The costs of launchers is getting low enough that we can reasonably imagine the establishment of a lunar base well within NASA’s spaceflight budget.

With the discovery of ices on the lunar poles, astronauts could provide their own life-support indefinitely (water, oxygen, food, and fertilizer). While living in a sheltered habitat, they then immediately proceed to establish other basic processes to step-wise become increasingly independent of supplies from Earth (e.g. producing their own metals and glass).

Given the increasing independence of the small colony, one begins to consider if additional steps could be taken to achieve a fully independent small colony to serve as a backup for the human species should a catastrophe destroy humanity (e.g. a large asteroid or our own self-replicating technology).

We wouldn’t want just for humans to survive, but that other species could eventually be reestablished as well. If species could be stored in their frozen single cell form, millions of individual organisms could be delivered to the Moon in each 5,000 kg payload delivery.

But this leads to some interesting questions:

1) We cannot save all species. There are just too many of them. So, which should we choose in order to have a broad representation of the biosphere?

2) In what biologic form should the frozen specimen be so that they can be most easily revived? Bacteria & protozoa — frozen. Fungi — spores. Plants — seeds. But what about birds, mammals, etc? We can freeze embryos, but how do we get the adult mother to gestate them?

3) How could we eventually establish Minimum Viable Populations? (say 1,000 individuals per species).

It seems to me that these questions could form the basis for interesting biology studies. The more these questions are studied, looking for plausible solutions, the more interest there would be for establishing actual terrestrial and lunar preserves for the biosphere.

Now, if you click on the BioPreserver link on this website, you will learn that the Frozen Ark is doing something rather similar to what is suggested above. However, they focus only on endangered species and not a representation of the whole biosphere. Despite significant affiliations, the rate at which they are securing different species is insufficient to imagine backing up the biosphere in any reasonable number of years.

So please comment on the above ideas and suggest how it could be advanced.

It would be more appropriate to consider the magnetic field of the neutron star such that cosmic rays are always deflected by the Lorentz force from such stars, or perhaps some solar wind type effect may do similar (though this has at least partly been argued against in safety assurance already). The alternative (and infinitely more plausible) explanation of course is that micro black holes (TeV scale, at least) do not exist, though dozens of papers on arXiv and other journals argue otherwise (and CERN scientists willfully anticipate the creation of approx. 10,000 of these over the course of LHC experiemnts). The slightly less plausible explanation is that Hawking Radiation Theory is actually effective, with the only other explanation being that MBH accretion models are flawed. Otherwise we would not have stable neutron stars in the Universe… they would all be black holes by now.

I thought I’d kick off a thread of discussion here — if anyone has the appetite to participate — on discussion of ‘The Neutron Star Paradox’, as you will see from my previous post on the flux of (hypothetical) stable micro black holes, this is quite central to LHC safety assurance.

Prompted by Prof O.E. Rossler’s recent publication of his Telemach theorem — but not dependant on it, this paper looks at the relative flux (km per km) of micro black holes through the Earth — if created by the LHC — when compared to the flux caused by cosmic ray collisions in nature. It endorses Otto’s viewpoint that if Telemach were correct, then safety assurance is solely based on the disputed neutron star & white dwarf safety arguments.

The focus of the paper however is that of relative flux — and a derived micro black hole flux ratio of almost a one million fold increase relative to that generated by natural cosmic ray collisions with the Earth. Furthermore, the alternative prospect to accretion in the case of such an elevated flux is planetary heating through Hawking Radiation — as explored by other research — a scenario in which the neutron star safety argument is irrelevant - as their survival does not prove/disprove anything in this outcome. Feedback as always welcome.

This derivation of flux is distinct from previous CERN statements which made direct comparisons to rates of collisions (a 10,000 fold increase during operations) -  as I consider the flux of products as a function of kilometres of matter traversed — a more relevant metric.