This biotech startup wants to transform its DNA into a vault on the moon

The crazy idea: a new biotech and space company wants to build a pyramid on the moon to store the DNA of all the plants and creatures of the Earth, including yours. The craziest idea: after all, it may not be so crazy.

The LifeShip startup, based in San Francisco, is the work of the engineer and entrepreneur Ben Haldeman. Haldeman's idea is to give anyone who wants the opportunity to send their genetic code to the moon, with the help of a DNA kit containing $ 99 stamps. These cumulative DNA samples will be assembled over the next two years, combined with other life-based codes in a giant archive, incorporated into a polymer that he describes as "the only one in the world." "synthetic amber" and then projected into space.

A Landing Page for the LifeShip website cites Maximus Decimus Meridius, the character played by Russell Crowe in gladiator"What we do in life resonates in eternity". There is also a button "Sign up now!" Who promises to "book [your] place on the moon. "

"The biggest DNA products so far have been ancestry services; let people look at their family tree and their origins, "Haldeman told Digital Trends. "I think it's a whole new product around the future of your DNA. The future comes with a sense of astonishment. "

The idea is, basically, an upgrade of a time capsule of the space age. Instead of holding a video of your primary class and a copy of today's diary, it's a DNA record of life on Earth as it exists today. And rather than being buried in a field, it will be placed on the celestial neighbor of our planet.

"We are building a monument on the moon that people from around the world will be able to watch and see a piece of themselves in the night sky," Haldeman said. They can look up and see a symbol of all life on Earth. Each of our species, each of us as a human, has a part of the great story of [our planet] in their genetic code. "

The trip to LifeShip

Ben Haldeman comes to LifeShip with an impressive experience. For his MSc at Berkeley University, where he studied mechanical engineering and product design, Haldeman developed optical instruments to find amino acids in Mars soil. After that, he worked on a project to build telescopes to search for new planets and new star systems that may or may not support life. Then we joined Planet, a company that operates large fleets of networked terrestrial imagery satellites. "I was starting to feel more and more that my work was not just about people in space, not robots and technology in space," he said. "It was about how life expands."

In December 2018, Haldeman took a vacation. He went to Guatemala for a holiday on foot, with a particularly memorable hike around Lake Atitlán, a vast expanse of water in the Sierra Madre, surrounded by volcanoes. For some reason, Haldeman began to think of building biospheres, "great, living bubbles." These closed systems – with their self-regulated and reduced versions of global ecological systems – have been appealing to scientists for over a century. They are, for biologists, geologists and others interested in the natural world, what is a model urban landscape for us: perfect replicas of a sprawling chaotic system, ordered by miniaturization.

Haldeman, however, had an extremely complex twist. He wanted to build his biospheres in space. Only he knew that he could not. The idea, certainly with the current levels of technology, was absurd. So he started reducing his idea to make it workable. "I had the feeling and the feeling of" how does the Earth want to go to the outside? He explained. "How does Gaia want to reproduce? I wondered how you could do it in the smallest possible way. "

This is how the idea of ​​LifeShip was born. Instead of physically transporting all species in space, like a science fiction Noah, it would instead take traces of it in the form of DNA. "There are already many extraordinary seed banks and archives on Earth," said Haldeman. "Humanity sees the value of preserving this genetic information in the long run. What we are really doing is building the ultimate archive away from the original source. "

Part of the decision to host these archives off the planet is due to its concerns about what will happen to our planet in the decades to come. "I think it's more about saving for an unknown future and giving a gift to our descendants," he said. "If we get to the point of sending that beyond the solar system, it's also a gift for other living things. This really becomes the record of a pretty amazing planet we have here on Earth. "

While the moon may seem a bit distant as an archive (though, conversely, perhaps not far enough if an Earth's extinction event actually occurs), Haldeman sees that changing. At least, in terms of humanity's ability to access it.

"Really regular access to the moon will come in the next two years," he said. If LifeShip became a reality in itself, his company plans several trips to the Moon, each time by depositing a new series of documents to add to the DNA library.

Countdown to launch

So, when does Haldeman expect the first human DNA to go to the stars? To paraphrase Ozymandias, the antagonist of guardians, it's already arrived. Well, to a certain extent, that's it. In March, a SpaceX rocket launched an Israeli spacecraft. He carried about 30 million analogue and digital archive pages of human history on board the Arch Mission lunar library in the form of a small stack of nickel discs. It also contained something else: a drop of epoxy resin containing 100 million cells of humans and various organisms.

Unfortunately, the SpaceIL lander Beresheet crashed on the lunar surface just before landing on the Moon. However, as Israeli hopes for a successful lunar landing could be wiped out, the LG payload would have survived. (And, like that, twice as many humans as ever walked on the moon landed there.)

Haldeman plans to launch his series of DNA test kits for home-based consumers next month. A Kickstarter fundraiser is also planned for later in the year, possibly in conjunction with a series of venture financing. Haldeman said LifeShip would spend the next two years collecting its first batch of DNA, with the goal of depositing its payload on the moon in the year 2021. If insects and plants sequences DNA resulting from it should last for millions of years. It's been a long time since the first LifeShip customers were forgotten.

Oh, and what about the pyramid? This is unlikely to be part of the first mission. But it's absolutely planned for the future. "A pyramid is a globally recognized symbol that has had significance in all kinds of cultures and periods of human history," he said. "I think that even if we could put a little one on the moon and connect all our DNA … it would be a real monument to the Earth and to humanity. It could be a pretty powerful symbol. "

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