How many different types of critters and flora have existed on this planet since life first appeared some 3.7 billion years ago? I was curious so I googled: number of species in earth’s history. There were scads of hits from conservation organizations, university researchers, independent scientists like biologists and archaeologists, scientific journals, and even Answers in Genesis, a Judeo-Christian Bible-based outfit.
The answer? Well, it’s anywhere from a few million up to one trillion. The thing is, nobody really knows because the fossil record is woefully incomplete. Lands have been buried beneath the geologic substrata thanks to the continuing motion of plate tectonics. Countless sea species fossils lie beneath the silt of the world’s great oceans, well beyond the reach of modern technology. Even estimating the number of species alive on this day is nigh impossible, considering there are places on the globe — the Amazon rainforest, for instance — that haven’t been thoroughly canvassed for the variety of bugs, creepy crawlers, furry guys, birds, dragons, hopping and slithering things, and any other motile, reproducing, consuming and excreting characters that dwell there.
Suffice it to say there’ve been more types of life in the long history of Earth than can be calculated on your smartphone. And that’s not even taking into consideration the very definition of life itself, a concept generally defined as a quality apart from that possessed by things that aren’t alive.
Gee, thanks.
Anyway, I got to thinking about all this after news came last week that a paper published by lead researcher Mary Hagedorn, cryobiologist for the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute is calling for a sort of Noah’s Ark to be built on the moon.
Hagedorn and her research team suggest we humans gather up tissue samples from as many species as exist today on Earth and park them in a deep crater on the moon, safely shielded from the Sun’s heating rays, and preserved as efficiently as if they were stored in cryogenic iceboxes here on Earth.
Cryonic storage vats.
“Our ultimate goal would be to cryopreserve most species on Earth,” Hagedorn says. She and her gang want to do this because global warming threatens a certain swath of life on Earth over the next few decades. Not only that, there exists the off-chance that a massive comet or speeding asteroid could slam into, say, Muncie, Indiana, raising a planet-encircling ash cloud that’d wipe out most life on Earth, even Republicans. And, there’s also the possibility that our dear leaders might at some time within the next few years decide to fling thermonuclear bombs at each other, blotting out the Sun and playing havoc with all our plans for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
It’s estimated that far more than 99 percent of all species that have ever existed in these precincts have gone extinct. That’s over the long history of life on Earth so you needn’t feel guilty for it because you opted to buy that big Cadillac Escalade last year. Extinction, it appears, is a natural and necessary aspect of life.
Life itself, extinction included, is a continuum. We — humans, cats, honeybees, oak trees, cyanobacteria, and Elon Musk — all owe our existence to, it has been surmised, the first microorganisms that awakened in deep sea geothermal vents. Or wherever life on this planet originated, because that genesis remains a topic of debate. Again, who knows?
Species have come and gone like shoe fashions. One leads to the other. Our sisteren and brethren in life are winged, scaled, horned, skeletal and not, red- and blue-blooded, predator and prey, deciduous and coniferous, MAGA and sane. The species that are alive today are but a screenshot from the epic movie that is Life on Earth. To preserve today’s species would be like stashing the 1846 daguerrotype of Lincoln in a time capsule and thinking you’ve salvaged the entirety of the history of the United States.
There was more to it than this.
Parking the tissue of the billions of species extant today in a crater on the moon seems to be the equivalent of allowing whatever the lab technicians in Wuhan are working on in any given day to waft freely out the open window. You might recall that when the six Apollo crews returned to Earth from their lunar explorations, they were sequestered for weeks as a precaution against bringing extraterrestrial germs home. That still seems a prudent way of thinking. And even before each mission, utmost care was taken to preserve the bio-cleanliness of the astronauts and their equipment, lest we taint the moon with our funk.
Transporting the millions and millions of earthly species samples to that crater on the moon is asking for trouble. In a way, it’s a reprise of Manifest Destiny, wherein we see the moon as our divinely-bestowed “property,” just sitting there, waiting for us to exploit it for our whim.
Life isn’t exclusive to this planet. We don’t know for sure yet, but it’s logically laughable to think there’s no life elsewhere in the universe. That’s the premise of Stephen J. Dick’s book, The Biological Universe. Dick posits that the whole raison d’etre of the universe, its endgame, is life. Preserving samples of earthly species seems to be rather narcissistic.
And that’s pretty much the raison d’etre, the endgame, of being human.