Sending a sacred Jewish scroll to the moon could be just the beginning of an apocalypse-proof off-world backup of all culture and life on Earth

Spot the Bible (Image: NASA)

THINK of Earth as a giant supercomputer, with the moon as our backup hard drive. That’s the vision behind plans to use the moon as off-planet storage for the religious, cultural and even genetic trappings of humanity.

The movers and shakers behind this idea initially plan to hitch their wagons to privately funded firms vying to win millions in a Google-backed space flight competition, with the first of those missions scheduled to fly before the end of 2015.

Eventually, commercial moon landers may help carry a diverse library of cultural and biological records to the lunar surface, where they would be preserved in case Earth suffers a pandemic plague, nuclear holocaust or lethal asteroid strike.


The first artefacts to shoot for the moon could be three religious and philosophical texts. The Torah on the Moon project, based in Tel Aviv, Israel, has been courting private firms to deliver a handwritten Jewish scroll, the Sefer Torah, to the lunar surface. If they succeed, later flights will carry Hindu scriptures called the Vedas and the ancient Chinese philosophical work, the I-Ching.

Each document will be housed in a space-ready capsule designed to protect it from harsh radiation and temperature changes on the moon for at least 10,000 years.

“This is an incredible, beautiful project,” says group founder Paul Aouizerate, an entrepreneur and inventor. “These three texts are among Earth’s most ancient documents, created over 3000 years ago. They are significant to billions of people.”

These three texts are among Earth’s most ancient documents. They are significant to billions

Aouizerate says that the mission is one of cultural preservation. But the religious nature of the proposed cargo is likely to ruffle a few feathers.

“The Sefer Torah has unique symbolic value and is nowadays the most sacred object in Judaism,” says Nicholas de Lange, a researcher in Jewish and Hebrew studies at the University of Cambridge. “Such an object is supposed to be treated with extreme respect and care. I find it hard to believe that shooting it into space can fall under this heading.”

To make the dream come true, the Torah on the Moon team had been hoping to send its first capsule up with a lander built by SpaceIL, an Israeli-based entrant in the Google Lunar X Prize. Google is offering $20 million to the first privately funded group to land a robot on the moon, travel 500 metres and send back two videos before the end of 2015.

In all, 18 teams from around the world are competing, including two US firms that were recently awarded partnerships with NASA granting them access to testing labs and scientific expertise. Regardless of who takes home Google’s lunar gold, the Torah on the Moon project will pay to piggyback on a mission that is capable of carrying their capsule.

SpaceIL says it declined to participate in the project. Now it is believed that Torah on the Moon has approached the Spain-based Barcelona Moon Team, an X Prize entrant that is due to launch in the second half of 2015 on a Chinese Long March rocket.

Ed Chester of the Barcelona Moon Team advisory group, says the firm will not comment on any aspect of its mission while delicate negotiations are being ironed out. But last week the European Space Agency’s engineering arm in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, confirmed that it has been commissioned to test the space hardiness of the capsule that will contain the Sefer Torah scroll.

Thermal extremes

The moon has no atmosphere to trap heat, and the surface temperature around the equator rockets to a daytime high of about 123 °C and plunges to -173 °C at night. ESA says the capsule failed to withstand such thermal extremes in early checks and has gone back to the Torah on the Moon team for a redesign.

The Sefer Torah is a handwritten scroll, so Aouizerate hopes to raise an estimated €12 to €15 million in funding by asking believers to sponsor religious scribes to pen each of the document’s 304,805 characters. Different funding models will be developed for the Hindu and Chinese documents.

The texts would join a Bible left on the moon in 1971 by Apollo 15 commander David Scott. The red leather Bible sits on the control console of an Apollo moon buggy (see picture).

At the time, Christian practices by Apollo astronauts enraged atheist activists, who said that religion had no place on federally funded space missions.

The Torah on the Moon project neatly sidesteps that concern, since X Prize contenders are not allowed to accept government funding. The texts should also be the first of many objects sent into space in the name of preservation.

“I don’t think these religions are claiming the moon. It’s about saving our culture, saving the humanities,” says Naveen Jain, CEO of the California-based X Prize hopeful Moon Express.

I don’t think these religions are claiming the moon. It’s about saving our culture, saving the humanities

Jain thinks future projects should find a representative sample of humanity, perhaps a million people, take their DNA and store it on the moon. “So in case of an asteroid strike that wipes us out like the dinosaurs, humanity can be saved.”

Jain’s idea may become a reality: New Scientist has learned that a UK-based venture is quietly developing a mission to store human, animal and plant genomes on the moon – although flaws in this plan are turning up in seed banks on Earth (see “Banked seeds are plants out of time“).

Such off-planet backup missions are proliferating, says Joanne Wheeler, a lawyer specialising in space issues at CMS Cameron McKenna in London. “There are several missions planned to put religious and spiritual icons on the moon and also to preserve some trace of humanity on it,” she says.

As long as the missions are for peaceful purposes there are no particular legal implications, Wheeler says. The UN’s Outer Space Treaty states only that all projects like this should be non-discriminatory, so nobody can argue that a certain religion, or the genomes of a certain race, should not be sent to space.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins says that the moon could even become a “cosmic tombstone” if humans become extinct. “We should be using it to store the best humanity has ever had to offer, like the works of Michelangelo, Beethoven, Schubert and Shakespeare,” he says.

The Torah on the Moon team is expected to announce details of its plans, including which team will fly them to the moon, in the next few months.

Meanwhile, Roger Launius at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC thinks it apt that such space flight projects should be tied to religion, because space flight advocacy itself has many of the hallmarks of a religion. “There is salvation theology, in that they believe the human race will be saved by space flight’s ability to make us a multi-planetary species,” he says. “And we have pilgrimages at gatherings like launches, which are like a euphoric religious experience.”

Banked seeds are plants out of time The race is on to bank Earth’s riches on the moon, from sacred texts to human and plant genomes, in the hope of rejuvenating Earth after a major cataclysm (see main story). But without the chance to adapt to changes in terrestrial climate, will stored genes and seeds become useless relics? Amity Wilczek and Johanna Schmitt at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, examined thale cress seeds that had been banked on Earth for 70 years. They planted different varieties of the cress at sites in Spain, Germany, the UK and Finland, including versions that were native to each region 70 years ago. At every site, they found that thale cress varieties originally from warmer climates grew better than plants grown from native seeds – reflecting changes in climate in the decades since they were collected (PNAS, doi.org/st7). “Seeds originally collected from a particular region may no longer be best suited to the climate of that region in the future,” says Schmitt. She adds that off-planet seed banks are an intriguing idea, although she thinks a climate-change cataclysm is much more likely to happen first. Either way seed banks should save a broad range of genetic diversity within a species to ensure success.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Life’s lunar backup plan”