Apart from being many things — from an object of poetic fascination to a source of nightlight, a metaphor for anything beautiful or a possible launchpad for onward space travel — our moon could be readying itself for an entirely out-of-the-world use.
Remember Svalbard, the island 2,000 km north of Norway, which has a vault that holds 1.3 million seeds from all corners of the world? The natural cryogenic conditions at just 650 km South of the North Pole would preserve the seeds and hence crop diversity.
Now a group of American scientists have suggested in a paper that the moon could be the Svalbard in space, holding cryopreserved cells of endangered animal species. Their idea is to put several cryopreserved (therefore, alive and can be revived and cloned) cells in a special box and it into the shadowed regions of the moon, where the sun never shines. They are asking the US space agency, NASA, to do a mock flight of a box in an upcoming moon mission.
Cryopreservation could call for constant temperatures of minus 196o C, which on earth would cost the moon. What better way to preserve species than in a biorepository in the secluded lunar wilderness? A term in Sanskrit, generally used for a benediction is ‘aa chandraarkam’, meaning ‘until the moon and the sun remain’. The box of species cells could live aa chandraarkam if the American scientists have their way.