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.

The Next Mass Extinction Has Begun

There have been five major mass extinction events in Earth's past. During each one more than 70 percent of all species were wiped out.  One of them, the Permian-Triassic event 252 million tears ago, actually killed off about 96 percent of all species.

Most of the events were caused by a significant climate change brought on by a combination of volcanic activity, asteroid impacts, sea level changes and drops in oxygen levels. The most recent mass extinction - the Cretaceous-Paleogene event 66 million years ago - is thought to have been almost entirely due to a massive asteroid strike known as the Chicxulub Impact, on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. It has become the most well-known of all extinction events, primarily because it caused the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. The dust cloud created by the impact reduced global temperatures by several degrees for decades. After that there was a period of rapid warming due the huge increase in carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere. For up to 100,000 years the global temperature was an average of five degrees higher. There was little time for most species to adapt.

An artist's impression of the Chucxulub impact crater a few hundred years after the asteroid hit. The crater is about 150 kilometres in diameter, and up to 20 kilometres deep.

There will be another mass extinction event - a sixth massive reduction in the number of species living on this planet. That extinction event, known as the Holocene extinction, is already under way, and its cause seems to be exclusively linked to human activity.

Humans have been responsible for extinctions for many thousands of years. The mammoth, which had been in decline as a species since the end of the last ice age more than 11,000 years ago, is one of the first examples. It was finally hunted to extinction 5,000 years ago. This was the start of our destruction of our planet's ecosystem.

Over the last century our rapid advance into a global technological civilisation, and our massive population growth, has lead to extremes of habitat destruction, over hunting, pollution and subsequent climate change. Without a drastic change to our activities most species will be extinct within a few centuries. Humans will have caused the fastest and most extreme mass extinction ever known on this planet. And it is more than possible that our own species will be one of those driven to extinction as the ecosystem we rely on collapses.

To survive as a species we need to do two things. And we need to do them now.

1. Halt our Destruction of Earth's Ecosystem

An extreme level of cooperation between the governments of the world's nations is required if we are to stop, or even just slow down, the climate change caused by our activities. And that cooperation needs to start this year. Unfortunately, as always, governments seem preoccupied with political, economic and territorial disputes. Climate change, and its effect on our very survival as a species, seem to be far down the list of priorities.

Radical policies are needed, with developed countries pushing for the complete replacement of fossil fuels with clean energy generation within a decade. Nuclear energy, despite its controversial nature, is very clean compared to coal and gas burning. In fact, nuclear energy generation produces zero emissions, and very little waste due to the density of nuclear fuel. The land required for a 1,000 megawatt nuclear energy generator is only about one square mile, compared to 75 square miles for the equivalent solar power plant. As well as building many more nuclear power stations, solar and wind power generators should, of course, be expanded rapidly, too. This will accelerate the closure of coal and gas power stations.

The massive and ever increasing human population on Earth needs to be ethically controlled. Developing countries in particular need immediate help to remove the need for people to have more than two children. If population growth is not controlled it is predicted that there will be almost ten billion people living on this planet by 2050 (up from 7.6 billion now). The demand on resources is already unsustainable. With such an increase we are condemning billions to starvation.

2. Build Self-Sufficient Colonies Away From Earth

The creation of self-sustaining colonies away from Earth should have started decades ago, but at least there seems to have been some recent minor progress towards such colonies. NASA have brought forward plans to get humans back to the Moon. It will create a sustainable human presence on the Moon by the middle of the next decade, and the Gateway, a space station in orbit around the Moon, will be a staging post for crewed missions to Mars.

NASA's space station orbiting the Moon. Construction is expected to start as early as 2022. It will be used as a staging post for Moon landings, and as a stepping stone to Mars.

While NASA does not seem to have much of a timeline beyond for the crewed missions to Mars (other than 'sometime in the 2030s') the plans for the Moon seem to be quite well defined, and impressively ambitious. The resources of the Moon can and will be used to manufacture the fuel for future missions to Mars.

This relatively sudden new momentum is encouraging, and must continue.

As soon as a permanent settlement is established on the Moon the missions to build one on Mars must begin immediately. No time can be wasted. And as the Mars colony grows in the 2030s there must then be a push to establish colonies further afield, such as on Jupiter's moon, Callisto (which orbits outside of Jupiter's harsh radiation belt - see 'Humans on Callisto within 15 Years'), and on Saturn's moon, Titan. Despite the extreme cold Titan is particularly suitable for a very large human colony - see my article, 'Human Colony on Titan' for more on that subject. In fact, it seems to be one of the best places to create a very long term human presence.

