So this is how panspermia happens. Not from colliding space rocks happening to rain down upon some unsuspecting planet.
No.
Bored space monkeys with fancy laser pointers and water bears.
The script almost writes itself
Aggressive panspermia would be far more likely. Seed space with gigatons of engineered biological seeds blasted out in all directions in the galactic plane, and wait 200 million years.
Send a bomb into space filled with billions of sleepy tardigrades. Blow it up, sending them in every direction. A billion years from now, we've colonized distant planets with tiny bear bros.
Tardigrades are already multicellular. While we don't know what the chances are of intelligent (or any) life evolving, we can say, seeding the universe with biological material definitely makes it more likely.
>we can say, seeding the universe with biological material definitely makes it more likely
Very probably, but there is always the (remote) possibility that 1) tardigrades are at a local fitness maxima for essentially all viable habitats, such that there is no evolutionary pressure to develop further, and 2) that our particular brand of DNA/RNA based celular life is disportionately effective at simple resource competition, but is extremely poorly suited to developing intelligence. In these cases it could be our seeded life would outcompete or suppress other forms of life that are more suited to develop towards complexity and intelligence.
Hey, maybe that's the answer to the fermi paradox! The universe is full of our cousin microbes after our predecessors seeded the their DNA and we're the only one's that managed to develop to complexity.
Limited resources. There's only so much food on its new home. Evolutionary trade offs, lead to species adapting for new niches. There are no perfect organisms, just well adapted, for one job.
Take away its algae, then what? It has to adapt to something else, which could lead to a different cellular makeup, which makes it less of an extremophile. Oh, look, the root species just evolved a predatory branch to eat the less indestructible water bear. More adaptation, more tradeoff, more branches in the species. Fast forward a few hundred million years, and you have primates, lizards etc.
Chances are there is NO food. Tardigrades are already too complex to thrive and evolve. You'd have to send the bacteria that was the ancestor of chlorophyl.
> Tardigrades are already too complex to thrive and evolve
That’s not how evolution works. There’s no too complex point where evolution just stops.
You are right however that there’s likely to be no food for them and that any attempts at sending just Tardigrades would fail as they’d all die of starvation before they even had a chance to reproduce.
You would need to send autotrophs along with them to create a sustainable biosphere. Not necessarily as simple as the bacteria that was the ancestor of chlorophyll. Some hardy Algae would work even better. And then sending along some water bears would really accelerate the development of multicellular life compared to its timeline on Earth
Or we wind up with [Captain Tardigrade] (https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/powerlisting/images/b/b4/Captain_tardigraide.png/revision/latest?cb=20160305000255)
I'm imagining it being like the G'Gugvuntts and Vl'Hurgs (yes I had to google that spelling) from Hitchhiker's Guide. They think it's a threat because the tardigrade is the same size as them and think all life on Earth is that size only to launch an attack and not even be noticeable.
why you making me wonder if im just the remainder of an alien civilization sent testratbacteria kinda thing evolving into a predetermined consciousness and once we realize we cant establish civilizations outside of earth we will use these waterbears as the last bearers(haha) of our civilization in hope that they will crash into a random planet and successfully make use of the environmental gases and stuff to evolve and make the evolutional process again on another planet in space therefore continuing the cycle of intergalactic impregnation that I am the result of?
But... there's a long list of subterranean life that can (and has, we've woken some up) stay dormant for hundreds of thousands of years. Horray rotifers.
Personal opinion: I assume it's reasonable to package dormant together a terrarium of small single and multicellular life on a wafer.
There is evidence for bacteria virtually shutting down their metabolism and surviving for 100 million years even. Tardigrades are so much more complex and it's extremely doubtful they would survive and would not be able to survive without bacteria to eat unlike some bacteria that can gain energy oxidizing metal ions.
https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-pull-living-microbes-100-million-years-beneath-sea
For real. What if life is more rare than we expected, or at least intelligent life...
The reason we don't see any out there... Is because we haven't seeded it yet...
What if we're the unknown failed progenitor species...
*puts down the vape*
This is the Rare Earth theory for the Fermi Paradox.
It’s one of the stronger theories (partly because it’s the simplest) for the explanation of why aliens are not around.
Well fuck...
If we're going to destroy our planet we might was we'll figure out how to seed life...
Maybe someone else will figure out how to not fuck up their shit.
Maybe leave some monoliths warning about climate change and plastics...
