Tardigrades spilled all over the Moon in 2020
inverse.com
inverse.com
Thousands of tardigrades settled on the Moon, after stowing away on a space mission. They mutated due to solar radiation and reproduced. Now they roam in herds on the Moon, eating all the cheese, and plotting their glorious return to Earth.
The Truth:
There were no living tardigrades likely to be onboard. At best there were some dehydrated tardigrades in the tun state, embedded in epoxy resin, inside a disc containing an archive of humanity (See: www.archimission.org).
The total quantity would have been microscopic in size and the mass would have been far less than 1 gram.
At the time this occurred there were no regulations governing the delivery of such a low mass of non-living organic material to the Moon, which was not a protected location. No planetary protection guidelines were violated due to the extremely low mass and non-living nature of the alleged tardigrades. As there is no liquid water on the Moon, there is no way to rehydrate tardigrades on the Moon, nor could they reproduce on the Moon if there was liquid water there.
The Deeper Truth
The tardigrades were announced in the month of April. The tardigrades might have been a myth constructed as a media "beacon" to mark the location and time of a shipwreck on the Moon for future historians.
It's surprising to me that tardigrades can survive even a brief exposure to space.
But imagine if, in the year 2120, we discover thriving colonies of live bacteria 40 meters below the surface of Mars. Life on another world! It would change everything! But suppose upon further inspection the bacteria turn out to be a species from Earth, stowed away stuck to the treads of the Perseverance rover [1].
Was there life on Mars before we put it there? Was there a unique kind of Martian life, with DNA completely different from ours, that has been forever eaten away by our accidental contamination? We would never know.
For this reason, NASA and the Soviets agreed in 1967 to pursue a policy of Planetary Protection [2] ensuring that no probe or lander contaminates another planet.
[1] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press_kits/mars_2020/launch/mi...
Our priority, our responsibility to the non-space-faring life forms of Earth is to spread them, as much as possible, to as many places as possible. Drop them into Venus, Mars, Europa, onto every passing comet, and as soon as it becomes feasible, into a one way trip to the nearest exoplanets.
It’s bad enough that the universe appears to have no other life in it, we are the only known agents with any chance of changing that, it’s way more important for the next 14 billion years that we try, than that we protect our ability to identify some hypothetical Martian protein chains or amoebae.
Really? How? What is one aspect of life that would change for anyone not in the space exploration industry?
If life originated independently twice in our Solar System it means whole galaxy should be teeming with it.
It doesn't look like it does - so the Great Filter moves from "rise of life" to "rise of complex life", "intelligence", and "technical civilization".
That's very bad news for u,, it dramatically increases the odds that technical civilizations usually destroy themselves soon after they develop.
They die from a high velocity impact with an asteroid. Planet is wiped clean and nothing suggesting life remains.
Maybe nothing. Maybe nanotechnology. Maybe information storage. Maybe photosynthesis. Maybe physics, math. It would almost certainly radically transform biology. One thing is certain: it wouldn't likely have zero effect on human understanding
It would change our science fiction.
Children would learn about it in school from a very young age, or at home in books even younger. They'd grow up knowing Earth life isn't the only life.
Religions would slowly adapt to be more palatable to children who grew up this way, or lose favor among the next generation.
Considering the fantastically great job we did running our own planet, methinks that's probably a good idea.
Humans are an STD: Spaceship Transmitted Disease.
And we're not "running" our planet.
Lumps of rock are not “more healthy” than “lumps of rock with life on”, nor are they “more happy”. And if you want to claim they are capable of experience and that you understand what they are thinking, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Unfortunately because you replied, now I can’t delete it.
If the physical weakness of an exoskeleton scales with the fourth power of gravity then a 16% decrease in gravity would mean a growth factor of 1.5e3.
Moon tardigrades would grow to be three feet long.
I look forward to publishing my research in full at, ahem, the start of April.
I'd say unfortunately.
However if we're talking cosmically, the chaotic crash landing does seem to be more in line with the more natural unpredictable way of the universe. So who am I to judge?
Besides, as the astronauts were unable to prevent getting moondust all over themselves and the spacecraft, it's highly unlikely they didn't spread biologic material all around, and it's all long dead now.
But having said that, I do like to hope we will discover much, much more about our nearest neighbours and who knows? Maybe life is much more versatile than we know it to be now. I never want to see that pursuit muddied or compromised by negligence on our part.
I thought about that, but they're already 99% adapted to the new ecosystem. Also, if a hippo is introduced to the arctic tundra, it will promptly die, not outcompete reindeer.
For NASA they have been using the planetary protection guidelines since the first lunar lander which was the Ranger mission [3]. Every NASA mission that goes to another planet is required to undergo sterilization using the "Dry Heat Microbial Reduction"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Space_Research#Pl...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_2#Payload
[3] https://sma.nasa.gov/sma-disciplines/planetary-protection#
Edit: Spelling
Saying, "It is immoral to risk destroying non-Earth life," would not be enough. One argument is a sort of recursive argument that humans are the best hope for Earth life in the long term, they are also the best hope for solar system life in general. All solar system life is equally doomed—albeit at potentially longer timescales than Earth life.
They are animals, vastly larger than bacteria that require a diet of plants and even smaller animals to survive.
Edit: plants not planets.
But then again, astronauts have been there, and the practices that were used were not (could not be) completely sterile. Still, this is probably a bit worse.
If humanity became space-fairing earlier, perhaps we could save some of them. We're probably committing more alien genocide by delaying space travel than we ever would through contamination.
In the context of space and time in the universe delaying things by a century or two is like delaying something in our life by a blink of an eye.
And therefore our species leaving the planet really implies leaving our solar system. And I’m hard pressed to see that possibility defined by a couple of centuries. So we better make our planet work for a very long time.
Maybe there are some things we can do that provide high ROI, but my inclination is that building bases and having humans basically live on the moon is going to require giving up its sterility.
Starfleet colonized quite a few planets without existing intelligent life.
We should do everything we can to spread our eggs into other baskets.
We're far more adaptable than dinosaurs.
It’s possible some small groups of humans could survive that, if they were survivalist types with bunkers and years of food, but it would be dicey.
(it's a stretch, of course.)