As a species, then, at least for the foreseeable future, "if we're ever going to die, we're going to die," Heppenheimer said. If doomsday came tomorrow, humanity would be in a bit of pickle, to put it mildly.
Genetic sequences, seeds and other biological stocks might also be stored in the ark and tended to by robots.Īll that may sound great, but it's nowhere close to reality.
#Another doomsday vault moon how to
The vault would house hard drives full of information on how to reboot human civilization, including instructions for metal-smelting and crop planting, for example, according to an article that appeared in The Telegraph. Permanent moon, Mars and asteroid colonies have also been detailed, and while they are less far-fetched than futuristic, free-ranging space abodes, such residences remain entirely on the drawing board.Īnother ambitious, yet figuratively more down-to-Earth proposal is to build an underground "doomsday ark" on the moon. Of course, constructing these gargantuan ships would take gobs of time, money and skill, all of which would be lacking in the event of a planetary cataclysm. Inside, a prescribed mix of gases to simulate Earth's atmosphere, as well as tracts of soil and waterways, and so on, would allow for agriculture and a sustainable human livelihood. Systems of external mirrors would reflect sunlight into the vessels. The various proposed designs, from spheres to rings to cylinders, would all rotate to create artificial gravity in parts of their interiors. Nevertheless, a number of space habitats have been proposed over the years as a measured migration into the heavens, rather than escape pods. To guarantee humanity's off-world survival, new sorts of spacecraft pushing the technological and engineering envelope would be needed, and slapping them together in a pinch - especially if society were crumbling - seems like an extremely tall order. a sinking life boat," said Thomas Heppenheimer, an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics who has written books about space colonization and the space shuttle, among other topics. The station is set up for a "permanent" crew of only six, who get swapped out after a few months on board.Īs such, the ISS would not serve well as a spaceborne "fallout shelter" above the apocalyptic fray below. About 300 people (around 200 of the same individuals) have visited it over its 14-year history. Getting people to the ISS is costly and, therefore, rare. The space stations we have created - the Salyuts, Skylab, Mir and the International Space Station (ISS), the only one currently aloft - are fragile things without the altitude boosts that visiting spacecraft give these stations, their orbits decay, and the habitats eventually burn up in Earth's atmosphere (this was the fate of Skylab and Mir, with the latter planned the ISS gets a boost several times annually). That said, humankind has not yet developed the means to live off-Earth for more than a few months at a time without being resupplied with food and water. As theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking put it to Big Think last year, "our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space." Gaining knowledge of how to preserve our civilization down the eons has been a lesser-cited rationale for further advancing human spaceflight abilities.
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