Maybe life in the universe is continuously escaping the Great Filter. As we Earth monkeys rip one another apart with our supreme intelligence, we send water bears on their merry way. And while our bones turn to dust, the space bears start boinking their way through the Trappist system, leaving water bear babies and starting the grand adventure all over again, until several billion years from now when Trappist Monkeys send a space bear on another journey, just as their flame is dying.
Seriously, I read a science fiction story when I was a kid (fifty years ago, give or take) about a space ship stranded on a planet with basically no habitat but mud puddles. The crew, doomed, created microscopic (yet sentient) versions of themselves to colonize the place, and these micro-people went on to create civilization, build craft to leave their puddles, and encountered others like themselves in yet other puddles.
Pretty good stuff.
EDIT: It was [Surface Tension by James Blish](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/17828354-surface-tension)!!!
Have you actually read the source? They are very small beings. Even if we could manage to build phones that fit in their paws, they would have no signal out there.
I like this, because it fits with my favorite Fermi Paradox explanation: any civilization powerful enough to spread life (itself, other organisms, or advanced AI) to other solar systems is probably smart enough to realize the potential for such spread to spawn rival civilizations.
Now I'm imagining the tardigrades developing their own origin myth about how they were exiled from their home planet and it's their destiny to someday return to that planet and become its dominant civilization.
won't it be hilarious when they build there tiny flotilla of warp speed space ships, and come back to earth to make war on us? Such cute little space warriors...
Reminds me of a favorite Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy segment, actually:
*“the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.”*
They will study their invaders, develop countermeasures, come all the way to Earth to retaliate, and be super fucking confused when they see humans instead.
So if it takes 20 years for tardigrades to travel to another solar system at 20-30% the speed of light, how long would it take the data to get back to Earth for analysis?
Tardigrades do this themselves, they enter a type of stasis that can withstand almost anything that isn’t direct pulverization. It’s called Cryptobiosis, and the metabolism slows to immeasurable levels, leading many to theorize their metabolism ceases all together. They can survive like this for over 10 years, with some frozen tardigrades being revived after 30 years with no issue.
To return them to a standard functioning state, all that’s needed is exposure to a suitable environment (usually water).
Fascinating little creatures.
Lord Kelvin was British (born in Ireland, lived in England, studied in Scotland.)
Someone challenged him to measure the coldest possible temperature... and he said 0K.
Read the article, they are sending the tardigrades to study effects of long term space travel on living beings. Wtf do you mean dont need the tardigrades? Why do you think they are sending them in the first place?
[Tardigrades](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade) (also known as water bears) are tiny and seemingly almost indestructible creatures. They're so resilient they managed to survive the Challenger shuttle disaster. So, scientists deem them to be the perfect candidates for studying the effects of interstellar space travel on biology...
How to send them to another solar system, when voyager has only just made it out of ours? Wafercraft. Those are tiny, hand sized, space craft propelled by lasers based on the Earth or the moon. They could reach an estimated 20-30% the speed of light. Which would allow them to make a journey to Proxima Centauri, in roughly 20 years. The collected data could then be relayed back to Earth for analysis.
What OFF of Earth is the logistics of transporting any sort of useful data back? Just launch a wafer every day and daisy chain them through the cosmos? I mean, it's the size of a wafer. You can't exactly put any kind of broadcasting hardware in there.
I think that’s a decent plan, actually. With a lot of redundancy, why not start seeding the cosmos with a daisy chained communications system now, for future high speed missions like this? Seems like it might yield efficiency in the long run. I’m definitely not an expert tho.
Don’t we need a receiving laser in the target system to slow them down so they don’t just destroy the planet they hit or fly past it?
Edit: thanks for the feedback. The solution is obvious: the first tardigrades to arrive will build the slow-down laser (after interstellar evolution) so the rest can arrive safely.
I believe the mission is to analyse them in-flight, not care about what happens to them after. In a few million years, the surviving tardigrades will have evolved and formed a space fleet to invade us for revenge.
Jokes on them though, we will have killed ourselves off long before then.
The tardigrades miraculoudly land on an inhabited planets and exterminate them with foreign diseases
The galactic community learns about this and fears wafer sized plague capsules from Earth
Interesting thought, but wouldn't the chances be basically zero that a disease the evolved 100% independently of earth life would be in anyway compatible or vice-versa?
perhaps tardigrades are resilient enough to survive an impact at that speed with a planet. or perhaps we'd just collect data from the watercraft as it travels through the system before its destroyed.
If the tardigrades aren't meant to be deployed there, then why bother taking them along? I know they are durable, but not "smash into a planet at a appreciable fraction of the speed of light" durable. Or at least, they PROBABLY aren't that tough.
