Tardigrades, also known as water bears, are microscopic animals that can survive for years without food or water. And now they’re on the moon!
It was just before midnight on April 11 and everyone at the Israel Aerospace Industries mission control center in Yehud, Israel, had their eyes fixed on two large projector screens. On the left screen was a stream of data being sent back to Earth by Beresheet, its lunar lander, which was about to become the first private spacecraft to land on the moon. The right screen featured a crude animation of Beresheet firing its engines as it prepared for a soft landing in the Sea of Serenity. But only seconds before the scheduled landing, the numbers on the left screen stopped. Mission control had lost contact with the spacecraft, and it crashed into the moon shortly thereafter.
Half a world away, Nova Spivack watched a livestream of Beresheet’s mission control from a conference room in Los Angeles. As the founder of the Arch Mission Foundation, a nonprofit whose goal is to create “a backup of planet Earth,” Spivack had a lot at stake in the Beresheet mission. The spacecraft was carrying the foundation’s first lunar library, a DVD-sized archive containing 30 million pages of information, human DNA samples, and thousands of tardigrades, those microscopic “water bears” that can survive pretty much any environment—including space.
But when the Israelis confirmed Beresheet had been destroyed, Spivack was faced with a distressing question: Did he just smear the toughest animal in the known universe across the surface of the moon?
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The tardigrade appears to already be equipped with his own space suit. They should go quite well on the moon.
I had to re-check to see if this was from the Babylon Bee.
No water, no life. They will desicate. Think mummy.
Surface temp will go to 100C plus in sunlight.
Proteins “cook” at that temperature. Think, eggs on a skillet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denaturation_(biochemistry)
Even in a place sheltered from sunlight, the radiation will get them eventually.
Same goes for any other life with proteins, which is everything, such as bacteria.
bwegher August 10, 2019 at 3:27 am:
No water, no life.
______________________________________________
bwegher – no chance / with water on the moon:
https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-huawei&ei=zTlQXbPLOtuf1fAPx66zwAU&q=Lunar+water&oq=Lunar+water&gs_l=mobile-gws-wiz-serp.
A gene from one water bear species has been shown to protect cultured human cells from X-ray damage:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5034306/
Wrong destination. Put the tardigrades and algae onto a comet and let them freeze-dry and thaw for millennia. Colonise the Oort Cloud!
JF
That Oort to be interesting when it happens.
LMAO
Which suggests this will be first done by the Swedish space agency?
Never heard of them since I left school.
I wonder how long before they evolve into giant Dune style sandworms ?
One really, really, really small step for a tardigrade…
ftw
heh
Obviously this did not really happen. The crash landing was all staged in a studio somewhere. (sarc)
Small and slow.
But what will it eat?
Cheese. of course
A termite went into a bar and asked,”Is the bar tender here?”
What’s the difference between boogers and broccoli?
Kids won’t eat broccoli.
Scientists have discovered a new food that lowers the female sex drive:wedding cake.
Tardigrade stew
One more scare is born.
I understand that Tardigrades are bigger on the inside than on the outside.
We are all Tardigrades now.
The lunar rocks and dust brought back from the moon from the Apollo missions showed that the moon has been repeatedly subject to massive un-attenuated solar flares. And it has been theorized that some of these rise to the level of micro-novas. I would not think any of the experimental specimens will survive even the next Carrington level event.
Chuck Norris however will roll out a mat at Apollo 11’s landing site, and enhance his tan.
Chuck Norris however will roll out a mat at Apollo 11’s landing site, and enhance his tan.
I understand that Chuck died a number of years ago but Death is afraid to tell him.
I think Chuck is still alive, at 79 years old.
I can’t find a list of books in the lunar library.
But what about the librarian?
Ook?
Miriam?
Next they will be playing 76 trombones….
Are you referring to Miriam?
Next they will be playing 76 trombones….
Rename the moon Tardigradia.
funny how they had fits about everything needing to be close to sterile for exoplanet landings(mars) ..but, private interests didnt do so?
and then human dna?
so if there were aliens;-) its handing them an awful lot of info assuming they could work any of it out.
Oh boy … our (mankind’s) first non-terrestrial bio-hazard accident … a notable first!
Be interesting to know what the last IMU data was in those last seconds … perhaps the beginning of a tumble by their lunar lander upon descent …
I know from personal experience that those last few seconds before touchdown on a lunar surface can be hectic. An unexpected slope or bolder can mess things up suddenly, and a rocket engine designed for landing in the lowered gravity doesn’t leave you much for emergency maneuvers.
