Building the Lunar Ark

About 75,000 years ago, the Toba supervolcanic eruption nearly wiped out Homo sapiens sapiens. More recently, tens of millions died in Europe during the bubonic plague. And stockpiles of nuclear weapons around the globe are sufficient to destroy Earth several times over. Advancements in cryogenics — the instantaneous freezing of individual plant, animal and fungi cells — have already enabled the transportation of mice sperm and eggs to the International Space Station for a three-year trip before coming back to Earth. Could cryogenics facilitate a “backup” of Earth’s biodiversity that we could store safely in lava tubes on the Moon and retrieve in the event of extinction or catastrophe — or even use to start settlements off-world?

Jekan Thanga has a background in aerospace engineering from the University of Toronto. At MDA Space Missions, he worked on Canadarm, Canadarm 2, and the DARPA Orbital Express missions. Jekan obtained his Ph.D. in space robotics at the UTIAS and did his postdoc at MIT's Field and Space Robotics Laboratory (FSRL). Jekan Thanga is an Associate Professor and heads the Space and Terrestrial Robotic Exploration (SpaceTREx) Laboratory at the University of Arizona. Jekan and his students have co-authored more than 200 technical publications and were winners of the Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award in 2016 for proposing the SunCube FemtoSat. His team won a Best Paper Presentation Award at AMOS 2019 for the Early Warning Constellation to Detect Incoming Meteor Threats. In 2024, he co-authored a Best Paper on using inflatable rovers to explore lunar and Martian lava tubes at the Earth and Space Conference.