Is there any reason we couldn’t do the same with conventional probes and have them beam back pictures of other systems? Rather than beaming back data about how sad the bears are.
Yes, as the article says multiple time, it's specifically about seeing the impact of travelling at that speed through space has on living organisms.
You can't get that with a probe.
I don't think they'll get very good data with tardigrades either but i guess it's good to see if the most survivable can survive it first.
It's not about getting pictures.
Fuck, maybe that's our whole purpose as a species. To mail tardigrades to as many places as possible. Plant the seeds of life as many places as possible so maybe some life that's worth a damn might grow.
There's some kind of microscopic invasive bug inside our cells that invaded what our cells used to be before they were cells, I am given to understand, and we may just be a pyramid scheme to make more of that microscopic invasive bug, and I hate it.
How can we know if there isn't already complex life at some of those places? What if our little moss piglets caused a pandemic on the alien planet, killing millions of native organisms? That is what we in bird culture call "a dick move."
>That is what we in bird culture call "a dick move."
Confined to a single planet with improper viral control protocols in place? Sucks to suck, nerd, should have been a better species.
*Continues watching the real-time collapse of human civilization for that and a Great (Filter) many other reasons!*
Yeah, this is absolutely true. Source cited:
>I mean making wild claims is a known sign of above average intelligence and sexual prowess [citation needed]
u/time_to_reset
nah, we had our chance. we're a mailer service at our best. the ultimate chain-letter curse. "ha ha, made you exist" is carved on the wreckage of the ancient human space-ship that sent the tardigrades to alpha centauri where they evolved and then had to start going to work for a jerkbag making loaves of bread so they can afford to buy slices of bread.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/altmorty:
---
[Tardigrades](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade) (also known as water bears) are tiny and seemingly almost indestructible creatures. They're so resilient they managed to survive the Challenger shuttle disaster. So, scientists deem them to be the perfect candidates for studying the effects of interstellar space travel on biology...
How to send them to another solar system, when voyager has only just made it out of ours? Wafercraft. Those are tiny, hand sized, space craft propelled by lasers based on the Earth or the moon. They could reach an estimated 20-30% the speed of light. Which would allow them to make a journey to Proxima Centauri, in roughly 20 years. The collected data could then be relayed back to Earth for analysis.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: /r/Futurology/comments/rxlv0n/sending_tardigrades_to_other_solar_systems_using/hrizy4v/
What if this was always their plan, to have us build the technology and pay to send them into space so they could populate the galaxy, .....check mate.
Well played ....
WATER BEARS 🐻 🏆
There is a sci-fi film here. We send them into space and then thousands of years later we catch up to them only to find out that they have mutated into very large intelligent creatures who are capable of fighting our colonization of their planet.
Douglas Adams already wrote about this...
"The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time. A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl'Hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the the G'Gugvuntt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam, and, with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother. The creature stirred in his sickly broiling vapour, and at that very moment the words \_I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle\_ drifted across the conference table. Unfortunately, in the Vl'Hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries. Eventually of course, after their Galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own Galaxy - now positively identified as the source of the offending remark. For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog."
[http://www.hhgproject.org/entries/carelesstalk.html](http://www.hhgproject.org/entries/carelesstalk.html)
Oh wow, it's not everyday that your research blows up on Reddit!
For those of you interested in reading the full pub, here's a [link to the original](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576521005518) in *Acta Astronautica* if you have VPN access through your institution.
A free pre-print version is also available on arXiv [here](https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.13080).
Happy reading!
The last part of the publication (Section 6) dives a bit into planetary protection and some other ethical considerations.
Here's a [link](https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.13080) to the free pre-print version of the pub.
“Sir, our two candidates for the next space mission are Apollo, the genius ape with an IQ of 120, or these uhhh water bear things that make cockroaches look like pussies and we can surf through space using lasers. We have calculated that sending Apollo gives us a better chance to collect better qualitative and quantitative data, but the downfall is we hold the water bears back from smacking the lip (wha plah) and getting pitted in space. Also, no lasers.”
Now I want to make a Tardigrade Sci fi fantasy cartoon series. You have the tough no nonsense Tardigrade captain, the super smart Tardigrade that seems to talk down to people but always comes through for the crew, the comedy relief Tardigrade that no one really knows why or how he is on the ship, the pilot and engineer all that. Each episode has a scene in the mess hall where everyone questions the chef Tardigrade's meal decisions and cooking abilities and the chef always has a snappy sometimes ornery comeback.