…what? Kerbal Space Program totally counts as personal experience.
~¿~
It strikes me that background computing CPU time was halted because primary program of CPU demands took precedence.
Sounds like a Windows OS.
They’ll evolve faster in the radiation and before long they’ll be landing on Earth in their own spaceships, demanding tribute.
Or reparations?
Did You hear about the new restaurant that opened up on the moon?
I hear the food is great,but there’s no atmosphere.
What do aliens eat for dessert? Martian-mallows.
Adults reading Dan’s jokes are groan (wo)men.
I believe this restaurant is supplied from that Israeli deli “Cheeses of Nazareth”
Oh Great.
We put a big chunk of human knowledge together and loaded it with a bioweapon. Any aliens who come across the artifacts will start decoding and fall ill due to infection. Because of the alien (to them) biochemistry of the Tardigrades, they will be helpless and will not be able to marshal their medical resources fast enough. A big chunk of their research teams will be lost to the plague before they get things under control.
No doubt, the aliens will consider the use of the bioweapon to be deliberate, and an act of war, because no species can be so stupid as to load an information library with an infectious agent.
They will respond in kind.
How is that going to work out for everybody?
LOL they actually included a copy of Wikipedia in their archive as a sign of human intelligence.
“In the weeks following the Beresheet crash…”
Beresheet is the first Hebrew word in Genesis and means “in the beginning” (God created the heavens and the earth). In this case, “In the beginning (they crashed)”.
You had to know, there would be a Big Bang in there somewhere.
What’s the difference between God and Bill Gates? God doesn’t think he’s Bill Gates.
where does a Beresheet ?
No, on the moon !
English Bibles start with “In the beginning there was the Word. ”
The Hebrew versions reads “In the Beresheet there was the Worm.”
Something seems to have gone wrong in translation.
Two words written as one, pronounced “buh” (in or at) and “ray-sheeth” (beginning or first).
The definite article “ha” isn’t used in biblical Hebrew as often as “the” is in English. In grammar it’s called a “particle definite article”, traditionally considered an actual part of the definite noun.
There’s no indefinite article in biblical Hebrew.
I thought I had read that while the tardigrades were technically “alive” they were in a dormant stage and they were encased in plastic resin.
So what? We’ve taken plenty of microbes to the moon already. Maybe it just so happens that tardigrades have also figured in some space-travel science fiction stories, and this now helps make a media story. Let them eat cake.
For what it’s worth, I reckon they look disturbingly similar to some Dyson vacuum cleaners I have known.
I mourn for the moss piggies.
Nobody is bother to ask the most basic question of all:
“WTF purpose were they transporting tardigrades to the moon?”
We have protocols against doing just such things! They very well may die, but what if they all don’t? We find ‘extremophiles’ is all sorts of ‘uninhabitable’ environments. Now we simply have the first introduction of non-native invasive life forms on a previously uncontaminated environment.
IMHO this was an extremely irresponsible thing to do! And now, we can only hope that this error takes care of itself.
Cosmic radiation will mutate them to giant size, turn them blue and grant amazing powers, like instantaneous, intergalactic travel.
Some think that tiny tardigrades descend from larger, macroscopic ancestors.
Genetics has helped to clarify their relationships. They appear to be the sister phylum to Euarthropoda in the clade Tactopoda, a phylogenetic grouping also supported by morphological traits. The sister phylum to Tactpoda is Onychophora, the velvet worms, in clade Panarthropoda of Superphylum Ecdysozoa of clade Protostomia.
Tardigrades, arthropods and hence ecdysozoans are known from the Cambrian Period (541-485.4 Ma) of the Paleozoic Era of the present Phanerozoic Eon. Protostomes and their (and our) bilaterian ancestors date from the Ediacaran Period (635-541 Ma) of the Neoproterozoic Era of the Proterozoic Eon.
I don’t know why, but “clade” is one of my favorite words (and rhymes with tardigrade). It ought to be used more often, IMO.
I agree.
The tardigrade clade has it made in the shade.
Except that their clade is generally considered a phylum.
This 2011 study switched the phylogenetic positions of velvet worms and water bears, with the former closer to arthropods and the latter as sister group to the arthropod-velvet worm clade. Hence, no clade Tactopoda.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3179045/
Water bears just look more arthropody to me than do velvet worms.
At least the paper agrees with other recent research ruling out a previously proposed close relationship with nematodes.