Stories

The Bible has a lot of weird stories - terra-forming, cities destroyed from above by fire and brimstone, sons of god impregnating human women which produces a super-race, heroes going up into heaven, wheels in the sky, a power holding together atoms and the universe, and, my favorite, the destruction of a planet by environmental disaster and the escape of all the biological information needed to seed the new world in a ship.

As a thought exercise, let's assume there is a kernel of very ancient history deep in the tale of Noah and his Ark, passed by oral tradition from generation to generation.  People changed the story while retelling it, modifying it to fit the primitive understanding of superstitious people.

Almost every culture around the globe has a deluge story.

Here are the basic details as I see them.

Water destroys life on the planet.  Humans store people, animals, and plants that existed before the deluge in a vessel.  The vessel floated above the destruction.  The humans found land and repopulated the planet.

Now, let's look at today and into the future.

Someday, Mankind will probably need to leave this planet to survive as a species.  This will not be a mass exodus but the movement of a small population of individuals.  It would be more efficient to transport genetic material.  They will have to take the essentials of life, food, and shelter with them.

We will require a target planet - a body in the Goldilocks Zone, close enough to reach in a reasonable amount of time.  What's reasonable?  That depends on technology.  Still, the hurdles for that technology are tremendous.  The closest habitable planets are centuries away  It is doubtful that we will ever be able to store humans for centuries or breed them along the way, but it is likely that, soon, we will be able to grow them, building them.  The protection of genetic material from cosmic forces is another concern. s may be the most difficult task.

We're a civilization that builds throw-away machines and technology, not things that will last centuries.

A more realistic scenario is to build an O'Neill Habitat somewhere in the Solar System where humans can wait out a disaster until the Earth heals.  Picture an Ark floating in Earth's orbit while the waters recede, plants grow, the rainforests take over farmland, the animals go unhunted, and the seas replenish themselves.

Here's my scenario.

We realized that life on our planet is dying.  The North American Habitat initiative has been planning for this inevitability, building a cylinder in high Earth orbit, lovingly called The Ark from the old stories.  Generations have lived there, waiting for the Earth to recover from mankind's abuses.  The inhabitants send Drones down every 40 years to monitor the recovery.  Once conditions are right, mankind returns to begin again.

Far-fetched?  Perhaps it has happened before.  Will we get it right the third time around?