But Who Will Retrieve the Sperm Stored on the Moon

There’s an odd bit of news (loosely defined here) making its way across the internet today: Some guys have devised a way to store sperm on the moon. As the New York Post reports, two mechanical engineers presented their paper, intriguingly named “Lunar Pits and Lava Tubes for a Modern Ark,” at Saturday’s Electrical and Electronics Engineers aerospace conference, laying out a plan B should, I suppose, planet Earth spontaneously combust or warm to the point of being incongruous with complex life.

Per the Post, the engineers suggested storing reproductive cells from 67 animal species, including humans, in a system of pits under the surface of Earth’s rocky satellite, referring to the scheme as a “modern global insurance policy.” This, the Post posits, makes sense because someday no one will be able to live on this wretched planet we call home:

As our planet faces natural disasters, drought, asteroids and the potential for nuclear war — to name a few troubles — scientists say that humans must set their sights on space travel to preserve life as we know it.

A couple of questions come to mind here, the most pressing of which might be: In the event that the entire planet suffers a disaster from which no animal life can remain unscathed, and a brave cadre of space explorers must abandon the rest of the humanity to play Noah on the moon literally stuffed with ova and sperm, who exactly do we think those people are going to be?