There must also be space-born colonies: vast habitats that do not rely on a planetary body and that can exist in their own independent orbits around stars and in interstellar space. They would obtain all the resources they need from small asteroids and comets, found abundantly for example in the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud.

Will this century be the last time we'll be able to look down on Earth from space? Is the damage to the environment and climate caused by human activity already beyond recovery? If so, our technological civilisation will soon end.

If we do nothing to limit the effects of the current extinction event then we certainly deserve our fate. If our species becomes extinct then at least our destructive activities will cease. Earth will begin a slow recovery and a new climate equilibrium will allow a host of new species to flourish. Over many millions of years the Earth will become a thriving and lush haven for life, at least until another highly intelligent species starts to dominate and abuse its environment.

Is it possible that some of the many smaller spikes of extinction and climate change in Earth's past were caused by a dominant intelligent species that brought about their own demise? We could simply be continuing a natural cycle of events that has already played out on this world and millions of others. That cycle needs to be broken right now, before we doom yet another of Earth's civilisations to oblivion.

Climate Change - The Point of No Return

We are on the verge of rendering our planet uninhabitable, unless drastic action is taken.

Scientists have recently announced, quite alarmingly, that climate change on our planet could soon reach its tipping point. We are only decades away from that moment. It will happen within a generation.

Lowering our carbon dioxide emissions is no longer enough. Carbon dioxide needs to be extracted from the atmosphere. And we need to start doing that now on a large scale. Otherwise, global warming will enter an unstoppable feedback stage, where warming triggers more warming, which triggers even more warming. Such feedbacks include the release of methane due to the thawing of permafrost, loss of snow cover, the melting of Arctic ice, warming seas, and the loss of forests. All of those will reduce our planet's ability to reflect heat and absorb carbon. The number and intensity of forest fires will increase dramatically, releasing huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. This will only magnify the feedback effect even more.

Global warming will result in an increase in the frequency and ferocity of forest fires. Such fires add vast amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

The end result of such warming is not clear, but at best it will significantly limit the areas of the Earth where humans can comfortably survive. At worst it will render the whole planet uninhabitable, water will boil away, and the Earth will suffer the same fate as Venus,

Even the 'best case' scenario will cause massive migrations, and subsequently major wars over dwindling food, water and energy resources. Such wars will only add to the warming feedback. As the desperation of governments increases those with nuclear weapons at their dosposal will eventually use them. Countries such as Israel, India, Pakistan and Iran - all nuclear powers and all located in what will become some of the worst affected regions - will feel compelled to use such weapons as countries to their north attempt to stop the migration of their populations. This will cause tremendous damage to the environment, and render even more areas uninhabitable. And there would be a very high chance that a limited nuclear war would escalate rapidly into a global nuclear conflict.

At that point our current technological civilisation will end, and with it humanity's chances of spreading beyond the Earth to become an interplanetary, and then an interstellar, civilisation. Our ability to preserve our species will have slipped away.

If he climate change wars turn into nuclear conficts they will bring to an end our current technological civilisation. Humans may have a change to develop another advanced civilisation one day, but it is likely to take centuries or even millenia to get back to anything like that which we have achieved today. Without forewarning such a civisation is almost certainly doomed to suffer the same fate as the one before it.

Such a dramatic warming of the atmosphere will cause a rapid rise in sea level, raising it to well over a hundred metres higher than it is at present. In addition to the billions who had already perished in the wars of the previous decades, hundreds of millions more will die. Survivors, who will eventually number just a few tens of million at best, will struggle to live in the few remaining higher altitude lands. Their existence will be basic and medieval. It will be a return to the dark ages. Thousands of years of progress and knowledge will have been lost.

Only then, with the destructive output of our current civilisation at an end, can the climate of Earth have a chance to stabilise. The ice caps will reform and the sea level will reduce. After many centuries flora and fauna will start to recover. Only at that point, humans, if they are not extinct, will have another chance at building a technologically advanced civilisation.

It's unlikely that we can prevent a climate change disaster on our planet, but we can improve on the 'best case' scenario if we start doing three things right now:

1. Preserve Knowledge of our Discoveries and Inventions

We must help survivors in the post-climate change world avoid repeating our calamitous mistakes, and allow them to 'fast-track' through what has taken our current civilisation thousands of years to learn, discover and invent.

