The Alliance to Rescue Civilization

ARC, despite it’s obvious Biblical wordplay, is a serious and welcome endeavor. This Lunar Noah concept can best be summed up as a library and biological vault or repository located on the moon, in case of terran apocalypse. It will be an archive to store the record and potential of life on earth, should life on earth cease to exist for some reason.

Life After Earth: Imagining Survival Beyond This Terra Firma.

President Bush has already proposed a Moon base. “He just needs to be told what it’s good for,” Dr. Shapiro said. Dr. 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.

In 1999, the same year the book came out, Dr. Shapiro wrote an essay with Mr. Burrows for Ad Astra, an astronomy journal. 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.”

“They were the haunting views of Earth, seen for the first time not as a boundless and resilient colossus of land and water,” they continued, “but as a startlingly vulnerable lifeboat precariously plying a vast and dangerous sea: a ‘blue marble’ in a black void.” A conversation shortly after the essay was published, Dr. Shapiro recalled, resounded with the earnest imagination of science fiction drama:

Dr. Shapiro: “We’ve got to use space to protect humanity!”

Mr. Burrows: “By God! Yes!”

And there you have. Finally a great idea from science fiction that even the doomsdayers of the Great Apocaplyptic Know-Nothing can agree with, since it appeals to their constant yearning for the violent End of All Life.

But this isn’t the marriage of science and religion. There is a vital difference in their viewpoints.

“But I’m not here to predict doomsday; I’m here for sanity,” Dr. Shapiro said. “When we’ve gained what we’ve gained, we should fight to keep it.

“And, worst-case scenario, if it’s all for nothing, we’ll have a nice museum.”

Ahhhh. Sane pragmatism and logic. Got to love those.

Finally here is something that evokes Noah’s Ark that all of us can believe in. Of course, I’m just waiting to see how long it will take Terra Prime to set up shop in the ARC and sneer down their simian noses at all the alien contaminations on earth.