Ultimate 2012 recovery site: the moon

Have you seen the disaster movie "2012"? A friend from Control Risks and I did, and we reluctantly concluded we wouldn't be able to write off the cost of our tickets as a professional development expense.

Spoiler: In the movie, China saves the human race, and all the American political leaders are black people. Selected individuals from many nations climb into giant arks to float to safety when a deluge engulfs the earth. The sun comes out in the happily ever after. Who says the Bible doesn't have something to teach emergency managers?

I even received a press release that tried to draw "lessons" and dignified talking points out of the film's computer-generated calamities.

Then the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced that they'd found water on earth's moon last month --far and away the most significant discovery in outer space in my lifetime-- and the global audience appears to have been asleep in their seats. Have we become so myopic, or so jaded by advancements in technology (many of which resulted from America's exploration of space in the 1960's), that we have lost our sense of wonder?

If I were seriously considering the consequences of the entire planet being flooded, I'd definitely be looking for a recovery site. I wouldn't have considered the moon at any time in the last thousand years because it was purportedly unfit for human habitation. Discovery of water on the surface changes all that.

After fifty years of space exploration , and 40 years since a human first walked on the moon, one might reasonably ask why scientists had never discovered water on the rock closest to our planet. It's because we'd never gone to look in the surface shadows, never sent a probe to the parts that are permanently on the dark side. So in October, NASA purposely crashed a Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) into the Dark Side of the Moon so they could analyze the resulting dust clouds, and boomz! A couple of centuries of science textbooks get sent to re-write.

Earth may seem like a big ol' world to you and me, but seen from outer space, we're riding around on one, tiny single-point-of-failure. Yes, it has 500 million square kilometers of surface area, but only a third of that offers standing or sitting room (on the rest of it, you have to tread water). It's spinning around like a top at a thousand miles an hour with no brakes, hurtling along at 67,000 miles per hour through an endless void that has no air, water or gravity. And there are almost 7 billion passengers on board.

Under the hood, the engine runs at maybe 3,700 degrees Celsius and boils over or erupts in various places--most of them in Asia--as regularly as a leaky radiator. The chassis shakes, rattles and rolls. As far we know, there aren't any replacement parts or similar models like it anywhere.

What could possibly go wrong? Well, earth could be hit by a meteor ("Deep Impact", 1998), an asteroid ("Armageddon", 1998) or a supernova ("Supernova", 2005); it could stop spinning ("The Core", 2003) or run into something ("When Worlds Collide", 1951 and again in 2010), freeze ("The Day After Tomorrow", 2004, by the same director as "2012") or explode ("Magma: Volcanic Disaster", 2006). It could be decimated by disease ("28 Days Later", 2002), be attacked by zombies ("Night of the Living Dead", 1968)--or both at once ("I Am Legend", 2007)! Whew.

I should add that in the movies, many people (particularly the Americans) are armed with weapons (some nuclear), and some of those people are deranged or dangerous. But that's just in the movies, of course.

I'm sorry, it just sounds like a high-risk location to me.

But at least we can fast-track the business impact analysis of planetary failure. Could we all just agree that the financial impact of the loss of the planet looks to be a number somewhere in mid-trillions (except in Vietnamese Dong, in which case, you'd be into the quadrillions)?

There are, of course, advantages and disadvantages to the moon as a recovery site. It may far enough away from our primary site that we can assume that the same disaster won't hit both orbs at once; then again, maybe not. There's no power, water, transport or communication infrastructure on the moon (yet), which will require a pretty big investment, but so far, it's quiet and peaceful. It's big enough to handle a bunch of simultaneous site activations, but the temperature extremes (-233 °C at night to +123 °C during the day) make it hard to decide what to pack. They don't take Visa or American Express on the moon. I hear the food is mostly dehydrated, and you have to bring our own entertainment (do they allow "2001" to be shown on the moon?).

But talk about off-site storage. Priceless.

Of what significance is the discovery of water on the moon to contingency planners? Day-to-day, not much, unless, like the stars of 2012, you're planning for the end of the world. In which case the moon has suddenly become the primary disaster recovery site for life on earth. US$100 million in transportation costs and five-days of travel time to the recovery site looks like a real bargain to me.

What is the RTO for civilization, anyway?

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Nathaniel Forbes

Nathaniel Forbes is the director of Forbes Calamity Prevention, a Singapore-based consulting firm providing business continuity, crisis management and emergency response advice and training to multinational companies, with a focus on companies with offices in Asia. The firm is 10 years old. FCP's current and past clients include Singapore Exchange Ltd, OCBC Bank, AXA Insurance, The Gillette Company, Siemens and ABN Amro Bank. A former President of the Singapore Computer Society’s Business Continuity Group, Nathaniel passed the DRII’s Certified Business Continuity Planner (CBCP) examination in 1997. He has lived, traveled or worked in Asia since 1973.