A comprehensive record of our achievements (and of our destructive actions, so that mistakes are not repeated), must be preserved in a way that they can understand, and in a way that will last for thousands, even millions, of years. We must investigate how we can provide such knowledge to our distant descendants, and then store it in multiple safe yet easily accessible locations, including locations elsewhere in the Solar-System.

DNA could be the ideal solution to extremely long term information storage

Using paper or digital media to preserve knowledge will only be suitable for a few hundred years or so, but such means should be used initially, as our descendants will be able to understand and use these forms of storage.

But a more radical solution is needed for complex and advanced knowledge that will be useful once any new civilisation progresses to a certain level. Storing information in DNA is one such solution. It's been shown that if the DNA can be kept at sub-zero temperatures the information will maintain its integrity almost indefinitely. DNA information stores would be best located away from Earth, perhaps on the Moon in the permanent darkness of one of the polar craters, and deep within some of the planetary bodies of the outer Solar-System.

2. Work to Avoid or Delay the Climate Change Tipping Point

Even to just delay the tipping point we need to start work now.  The small steps some of us are currently taking are utterly inadequate.

Our civilisation needs to fast track the very widespread use of electric vehicles by banning petrol and diesel engines within a decade. All developed countries need to push this idea hard, and give incentives to developing countries to do the same. And governments need to increase vastly the funding for research into clean energy, and get nuclear fusion working. The generation of electricity by burning coal and oil has to stop on a worldwide scale without delay. Countries like China appear to be increasing the use of fossil fuels for energy generation, which is going to be catastrophic if it is not prevented.

But that alone will not be enough. We need to start undoing the damage we've already done.

Various climate engineering projects should be started immediately. These are possible with current technology. To help reduce global warming solar radiation management needs to be implemented to reduce the sunlight absorbed by the atmosphere. Relatively simple things can be done such as seeding clouds with sea water to brighten them (and therefore reflect more sunlight), and using pale roof colourings and promoting the expansion of polar ice.

Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere using facilities such as this is possible. It can be stored in hard pellets which can be buried deep underground.

We need to start removing some of the excess greenhouse gases that our activities have pumped into the atmosphere. This can be done directly using machinery that would then store the extracted carbon dioxide deep underground, and indirectly by promoting natural processes, such as extensive tree planting to reverse deforestation, and ocean fertilisation to add nutrients to the upper oceans to increase carbon dioxide absorption.

And the growth of our human population needs to be controlled, especially in developing countries. We can no longer support such large increases, which are generally located in regions that can least support it. It should be stabilised as soon as possible, and allowed to reduce naturally to a more sustainable level.

Doing all of the above is the best chance the Earth has of remaining a viable place for humans to live. But it is likely to only buy us some time - nothing more. We need to establish our civilisation elsewhere to properly secure our future.

3. Secure the Survival of Our Civilisation Independent of Earth

There's a significant possibility that the feedback warming will not stop, and if that is the case the Earth could indeed end up in a state similar to that of Venus.

The only way to ensure the continuation of our species beyond that event is to make sure that there are self-sustaining human colonies beyond Earth, on planetary bodies such as the Moon, Mars, and especially on what is looking like the best location: Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.

As well as colonies on planetary bodies there should be very large space habitats constructed throughout the Solar-System that would house tens of thousands. The resources to build such massive facilities can be found in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

We will have to mine asteroids on a large scale to construct the off-world facilities humans will need to live independently from Earth

Extracting those resources would be relatively easy due to the very low gravity wells of the asteroids. The establishment of mining operations there must be an immediate priority. The space habitats could be constructed in the asteroid belt and then maneuvered into their final positions, either into planetary orbits, or into their own independent orbits around the sun.

In parallel to the development of colonies around the Solar-System there needs to be development of interstellar missions with the goal of establishing human colonies around other stars. More and more exo-planets with the potential for colonisation are being discovered all the time, with one, Proxima Centauri B, only 4.3 light years away.

The planet Proxima B, which orbits Proxima Centauri 4.3 light-years from Earth. It's the closest known Earth-like exo-planet, and has huge potential as a suitable destination for our first interstellar colonisation mission.

It would be a mammoth undertaking, and there are incredible engineering challenges to overcome, but investment in the rapid development of the methods and technology required is essential to build such habitats in time. As well as providing immediate funding, it should be the priority of governments to ensure that education systems are geared to maintain a constant supply of highly capable scientists and engineers to make it a success. The long term survival of our species depends on it.

