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The Fiction: Thousands of tardigrades settled on the Moon, after stowing away on a space mission. They mutated due to solar radiation and reproduced. Now they
by airesearcher 6y ago
The Fiction:
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.
- smoyer 6y agoThe truth for me is simpler ... this article, unlike most of the other news I've seen the last two weeks made me smile when I imaged them being freed by the crash. Re-hydration may not be so simple but thanks to the FOTON-M3 mission we do know that live tardigrades can also survive in space. Thriving and reproducing are pretty unlikely though.
- anthony_romeo 6y agoI stopped reading the article at: “Despite the impact, scientists believe that if anything survived the crash intact, it may well have been the tardigrades. The microscopic creatures were sandwiched between micron-thin sheets of nickel and suspended in epoxy, a resin-like preservative that acts like a jelly — potentially enough to cushion their landing” as I realized that I’d been duped by their very affirmative headline
- prvc 6y agoNobody is advocating the position outlined over your "fiction" heading, your "truth" section talks about only about likelihood and details like the total mass of the contaminants are irrelevant figures. As for the "deeper truth" section, why would historians need to be informed of this if they had access to 2020 news stories already? And how would a false (or, worse, true) claim about committing such an act bolster the credibility of other information related to the crash?
- scott-smith_us 6y agoPosted stories get so much more love if you don't mind misleading people in the title
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- seg_lol 6y agoNice try GPT4!
- FerretFred 6y agoYou of course are coming at this from the point of view of a Human that probably believes that we (Humans) are the only recognisable, and allegedly intelligent life-form in the part of the galaxy that we can just about reach. Who's to say that the Tardigrades haven't been planning a rendezvous with their lunar contacts and took advantage of the free ride? Once Mankind start mining minerals on the Moon (as they allegedly intend to), they may meet with some unexpected visitors!
- Recurecur 6y agoEven if dormant tardigrades were delivered to the lunar surface, they wouldn't be viable after a short time. Between being frozen to less than -200F at night, to roasted at 200F during the day, and irradiated with all kinds of hard cosmic radiation, any DNA present would be destroyed fairly quickly. It's surprising to me that tardigrades can survive even a brief exposure to space.