Folks, have you thanked the moon lately?
The large, cratered orb — weighing in at some 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds — serves us greatly. Its potent gravity stabilizes Earth’s wobble, so we don’t spin chaotically over time (like on Mars), an unpleasant reality that would ignite climate chaos.
Yet beyond ensuring our planet is livable, creating tides, and appearing as a magnificent celestial object, scientists have proposed a novel idea for the moon: As wild species are increasingly threatened by a quintuple whammy of habitat destruction, exploitation, invasive species takeovers, pollution, and relentless climate change, they want to capitalize on extremely frigid lunar environs to naturally cryopreserve animal cells — a difficult thing to artificially sustain on our world.
“Such a biorepository would safeguard biodiversity and act as a hedge against its loss occurring because of natural disasters, climate change, overpopulation, resource depletion, wars, socioeconomic threats, and other causes on Earth,” the researchers, which include Mary Hagedorn, a senior research scientist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, wrote in the journal BioScience.
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