If all three of the above steps - preservation of our knowledge, delaying or avoiding the tipping point, and establishing large self-sustaining human colonies elsewhere in the Solar-System and beyond - are pursued with the resilience, determination and creativity that our species has in abundance, then we will survive.

But we must start now.

Right now.

The Evacuation of Venus

Venus may once have been teeming with life.

The planet, almost the same size and composition as Earth, had oceans and an Earth-like atmosphere for almost two billion years of its history. It's long days, which would have had the day side exposed to the sun for more than two months at a time, would actually have kept the planet cooler by increasing evaporation and rainfall, which would have shielded the land from the strong sunlight.

Venus more than a billion years ago, before climate change rendered the planet uninhabitable

There would have been ideal conditions for life to not only evolve, but thrive. And such conditions could well have lead to the evolution of an intelligent lifeform, and the development of an advanced technological civilisation.

And there appears to be some evidence for that. Studies of the detailed radar maps of the surface beneath the planet's dense shroud of cloud show what look like immense surface structures. They could well be the remains of cities, or the launch facilities that were abandoned after the last inhabitants evacuated their dying world.

There could be many reasons why Venus became uninhabitable. It could have been the result of the activity of the civilisation: war, excessive use of fossil fuels etc. (which if proven could be a very valuable lesson for our civilisation). But it is more likely to have been natural in nature. The sun has become significantly hotter over the last few billion years. This would eventually have evaporated away Venus's oceans, thickening its atmosphere and trapping more and more heat in what would have been a runaway greenhouse effect. It would have been an event that was unstoppable, even for an advanced civilisation. Fortunately such a civilisation would have been well aware of the looming crisis, and would have had thousands of years to prepare for its evacuation. This makes it highly likely that a significant number of inhabitants would have been able to leave and set up colonies elsewhere in the Solar-System, and even beyond.

If the warming of the sun was not enough, there is strong evidence that Venus has suffered high levels of volcanic activity, and on a global scale. In the past the planet has suffered periodic and massive resurfacing events by lava flows. The most recent could have been 500 million years ago. Such an event would destroy most of the evidence of a civilisation, and multiple such events would explain the transformation and thickening of the atmosphere. Combined with the warming of the sun, life on Venus was doomed.

One billion years ago: Venus is finally rendered uninhabitable by volcanic activity and the warming of the sun

Ultimately we may be better off looking for evidence of an ancient technological civilisation on Venus elsewhere in the Solar-System, and most likely in the asteroid belt (see my previous article: 'Pre-Human Technology in the Asteroid Belt'). An advanced civilisation with knowledge of its home planet's impending demise would certainly have tried to escape, and the asteroids would provide a relatively easy and abundant source of materials for habitat and spacecraft construction.

Having said that, we need to explore Venus in much more detail, especially on the surface, and below it. So far only the Russian Venera landers in the 1970s and 80s have successfully returned images and data from the surface of the planet, and they only survived the hellish conditions for a few hours.

Left: an image of the surface of Venus, taken by the Russian lander Venera 13. Right: the lander before launch

A rover is required, one that could survive for months or more. NASA's proposed landsailing rover is the most promising. With recent success in developing electronics that can function under the extreme pressure and heat on Venus's surface, such a mission is looking more and more likely to succeed. And that means it is much more likely to get the funding to go ahead. If it does, it could be launched in about ten years.

NASA's proposed landsailing rover, which would use Venus's dense atmosphere and strong winds to move it across the surface. It's expected that the rover would survive for about fifty days - a great improvement on the static Russian Venera probes that survived for a couple of hours at most.

Amazingly, there may still be life on Venus. The last remnants of the planet's once complex biosphere may be surviving in the clouds as dark streaks of microbial life. Russia and the U.S. are working on a mission that could prove such a theory, which will probably include a solar-powered aircraft that would target the dark streaks and analyse them.

We may discover that any life in the clouds of Venus is related to life on Earth, which would indicate a common ancestor. Perhaps the Venus evacuees migrated to Earth...

Venus is fascinating and brutally hostile place. There is so much to learn, and the confirmation of the existence of a civilisation that once lived there would be astounding. We need to get a sustainable mission down to the planet's surface as soon as possible. What we find could be invaluable and essential to the future of our species.