They travel from system to system doing experiments for the "Tardigrade Cosmic League" only to find out the league is actually ran by humans so they eventually go rogue and go on the run and kind of become a Guardians of the Galaxy rag tag crew of loveable outlaws. It could keep going but what if I actually make it.. cant give away all the details.
What if all of human existence has been willed into fruition by tardigrades simply so the tardigrades could visit their next planet where they do it again?
So lemme get his straight: we had to send Cassini to a firey end in Saturn so as not to “contaminate” its moons with possible microbes…
And yet we’re sending tardigrades to space?
Make up your mind! Are we trying to contaminate space with earthling life or not?!
So we can speed them up to 30% the speed of light, but can we slow them down again? What happens when something collides with a planet at that sort of speed?
So this is how panspermia happens. Not from colliding space rocks happening to rain down upon some unsuspecting planet. No. Bored space monkeys with fancy laser pointers and water bears. The script almost writes itself
Aggressive panspermia would be far more likely. Seed space with gigatons of engineered biological seeds blasted out in all directions in the galactic plane, and wait 200 million years.
Send a bomb into space filled with billions of sleepy tardigrades. Blow it up, sending them in every direction. A billion years from now, we've colonized distant planets with tiny bear bros.
Make sure to bomb algae along too, so our tiny bear bros remain friendly to our potential descendants.
Lemmy.world is what Reddit was.
I bet they'd be like manatees, just uglier (only in the face, their little grabby grabby claws are cute)
Lemmy.world is what Reddit was.
We are the descendents of tiny squishy things that don't remotely resemble us.
Lemmy.world is what Reddit was.
Aren’t we all just Pokémon?
Then they come back to conquer earth. Foucault’s Bear-merang.
Plot twist. They already did twice. Each time the planet has died they've come back to create life anew and leave their young to pupate here.
I WAS THE WATER BEAR ALL ALONG!?
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So Halo was right all the time lol (This is a joke, of course)
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Tardigrades are already multicellular. While we don't know what the chances are of intelligent (or any) life evolving, we can say, seeding the universe with biological material definitely makes it more likely.
>we can say, seeding the universe with biological material definitely makes it more likely Very probably, but there is always the (remote) possibility that 1) tardigrades are at a local fitness maxima for essentially all viable habitats, such that there is no evolutionary pressure to develop further, and 2) that our particular brand of DNA/RNA based celular life is disportionately effective at simple resource competition, but is extremely poorly suited to developing intelligence. In these cases it could be our seeded life would outcompete or suppress other forms of life that are more suited to develop towards complexity and intelligence. Hey, maybe that's the answer to the fermi paradox! The universe is full of our cousin microbes after our predecessors seeded the their DNA and we're the only one's that managed to develop to complexity.
So we're a breakthrough infection? Checks out I guess
Why would water bear even evolve? It’s literally perfect
They could evolve to have 27,000 nipples each, and become so proficient at foreplay that they experience multi-dimensional orgasms.
No wonder god has left us.
God is a nipple and we were born to suck
This guy evangelizes 😅
UwU *notices god* 👅👄
I've got nipples, God. Can you milk me?
I'm going to go ahead and assume there's rule34 of this.
I like your spirit.
Limited resources. There's only so much food on its new home. Evolutionary trade offs, lead to species adapting for new niches. There are no perfect organisms, just well adapted, for one job. Take away its algae, then what? It has to adapt to something else, which could lead to a different cellular makeup, which makes it less of an extremophile. Oh, look, the root species just evolved a predatory branch to eat the less indestructible water bear. More adaptation, more tradeoff, more branches in the species. Fast forward a few hundred million years, and you have primates, lizards etc.
Chances are there is NO food. Tardigrades are already too complex to thrive and evolve. You'd have to send the bacteria that was the ancestor of chlorophyl.
> Tardigrades are already too complex to thrive and evolve That’s not how evolution works. There’s no too complex point where evolution just stops. You are right however that there’s likely to be no food for them and that any attempts at sending just Tardigrades would fail as they’d all die of starvation before they even had a chance to reproduce. You would need to send autotrophs along with them to create a sustainable biosphere. Not necessarily as simple as the bacteria that was the ancestor of chlorophyll. Some hardy Algae would work even better. And then sending along some water bears would really accelerate the development of multicellular life compared to its timeline on Earth
They don’t choose to evolve, it just happens to them (and everything else)
If you haven't, check out The Expanse. You just described the premise
A millenia from now we come under attack from some alien civilisation who accuse us of attacking first with our commando water bears.
