The Asteroid is an Ark

[StarSquid]

First, what we already know. These are of course legitimate spoilers for the files found in the various Places of Interest, so don't read this if you don't at least know the gist of those and want to avoid being spoiled.

Spoiler

• All the points of interest, and the machinery inside them, were constructed by a company(?) called Gravitas, and were once all part of one building called the Gravitas Facility
• Gravitas was (or is?) a company that seems to invent just about everything, so long as it has relevance to space technology. This includes bioengineered creatures, space hardware, and some basic utilities.
• The duplicants are clones of Gravitas staff, whose DNA was extracted by the security doors. The locations of the originals are unknown.
• Gravitas detected some sort of cataclysmic event in the near future and began preparing for it.

This leads to my theory. The asteroid is deliberately designed as a space ark. Ever wonder why every single critter, plant, and resource serves some potential use? Ever wonder why almost every critter is edible by duplicants? Every plant and critter is genetically engineered to be useful to humanity. For all we know they were also printed by the printing pod.

Other aspects of this:

The printing pod was originally meant to print foods, as we know from one of the entries. The fact that it can no longer do that despite the obvious utility indicates to me that it was reprogrammed to print duplicants only at the last second, or that it was damaged and is stuck on the last possible entry.

The anti-entropy thermo-nullifiers spawn at a very low temperature, and only in cold biomes. This leads me to believe that they were active when the facility was destroyed, likely deliberately.

The asteroid, and indeed all the other asteroids, as well as most of the meteors which strike the asteroid, are fragments of Earth and the moon. I would not be entirely surprised if this whole thing happened because the moon hit earth.

 

TL;DR the asteroid is deliberately designed to keep the duplicants alive for as long as possible.