preservation vaults, and there will be hundreds more waiting to be discovered. Those larger bodies are more useful that the millions of small bodies out there, if only because they provide at least a useful level of gravity, even if it is only around 5 percent that of Earth.

The best known example of a large object in that region is Pluto. The mountains and crevasses of that dwarf planet, which can rise over six kilometres in height, are examples of places in the outer Solar-System that would be ideal locations for such vaults.

The surface of the dwarf planet Pluto. The Al-Idrisi mountains shown consist almost entirely of water ice, and the plains are mostly nitrogen ice. With a mean surface temperature of -229 Celcius it would be an ideal place for preserving life and knowledge for many hundreds of millions of years at least.

Even on the surface of Pluto the temperature is low enough to provide an excellent level of preservation, but vaults should still be constructed deep into the ice to protect against meteorites, and eventually from theft. Building inside mountains means access to the vaults can be horizontal, which would ease construction. Several preservation vaults should be constructed, each on a different dwarf planet and on radically different orbits.

Interstellar Vaults

Ultimately the sun will flare up and expand, consuming the inner Solar-System vaults. The outer Solar-System will suffer too, with the extra heat threatening the stability of vaults in that region. A truly long-lasting vault, that could survive for billions of years, should not be in the Solar-System at all.

The interstellar void between stars is the coldest and most benign area in the galaxy. It is not completely empty, with rogue planets and smaller bodies drifting for aeons out there in the frigid darkness. Finding one is not easy, but such a world is an ideal place to build a safe and secure preservation vault (and surprisingly, it would also be suitable for an interstellar human colony).

Instead of hunting for interstellar objects on which to construct the vaults it would be easier to create our own. By redirecting some of the smaller Oort cloud objects away from the Solar-System (or even constructing our own purpose-built station for the vault) we would have easily available bodies on which to preserve whatever we wish. Ideally there should be human colonies nearby.

Although in the Kuiper Belt, Arrokoth (pictured here) is a good example of the kind of small object we can find in the Oort Cloud. At just under 20 kilometres in diameter, a body like this could host a preservation vault and be redirected onto an interstellar course to hide between the stars.

It may sound almost impossible, and undesirable, for a human colony to be located away from the obvious benefits of a star, but it is not so. My 2018 article 'Secret Colonies Between the Stars' explains why not, and gives reasons why such colonies would actually be an essential part of our colonisation efforts, and even on which the ultimate survival of our species could well depend.

Where ever we humans go, from the inner and outer Solar-System to interstellar space and other star-systems, we should construct life and knowledge vaults to preserve as much of what has been achieved on Earth as possible. It should be an essential part of colony building wherever that may be. In billions of years time it will then be possible for our very distant descendants to benefit from our endeavours, even if it is just to know where all that they take for granted actually comes from.

Hopefully they'll be able to enjoy bread just as we do today.

Secret Colonies Beween the Stars

We tend to think of human colonies beyond Earth as being located on planets or moons around stars. The abundant energy resources at such locations certainly make such thinking logical and sensible.

But such locations are also the most visible and desirable. And that makes those locations the most likely places where we may encounter a competing and hostile civilisation.

While we should certainly colonise other star systems, we should also consider colonising deep interstellar space. We should create clandestine colonies; ones that limit contact with the star-bound colonies. Those clandestine colonies would need to be large and self-sustaining, and most importantly  they would need to be 'silent', with no emissions, including light, detectable from even just a single light-year away.

A clandestine interstellar habitat under construction. A rogue asteroid is used to provide the resources required.

Such colonies would be our insurance. They would passively monitor the surrounding human colonies, watching and listening for signs of distress. They would ensure our continuation as a species should our star system colonies suffer natural or unnatural catastrophes.

In an earlier article titled 'Living on Rogue Planets' I explored how life could evolve on planets between the stars, how humans could colonise them and reasons why such planets would be safe from various threats. But finding such worlds would be difficult, and they would be unlikely to be in the right locations. It would be better to create our own rogue worlds in exactly the locations we want, and where they would not drift close to star-systems for millions of years.

Simply put, the clandestine colonies must be located in the right places to be able to remain hidden essentially forever.

But how could such remote colonies be created and sustained?

One possibility would be to create generation starships that would intentionally 'stop' in the void between stars. Such spacecraft would,  of course, need to have very efficient and self-sustaining ecosystems and the means to provide appropriate energy generation. This could be fusion-based, or even antimatter-based. This would provide enough energy to create the light and warmth for growing food to maintain a significant human colony.

Resources would be required for manufacturing replacement parts, new equipment and topping up air and water supplies. Comets from the very outer reaches of star systems (such as the Oort Cloud in our Solar-System) could be redirected to pass close enough to the clandestine colonies to be easily mined.

A comet in the Oort Cloud is moved closer to the clandestine human colony nearby. It's resources will help sustain and grow the colony for centuries or more.

Such redirection would be relatively easy as objects in the Oort Cloud are very loosely bound to the sun due to their vast distance. Those objects are essentially just a nudge away from being truely interstellar.

Of course, the Oort Cloud itself is about one to three light-years from the sun, which puts it in interstellar space. This would enable some interstellar colonies to remain shrouded in darkness and secrecy while having access to a sparse but relatively abundant set of resources.

The Oort Cloud in relation to the rest of the Solar-System and its closest neighbouring star-systems. It would be an ideal location for secret human colonies, with relatively easy to find resources from the mass of comets in that interstellar region.

If such clouds of objects are common around most stars it would make setting up such colonies much easier. It should be an essential component of any interstellar colonisation missions that humans embark upon.

Creating sustainable colonies between the stars will be a formidable task, but it is a crucial one. Those colonies will be our backup, and the skills learned by those surviving (and hopefully flourishing) there will be invaluable as the human species spreads throughout the galaxy and beyond.