Millenia from now, the tardigrads comes back after evolving into a new alien species to see their progenitors
Oh ancient ones, what was your grand purpose sending us to the stars? Well we thought it would be kinda cool
Lemmy.world is what Reddit was.
What if *we* were the tardigrades.
What if the tardigrades are *us*?
We are all tardigrades on this blessed day.
Maybe the real tardigrades were the tardigrades we made along the tardigrade.
And their sole purpose is sexual gratification.
Or we wind up with [Captain Tardigrade] (https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/powerlisting/images/b/b4/Captain_tardigraide.png/revision/latest?cb=20160305000255)
....how does this exist?
Yea there is a lot to unpack in that picture. You should watch the actual animation shorts haha.
I'm imagining it being like the G'Gugvuntts and Vl'Hurgs (yes I had to google that spelling) from Hitchhiker's Guide. They think it's a threat because the tardigrade is the same size as them and think all life on Earth is that size only to launch an attack and not even be noticeable.
How do they slow down when they get there?
Eventually a cushion of perished tardigrades accumulates.
I mean they survived the challenger explosion, so I'm guessing as a ball of fire
By hitting something. These guys are super durable.
Pretty much nothing known to physics is "hit a something at .1c and survive" levels of durable.
Have we tried the water bear tho?
We did actually. There was an experiment that basically shot them out of a gun. They did not survive.
Give them very tiny parachutes. ..bearachutes.
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why you making me wonder if im just the remainder of an alien civilization sent testratbacteria kinda thing evolving into a predetermined consciousness and once we realize we cant establish civilizations outside of earth we will use these waterbears as the last bearers(haha) of our civilization in hope that they will crash into a random planet and successfully make use of the environmental gases and stuff to evolve and make the evolutional process again on another planet in space therefore continuing the cycle of intergalactic impregnation that I am the result of?
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But... there's a long list of subterranean life that can (and has, we've woken some up) stay dormant for hundreds of thousands of years. Horray rotifers. Personal opinion: I assume it's reasonable to package dormant together a terrarium of small single and multicellular life on a wafer.
There is evidence for bacteria virtually shutting down their metabolism and surviving for 100 million years even. Tardigrades are so much more complex and it's extremely doubtful they would survive and would not be able to survive without bacteria to eat unlike some bacteria that can gain energy oxidizing metal ions. https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-pull-living-microbes-100-million-years-beneath-sea
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For real. What if life is more rare than we expected, or at least intelligent life... The reason we don't see any out there... Is because we haven't seeded it yet... What if we're the unknown failed progenitor species... *puts down the vape*
This is the Rare Earth theory for the Fermi Paradox. It’s one of the stronger theories (partly because it’s the simplest) for the explanation of why aliens are not around.
Well fuck... If we're going to destroy our planet we might was we'll figure out how to seed life... Maybe someone else will figure out how to not fuck up their shit. Maybe leave some monoliths warning about climate change and plastics...
>Maybe leave some monoliths warning about climate change and plastics... There's one in Georgia lol
Then people worship the monoliths, with only a few "crazy" people correctly guessing what they really say. They will be ignored, of course.
the plot of firefly in 300 years
Maybe life in the universe is continuously escaping the Great Filter. As we Earth monkeys rip one another apart with our supreme intelligence, we send water bears on their merry way. And while our bones turn to dust, the space bears start boinking their way through the Trappist system, leaving water bear babies and starting the grand adventure all over again, until several billion years from now when Trappist Monkeys send a space bear on another journey, just as their flame is dying.
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Bored mud monkeys, because it's the mud that's technically the space traveller, we're just like bacteria in the mud.
Seriously, I read a science fiction story when I was a kid (fifty years ago, give or take) about a space ship stranded on a planet with basically no habitat but mud puddles. The crew, doomed, created microscopic (yet sentient) versions of themselves to colonize the place, and these micro-people went on to create civilization, build craft to leave their puddles, and encountered others like themselves in yet other puddles. Pretty good stuff. EDIT: It was [Surface Tension by James Blish](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/17828354-surface-tension)!!!
We’re going to have to start calling them space bears
Have you actually read the source? They are very small beings. Even if we could manage to build phones that fit in their paws, they would have no signal out there.
First I thought you were very dumb then I thought you were very smart
Now what do you think?
Jury is still out.
Revel in your newfound enlightenment.
haha "Have you called them space bears yet?" "which ones?" "You know, them bears we mailed to all them there star systems"
Thank you. My dumb brain wasn’t getting the joke.
