In a recent study, a collaborative team of researchers discuss the potential for future lunar settlers to establish a backup data storage system of human activity in the event of a global catastrophe on Earth that could be used to recover human civilization on a post-catastrophe planet. This comes as NASA's Artemis missions plan to send people back to the moon for the first time since 1972, coupled with current global events such as the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and the War in Ukraine, with Russian President Vladimir Putin recently threatening nuclear war. Given the current state of world affairs, how important is it to establish a type of off-world data backup?

"The COVID-19 pandemic taught us how vulnerable our world is to large-scale disasters because of its growing interconnectivity," says Carson Ezell, who is an undergraduate at Harvard University, the Director of Space Futures Initiative, and lead author on the study.