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."

Comments

Work on this project has already started.

[spin2cool]

Craig Venter (yes, the Craig Venter of Celera/Human Genome fame) is undertaking a mission to do just that - catalog every species on earth's DNA. He's starting with the largely under-explored ocean species.

Here's the Wired News article about it.