Japan: Tardigrade reproduces after 30 years on ice | Hacker News Reader

Japan: Tardigrade reproduces after 30 years on ice

bbc.com

177 pointstsutomun29 comments

Tardigrades have lived past all the previous mass extinctions, and will live through the next well beyond humans. They're amazing. People give cockroaches too much credit.

> will live through the next well beyond humans.

Why so pessimistic? We're clearly better at survival than tardigrades which can't build space stations or sequence their own DNA...

We have potential they don't have, but they have innate survival traits that we will almost certainly never have. We also haven't had any opportunity to exercise this potential, really. So there is no "clearly" about this. They have survived conditions and epochs that, in the past, would have laid waste to the human species. We'll have to wait until the next extinction level event to determine who is better equipped.

A fancy space station isn't going to do much good if a giant asteroid hits Earth and creates another extinction event (which will happen, it's just a matter of when).

Spotting and deflecting asteroids away from earth is challenging, but feasible with present technology and there are groups working on it. (A feat tardigrades could never hope to accomplish, but they get to freeload off our achievement in this case.)

Dude, lay off the tardigrades. Let's at least deflect one or two asteroids before we start accusing other creatures of freeloading.

Let's just hope the tardigrades and cockroaches don't form an alliance. We'd be doomed.

And that no one send them on mars [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Formars]

I should get into manga. That actually seemed to make an amazing movie. Like the reverse of Prometheus.

No, tardigrades have no lived past all previous mass extinctions; there were mass extinctions that predated tardigrades.

If you downvote my scientific comments, please provide a coherent rebuttal. For example, the Great Oxygenation Event happened 2.3Bya (billion years ago), but tardigrades are animals, and animals date back to only 1Bya (modern phyla are 500Mya), so at least one mass extinction event (the GOE) predated tardigrades.

It comes as nitpicking; it should be obvious to even a small child that events outside something's existence couldn't have affected it.

It would be like if someone said "IBM has survived every major downturn in the economy" and then someone replies "not the Dutch tulip crash of 1637!".

OK at best this appears to be Hacker News comment policing, not legitimate (scientific) downvotes. understood, but disagree.

If you make scientific claims, expect people to be nitpicky. Scientists will take any statement you make literally, and evaluate it without thinking things are "obvious to even a small child". Many children think things are "obvious" but are scientifically wrong, and it's important to include enough context that the statement is both correct, complete, and useful.

Other organisms survived all the major modern extinctions (like tardigrades), but there are other organisms that survived even more.

The last universal common ancestor, from which all extant organisms derive, predates the Great Oxygenation Event. So, there is an organism that has survived all known extinction events. And its descendants survive today.

The cyanobacteria, and microbes that grow deep in the earth's rocky depths are both more likely to survive future extinction events, than are tardigrades.

Is this significantly harder than surviving the freezing process for 1 year? Once frozen, I would have thought most chemical reactions slowed to a negligible pace, making the time they spend frozen irrelevant.

Oxidation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freezer_burn

But that shouldn't be a problem for tardigrades frozen in a block of ice, because they are not in direct contact with air.

I would suspect that some of the oxygen from the water is liberated occasionally.

A quick google search didn't turn up anything, but I'd suspect that water spontaneously liberating oxygen is a very rare occurrence.

Oxygen is in a high oxidation state and once reduced to water is quite stable. In order for oxygen to form from water, you'd need an oxidizer of considerable power (e.g. ozone?).

Perhaps, although oxygen is a quite heavy element, and doesn't jump around in ices as much as hydrogen does.

Yes. Reactions are definitely slower but they're not negligible. Some proteins and chemicals only last a few months at -80°C.

Could you give me an example? I couldn't find many figures on protein half lives.

Is there anything wrong with trying to actively seed the cosmos with these suckers?

They (and the bacteria on their skin) could wipe out native life forms and prevent us from knowing if life ever started truly independently on other planets.

Its still technically a natural process cosmic life isn't dependent on random abiogenesis, in fact it's probably even more interesting than a simple case of biochemistry and luck.

That's what the guy on the last planet asked.

What would they feed on when they land? They need detritus or plants.

could this ultimately lead to the invention of that now familiar sci-fi trope: deep hibernation for long-period space travel?

please, no more tardigrade posts

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