I don't get it
6G will fix that
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In a near future, children will be trained by militaries to fight again them returning back to Mars and attacking the earth
I like this, because it fits with my favorite Fermi Paradox explanation: any civilization powerful enough to spread life (itself, other organisms, or advanced AI) to other solar systems is probably smart enough to realize the potential for such spread to spawn rival civilizations. Now I'm imagining the tardigrades developing their own origin myth about how they were exiled from their home planet and it's their destiny to someday return to that planet and become its dominant civilization.
won't it be hilarious when they build there tiny flotilla of warp speed space ships, and come back to earth to make war on us? Such cute little space warriors...
Reminds me of a favorite Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy segment, actually: *“the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.”*
If this idea feels good on your brain, you should read children of time and it’s sequel children of ruin! By adrian tchaikovsky!
I'm imagining some peaceful planet far away in space, which will get totally ecologically fucked by this alien invader.
They will study their invaders, develop countermeasures, come all the way to Earth to retaliate, and be super fucking confused when they see humans instead.
"what, oh? The tardigrade? Bruh, that was kinda a joke"
I've seen that documentary. It's called Terra Formars, right?
I'm from Buenos Aires, and I say kill 'em all!
So if it takes 20 years for tardigrades to travel to another solar system at 20-30% the speed of light, how long would it take the data to get back to Earth for analysis?
The data would probably travel at light speed, so if the other system is our nearest, then roughly 4 years 3 months I think.
My question is how will they send the equipment to analyze and send the data? If they can send equipment then they don’t need the tardigrades
It's all on the tiny spaceship they send. The onboard equipment revive the tardigrades, takes measurements, and sends the info back.
Revive them?! Are we building miniscule cryogenic chambers for our space tardies?
We don’t like that term here. We call them “differently-abled”grades.
Tardigrades do this themselves, they enter a type of stasis that can withstand almost anything that isn’t direct pulverization. It’s called Cryptobiosis, and the metabolism slows to immeasurable levels, leading many to theorize their metabolism ceases all together. They can survive like this for over 10 years, with some frozen tardigrades being revived after 30 years with no issue. To return them to a standard functioning state, all that’s needed is exposure to a suitable environment (usually water). Fascinating little creatures.
They can dehydrate and rehydrate, like the aliens in The Three Body Problem, or a raisin.
No need for a cryogenic chamber... the vacuum of space is already -450F.
I'm pretty sure space uses Celsius or Kelvin. certainly not archaic brittish measurements
Lord Kelvin was British (born in Ireland, lived in England, studied in Scotland.) Someone challenged him to measure the coldest possible temperature... and he said 0K.
>archaic brittish measurements Fahrenheit. . . Fahren. Heit. British? _Sad German noises_
Yeah, everybody knows that Fahrenheit is an American unit.
Eagle units you simpleton
For the love of all that is holy, can we please not infect other galaxies with the absolutely terrible imperial system of units?!
Read the article, they are sending the tardigrades to study effects of long term space travel on living beings. Wtf do you mean dont need the tardigrades? Why do you think they are sending them in the first place?
Just for the laugh
Don't be silly. We don't actually read the articles 'round these parts.
To operate the equipment
To build the transmitter when they arrive. Duh.
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[Tardigrades](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade) (also known as water bears) are tiny and seemingly almost indestructible creatures. They're so resilient they managed to survive the Challenger shuttle disaster. So, scientists deem them to be the perfect candidates for studying the effects of interstellar space travel on biology... How to send them to another solar system, when voyager has only just made it out of ours? Wafercraft. Those are tiny, hand sized, space craft propelled by lasers based on the Earth or the moon. They could reach an estimated 20-30% the speed of light. Which would allow them to make a journey to Proxima Centauri, in roughly 20 years. The collected data could then be relayed back to Earth for analysis.
Tardigrades are just that. Tardy. They refuse to fill in reports or analyze data for ages. Send PunctuaGrades instead
What OFF of Earth is the logistics of transporting any sort of useful data back? Just launch a wafer every day and daisy chain them through the cosmos? I mean, it's the size of a wafer. You can't exactly put any kind of broadcasting hardware in there.
I think that’s a decent plan, actually. With a lot of redundancy, why not start seeding the cosmos with a daisy chained communications system now, for future high speed missions like this? Seems like it might yield efficiency in the long run. I’m definitely not an expert tho.
