Seed banks are mostly self-refreshing. Seed viability decline during storage is measured and modelled for. A sample of seeds is taken out of storage and grown to breed a new batch of seeds after an amount of time based on the rate of decline of that sample.
So a batch that loses 20% viability every 5 years will be regrown to seed after a shorter amount of time than one that loses 2% viability every 5 years.
Source: was a seed germination and dormancy researcher at the Millennium Seed Bank
I'm the context of this comment chain, you're agreeing with the parent comment with a tone of disagreement. Yes, seed banks need periodic attention (whether you call that refreshing or self-refreshing or whatever), so you couldn't stick a bunch of seeds on the moon and just leave them there.
My understanding is you could have a fantastic apple seed, grow it into a fantastic tree with fantastic fruit, but then the next generation grown from its seeds might be nearly inedible. And that all the delicious fruit we eat comes from grafted trees as a result of this.
Also, more generally, lots of trees are huge, so presumably you aren’t growing them in a cave or mine shaft. How is that handled?
Yeah but even if the viability decline was quite slow on the moon, you would still have to refresh _eventually_, at least that's how I understand what you wrote.
Are we going to have robots on the moon doing the refreshing? That would be cool.
There are relatively serious plans for permanent habitation on the moon. Transporting seeds occasionally hopefully won't require launching a lot of mass, but I don't know how many seeds they store.
Ideally yes but scientists have grown crops from single seeds that are thousands of years old so as long as the facilities passively maintain a low temperature, many of them will be viable for a very long time.
