There, they formally laid out their plan for the rescue alliance, beginning by warning that "the most enduring pictures to come back from the Apollo missions were not of astronauts cavorting on the Sea of Tranquillity, nor even of the lunar landscape itself." In 1999, the same year the book came out, Shapiro wrote an essay with Burrows for Ad Astra, an astronomy journal. Shapiro has written a number of books on the origins of life on Earth, as well as "Planetary Dreams: The Quest to Discover Life Beyond Earth," where he unveiled the civilization rescue project. It would be run by people who, through fertility treatments and frozen human eggs and sperm, could serve as a new Adam and Eve in addition to their role as a new Noah.įar from the lunatic fringe, the leaders of the alliance have serious careers: Robert Shapiro, the group's founder, is a professor emeritus and senior research scientist in biochemistry at New York University Ray Erikson runs an aerospace development firm in Boston and has been a NASA committee chairman Steven Wolfe, as a congressional aide, drafted and helped pass the Space Settlement Act of 1988, which mandated that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration plan a shift from space exploration to space colonization, and was executive director of the Congressional Space Caucus William Burrows, an author of several books on space, is the director of the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program at New York University. What kind of feeble doomsday would leave London safe and sound?Ĭue the Alliance to Rescue Civilization, or ARC, a group that advocates a backup for humanity by way of a station on the Moon replete with DNA samples of all life on Earth, as well as a compendium of all human knowledge - the ultimate detached garage for a race of packrats. A global catastrophe - like a collision with an asteroid or a nuclear winter - would have to be rather tame in order not to rattle the test tubes in the various ark-style labs around the world. To a certain group preoccupied with doomsday, these projects are laudable but share a deep flaw: They are Earth- bound. While it has the extra safety of Arctic temperatures, the seed bank is just the latest life-preservation plan to reach reality, joining genetic banks like the Frozen Ark, a British program that is storing DNA samples from endangered species like the scimitar-horned oryx, the Seychelles Frégate beetle and the British field cricket. That is why in June on the island of Svalbard in the Norwegian Arctic, all five Scandinavian prime ministers met to break ground on a $4.8 million "doomsday vault" that will stockpile crop seeds in case of global catastrophe. When the dust settles after World War III, or World War IX, humanity will still want to grow pineapples, rice, coffee and other crops.
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