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Tardigrades may now be living on Moon
- macmac 7y agoThey will be waiting for us when we come back.
- dexen 7y agoCue the "accidental panspermia hypothesis" - the real (messy) world variant of panspermia[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia
- newzombie 7y agoIf we find one on the moon, can we know if it originates from earth?
- falsedan 7y agoyes because there is no water, air, or food on the moon for a suitable habitat for tardigrade reproduction
- itronitron 7y agoyes, these tardigrades were sent to the Moon in a rocket
- en-us 7y agoWe can sequence its DNA and see how similar it is to the ones on Earth. If there are living organisms on the moon that share a common ancestor with Earth tardigrades then they diverged a very long time ago and their DNA will reflect that. But if their DNA is identical to those on Earth then we know they came from Earth.
- masklinn 7y agoYes: they necessarily do so. Despite the article's statement, tardigrades are not extremophiles, they can't live in extreme environments. What they can do is exist/survive in hard vacuum and other extreme environment by entering a super-hybernation mode (cryptobiosis). Furthermore while they can survive fairly long spans in extreme environments they're not actually immortal, the FOTON-M3 mission resulted in 32% mortality after 10 days in hard vacuum but protected from UV (the survival rates were much lower for those exposed to UVs).
- Reason077 7y ago> ”That distinction belongs to the DNA and microbes contained in the almost 100 bags of feces and urine left behind by American astronauts during the Apollo lunar landings from 1969-1972.” Gross! Talk about littering and polluting a pristine environment. This is at least as bad as the climbers who leave poop on Everest, where it doesn’t biodegrade. Is it really so hard to bring poop back with you? Were payload restrictions that tight on the return Apollo journeys?
- itronitron 7y agoi wonder if they accounted for the reduction in mass when calculating the return trajectory
- bencollier49 7y agoDifficult to figure out how regular the astronauts would be.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- lawlessone 7y agothey probably had them on a strict diet and knew pretty well.
- Pigo 7y agoTIL if someday we travel to new worlds, outside Sol, and find remnants of sentient life having been there, it will most likely be the poop they left behind.
- maxerickson 7y agoProbably in the sense that they predicted a range of masses that the lander would have to be able to launch with. I doubt they shaved things close enough where a few dozen pounds were make or break though.
- pwinnski 7y ago
- Unknoob 7y agoCan this be flagged as clickbait? They are not living, they are in cryptobiosis. Even though experiments have shown that they can come back to life after a long time in this state, nothing can guarantee that they are actually still alive.
- dekhn 7y agoi agree the article isn't super informative, but is it correct to say that something in cryptobiosis isn't alive? There is almost certainly some tiny amount of remnant metabolism and sensor proteins.