Slashdot Mirror
ESA's Scientist Suggests A Noah's Ark On the Moon
13.7BillionYears writes "Many are familiar with a supermarket tabloid (whose name eludes me) offering ridiculous headlines, one of the most famous being 'Noah's Ark Found on the Moon!' In an ironic twist, that one may yet come to pass. The BBC reports that the European Space Agency's chief scientist, Dr. Bernard Foing, has said that there should be a Noah's Ark on the Moon consisting of a repository for the DNA of every single species of plant and animal, in case the Earth is destroyed by an asteroid or nuclear holocaust. One wonders how you'd go about indexing every life form including undiscovered species and how you'd protect the DNA from radiation."
It's not that illogical. It's just a little odd. I mean, so we get a bunch of earth DNA up there. So what? Personally I think it makes more sense to populate the moon and mars and beyond with people, instead of just sending DNA. Who's gonna be able to replicate it and recreate the living earth if we're all dead or bombed back into the stone age? Or what if it gets destroyed in the 2112 moon vs. earth war? Seems like more reasons NOT to do it than to do it. And any ET's that happen upon a DNA stash would probably be very wary of bringing it back to life.
Moo.
DNA by itself does not a creature make. You still have to have a cell to put that DNA in, and that cell has to be able to repsond properly to the protiens that that are transcribed from that DNA, and also be able to produce the proper chemical signals to cause the correct parts of that DNA to be transcribed at the right time.
Until bringing back the Dodo and the Passenger Pigeon becomes feasible, I fail to see how sending DNA from every animal to the moon is any better a way to spend research money than sending a box full of the covers to every O'Reilly book ever publshed tot he moon.
It's no good to just throw a sample of DNA up on the moon. We must have some kind of way to represent the genetic diversity within a species. The diversity itself is the mark of a species and its ability to prosper.
There've been recent articles that indicate that climate change is causing an overall loss in diversity among the world's species. Once the diversity decreases to a certain point, the populations will crash (I've read about computer simulations done on Atlantic salmon populations that bear this out.) In short, simply saving the DNA, either the actual molecules or a printout, will not do anyone any good in the future. Not only will it be impossible to resurrect the species, they future researchers will have only the very limited insight into just one example of a creature that once numbered in the thousands, millions, or billions with the genetic diverity to match.
The project, conceived this way at least, is doomed to failure. The best way to preserve what we've got is to reduce the threat of mass extinction with proper management of the planet we have now.