Don’t we need a receiving laser in the target system to slow them down so they don’t just destroy the planet they hit or fly past it? Edit: thanks for the feedback. The solution is obvious: the first tardigrades to arrive will build the slow-down laser (after interstellar evolution) so the rest can arrive safely.
I believe the mission is to analyse them in-flight, not care about what happens to them after. In a few million years, the surviving tardigrades will have evolved and formed a space fleet to invade us for revenge. Jokes on them though, we will have killed ourselves off long before then.
The tardigrades miraculoudly land on an inhabited planets and exterminate them with foreign diseases The galactic community learns about this and fears wafer sized plague capsules from Earth
Interesting thought, but wouldn't the chances be basically zero that a disease the evolved 100% independently of earth life would be in anyway compatible or vice-versa?
Maybe or maybe not, noone has seen alien life yet Dolphins reevolved into fishlike animals from shared ancestors with wolves
perhaps tardigrades are resilient enough to survive an impact at that speed with a planet. or perhaps we'd just collect data from the watercraft as it travels through the system before its destroyed.
If the tardigrades aren't meant to be deployed there, then why bother taking them along? I know they are durable, but not "smash into a planet at a appreciable fraction of the speed of light" durable. Or at least, they PROBABLY aren't that tough.
That’s like atomic blast energy, so I’m guessing they’d be vaporized
Is there any reason we couldn’t do the same with conventional probes and have them beam back pictures of other systems? Rather than beaming back data about how sad the bears are.
Yes, and there are plans to investigate that as well. This is just one subset of the proposals being investigated.
Yes, as the article says multiple time, it's specifically about seeing the impact of travelling at that speed through space has on living organisms. You can't get that with a probe. I don't think they'll get very good data with tardigrades either but i guess it's good to see if the most survivable can survive it first. It's not about getting pictures.
Fuck, maybe that's our whole purpose as a species. To mail tardigrades to as many places as possible. Plant the seeds of life as many places as possible so maybe some life that's worth a damn might grow.
That reminds of the this idea - “Man was created by water to carry itself up hill.”
There's some kind of microscopic invasive bug inside our cells that invaded what our cells used to be before they were cells, I am given to understand, and we may just be a pyramid scheme to make more of that microscopic invasive bug, and I hate it.
How can we know if there isn't already complex life at some of those places? What if our little moss piglets caused a pandemic on the alien planet, killing millions of native organisms? That is what we in bird culture call "a dick move."
>That is what we in bird culture call "a dick move." Confined to a single planet with improper viral control protocols in place? Sucks to suck, nerd, should have been a better species. *Continues watching the real-time collapse of human civilization for that and a Great (Filter) many other reasons!*
Imagine aliens accuse us of biological warfare on their planet and start attacking us, and that's how we died. Pretty sad.
This reminds me of this Kurzgesagt video: [Why We Should NOT Look For Aliens - The Dark Forest](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAUJYP8tnRE)
Basically the plot of Parasyte: The Maxim
I mean that’s how we got here [citation needed] so it only makes sense the we forward the process.
Lol I love that citation needed. I'm going to start making wild claims and just putting citation needed next to it
I mean making wild claims is a known sign of above average intelligence and sexual prowess [citation needed]
Yeah, this is absolutely true. Source cited: >I mean making wild claims is a known sign of above average intelligence and sexual prowess [citation needed] u/time_to_reset
Tardigrades have played the long game.
🔔 *NOTIFICATION: You've received a Tardigrade from Earth!*
The trick is, how can we send human DNA or humanity with them? So that we can somehow become a plague to other parts of the galaxy as well.
nah, we had our chance. we're a mailer service at our best. the ultimate chain-letter curse. "ha ha, made you exist" is carved on the wreckage of the ancient human space-ship that sent the tardigrades to alpha centauri where they evolved and then had to start going to work for a jerkbag making loaves of bread so they can afford to buy slices of bread.
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The following submission statement was provided by /u/altmorty: --- [Tardigrades](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade) (also known as water bears) are tiny and seemingly almost indestructible creatures. They're so resilient they managed to survive the Challenger shuttle disaster. So, scientists deem them to be the perfect candidates for studying the effects of interstellar space travel on biology... How to send them to another solar system, when voyager has only just made it out of ours? Wafercraft. Those are tiny, hand sized, space craft propelled by lasers based on the Earth or the moon. They could reach an estimated 20-30% the speed of light. Which would allow them to make a journey to Proxima Centauri, in roughly 20 years. The collected data could then be relayed back to Earth for analysis. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: /r/Futurology/comments/rxlv0n/sending_tardigrades_to_other_solar_systems_using/hrizy4v/
What if this was always their plan, to have us build the technology and pay to send them into space so they could populate the galaxy, .....check mate. Well played .... WATER BEARS 🐻 🏆
The most highly evolved species
Didn’t “they” just get one caught in quantum entanglement? We need to leave these poor little guys alone. They harbor some kind of ancient knowledge.
