Washington, Aug 15 : The moon should be developed as a sanctuary for human civilization in case of a cataclysmic cosmic impact, a NASA scientist has said.

Jim Burke, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California said the agency's plan for blueprints to create a permanent lunar outpost by the 2020s should be expanded to include a way to preserve humanity's learning, culture, and technology if the Earth were to be hit by a doomsday asteroid or comet.

He said though an impact of the size that wiped out the dinosaurs hasn't happened since long before the rise of humans, yet scientists have created a consensus that Earth remains vulnerable to a "civilization-crushing collision".

"This calls for the creation of a space age Noah's ark," Burke said.

He said, as of now, scientists are working on a decades-long project to transplant the essentials of humanity onto the moon and eventually Mars.

"The International Space University team is now on a more ambitious mission: to start building a 'lunar biological and historical archive', initially through robotic landings on the moon. Laying the foundation for 'rebuilding the terrestrial Internet, plus an Earth-moon extension of it', which should be a priority," he said.

He said the founders of the group Alliance to Rescue Civilization (ARC) have also agreed that extending the Internet from the Earth to the moon could help avert a technological dark age following 'nuclear war, acts of terrorism, plague, or asteroid collisions'.

But it has also advocated creating a moon-based repository of Earth's life, complete with human-staffed facilities to "preserve backups of scientific and cultural achievements and of the species important to our civilization," said ARC's Robert Shapiro, a biochemist at New York University.

"In the event of a global catastrophe, the ARC facilities will be prepared to reintroduce lost technology, art, history, crops, livestock, and, if necessary, even human beings to the Earth," the National Geographic quoted him as saying.

"The establishment of an ARC sanctuary would for the first time provide a compelling purpose for the colonization of space," he said, adding that ARC was hoping to finance the planned moon outpost into a lunar ark of recovery in part through donations from billionaire philanthropists.

Burke further said that if the international lunar outpost of the 2020s expanded into a colony and then a city, "it might be possible that a whole new phase in civilization might develop - the branching of history into one stream on Earth and another on the moon".

This "dual-world expansion" could be within reach by the end of this century, he said.

"Look at the last century, when we went from the Wright brothers to the Apollo missions-along with man's great expansion of his understanding of the cosmos," Burke added.