Tardigrades outside planet earth

They are popular animals, I think because they appeared in the Cosmos series, by the way, but they have superpowers, they are microscopic animals, but they are animals like us, in fact, in most species there is a sexual difference between males and females, under normal conditions, swimming and feeding, most species of Tardigrades do not live long, they live between 3 to 30 months at most, but they are famous for their superpowers of resistance.

They can withstand levels of radiation that would kill humans in a short time, they withstand the conditions of space, when they dehydrate, that is one of their keys, they form what they call anhydrobiosis, a kind of ball, dry, resistant or a suspended metabolic state, the term tun or barrel state is also used, although it is not very correct.

It is their power of resistance, especially because when they are in the water they are not so resistant, there they can die in many ways, it is when they are in the form of a dry ball, when they are dry, when they really have amazing capabilities. They can live in that state for decades. There are some who say that they can live up to 100 years, but well, it is not very confirmed, scientists have only managed to confirm that they can resurrect, revive in their dry ball state after 30 years.

If we humans could do the same, sleep in that percentage, that is, imagine on average that humans can live up to 90 years and tardigrades, well between 3 to 30 months, in proportion it would be like sleeping 100 years to 10,000 years, the variation is because if we take tardigrades that live 3 months or those that live 30 months, it would not be much more than 10,000 years because the cosmic radiation would damage little by little our DNA, to which we must add that some chemical processes are slowed down by the trick that tardigrades have to protect their DNA and their body, but they are not completely paralyzed.

So 10,000 years would be the maximum, even so, it would be a perfect hibernation to be able to travel, for example, to other stars, even with our current spaceship technology, it could be done perfectly, another detail, the dream of the tardigrade is a perfect dream, that is, if we managed to replicate its "trick" of turning into spores and once properly wet we could revive, we would revive with the age at which we fell asleep, that is, if someone of 20 years He enters that dry ball state, spends 1000 years in a spaceship and then begins a process of reviving with water, with whatever was necessary, he would have 20 biological years, he would not have aged at all.

So it would be the ideal trick to travel through space, although of course, it is obviously not a trick to then return to Earth, the Earth would be very very different if it still exists; I think it is similar to what appeared in the novel The Three-Body Problem, in one of the sorts of the novel Trisolaris, if memory serves.

The question is whether tardigrades, regardless of whether we can one day replicate that process, could colonize space, could colonize Mars or the Moon, because it turns out that in 2019 the Israeli development SpaceIL sent the Beresheet probe to the moon (which means "in the beginning" in Hebrew), and among many other things that traveled on that probe there was a colony of several thousand tardigrades in the shape of a dry ball or tum, unfortunately, the probe could not landed softly on the lunar surface and crashed on April 11, 2019 at about 500 km/h.

Why did they carry tardigrades? They wanted to revive them with a little water and see how they would be able to endure that lunar radiation, do an experiment with them, but in the end that couldn't happen, the ship crashed and the tardigrades survived that impact at 500 km/h, well, most experts believe so, because in fact in laboratory tests here on Earth the tardigrades survive impacts up to 2600 km per hour, much more than the crash of the Israeli probe against the Moon, and apart from that they can survive the radiation they are receiving on the Moon, in that dry ball state, they would need liquid water to be able to revive.

That is why to the question of whether the tardigrades would now be colonizing and expanding on the moon, the answer would be no, although they are alive, in quotes, in a latent state, in a spore state, those thousands of tardigrades do not have liquid water to be able to revive and even if they had reached an area of ​​lunar ice, it would be very strange because there is no ice on the surface of the moon, there is no ice, there is ice under the surface, but suppose it had reached one of those craters hidden in shadow and where It is believed that there is ice on the surface because the sun does not shine and therefore they cannot sublimate, they cannot transform that ice directly into steam, nor could they revive because they need liquid water.

But what would happen if the accident involved tardigrades on Mars and they fell into an area with extremely salty water, which, although it is doubtful that it exists on the surface of today's Mars, there are experts who believe that it could be that there are certain deep areas of Mars on the surface of Mars that are well below the average Martian surface that could have that extremely salty water at times.

Could they revive? Well yes, in those conditions they could revive, they wouldn't like it very much because, don't think that tardigrades like challenges, they like normal warm water, from a normal puddle, but they could revive, but the problem is that they couldn't colonize Mars, not even if they could filter to layers inside the planet where liquid water can exist, they could try, but they wouldn't get very far either because despite their superpowers there is another problem they have, they need liquid water and they also need to eat.

Tardigrades are not like bacteria, plants or algae that can process inorganic matter if they have an energy source, of course, whether solar or chemical; Tardigrades eat other living beings, whether algae or microscopic beings, so on Mars they would starve, but what if humans help them colonize Mars? I'll leave that for another post.

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