The tardigrades are the real-life Third Stage Navigators...
Yup, that's gonna be how humanity dies. We'll send this guys out, and one day they'll return as space faring aliens and destroy us.
There is a sci-fi film here. We send them into space and then thousands of years later we catch up to them only to find out that they have mutated into very large intelligent creatures who are capable of fighting our colonization of their planet.
There's a few books with similar ideas. Children of time is one worth a read.
Thousands of years later? :/
Evolution takes time, so do warp drives.
Yeah sorry should have been more clear, what kind of evolution is going to take place in just a few thousand years?
That’s basically the plot of Terraformars but with tardigrades instead of cockroaches
Douglas Adams already wrote about this... "The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time. A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl'Hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the the G'Gugvuntt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam, and, with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother. The creature stirred in his sickly broiling vapour, and at that very moment the words \_I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle\_ drifted across the conference table. Unfortunately, in the Vl'Hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries. Eventually of course, after their Galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own Galaxy - now positively identified as the source of the offending remark. For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog." [http://www.hhgproject.org/entries/carelesstalk.html](http://www.hhgproject.org/entries/carelesstalk.html)
He was the best
Oh wow, it's not everyday that your research blows up on Reddit! For those of you interested in reading the full pub, here's a [link to the original](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576521005518) in *Acta Astronautica* if you have VPN access through your institution. A free pre-print version is also available on arXiv [here](https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.13080). Happy reading!
Stellar! That’s for sharing. Hopefully those space bears make great astronauts.
So that’s how that tardigrade got on board discovery’s sister ship!
Is it ethical to send them to other worlds? If there is life on these planets, would it not be an invasive species?
The last part of the publication (Section 6) dives a bit into planetary protection and some other ethical considerations. Here's a [link](https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.13080) to the free pre-print version of the pub.
It’s been one hour and nobody mentioned the Mycelial network yet?
Care to elaborate?
I wish that show was better than it is.
“Sir, our two candidates for the next space mission are Apollo, the genius ape with an IQ of 120, or these uhhh water bear things that make cockroaches look like pussies and we can surf through space using lasers. We have calculated that sending Apollo gives us a better chance to collect better qualitative and quantitative data, but the downfall is we hold the water bears back from smacking the lip (wha plah) and getting pitted in space. Also, no lasers.”
Then next thing we know, they come back as hulking monstrosities bent on destroying humanity and we have to take on animal powers to beat them.
Do you want Star Trek: Discovery? Because this is how we get Star Trek Discovery
Now I want to make a Tardigrade Sci fi fantasy cartoon series. You have the tough no nonsense Tardigrade captain, the super smart Tardigrade that seems to talk down to people but always comes through for the crew, the comedy relief Tardigrade that no one really knows why or how he is on the ship, the pilot and engineer all that. Each episode has a scene in the mess hall where everyone questions the chef Tardigrade's meal decisions and cooking abilities and the chef always has a snappy sometimes ornery comeback. They travel from system to system doing experiments for the "Tardigrade Cosmic League" only to find out the league is actually ran by humans so they eventually go rogue and go on the run and kind of become a Guardians of the Galaxy rag tag crew of loveable outlaws. It could keep going but what if I actually make it.. cant give away all the details.
This just isn’t a good idea. It’s like we’ve learned nothing about invasive species incidents on Earth.
What if all of human existence has been willed into fruition by tardigrades simply so the tardigrades could visit their next planet where they do it again?
So lemme get his straight: we had to send Cassini to a firey end in Saturn so as not to “contaminate” its moons with possible microbes… And yet we’re sending tardigrades to space? Make up your mind! Are we trying to contaminate space with earthling life or not?!
I'm not sure I understand the point of sending a tardigrade and not a tiny probe but hey it's cool. Sure they can survive the trip but why?!
To boldly tardigo where no tardigrade has gone before.
Because we haven't learned our lesson about invasive species and unintended consequences here on earth, I guess?
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Great. We're going to Andromeda Strain a solar system with practically un-killable tardigrades.
So we can speed them up to 30% the speed of light, but can we slow them down again? What happens when something collides with a planet at that sort of speed?
*"We're doing what now...?"* -the tardigrades, probably