https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/noahs-spaceship/

There are many existential threats to life on Earth: a global pandemic even more deadly than COVID-19, a runaway greenhouse effect similar to what happened on Venus but with our own finger on the trigger; an impact by a giant asteroid bigger than the one that killed the dinosaurs; explosions of nearby stars in the form of supernovae or gamma-ray bursts; or the inevitable brightening of the sun within a billion years, which would boil all the oceans on Earth.


These catastrophes bring to mind the need to preserve the precious diversity of terrestrial life, in the spirit of the biblical story about Noah’s Ark. An exchange about these threats with a Harvard colleague, Stephen Greenblatt, inspired me to ponder what a modern Noah’s Ark might look like.