
Japan: Tardigrade reproduces after 30 years on ice - tsutomun
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-35323237
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azinman2
Tardigrades have lived past all the previous mass extinctions, and will live
through the next well beyond humans. They're amazing. People give cockroaches
too much credit.

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glorkk
> will live through the next well beyond humans.

Why so pessimistic? We're clearly better at survival than tardigrades which
can't build space stations or sequence their own DNA...

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jonknee
A fancy space station isn't going to do much good if a giant asteroid hits
Earth and creates another extinction event (which _will_ happen, it's just a
matter of when).

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jimrandomh
Spotting and deflecting asteroids away from earth is challenging, but feasible
with present technology and there are groups working on it. (A feat
tardigrades could never hope to accomplish, but they get to freeload off our
achievement in this case.)

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idlewords
Dude, lay off the tardigrades. Let's at least deflect one or two asteroids
before we start accusing other creatures of freeloading.

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Jabbles
Is this significantly harder than surviving the freezing process for 1 year?
Once frozen, I would have thought most chemical reactions slowed to a
negligible pace, making the time they spend frozen irrelevant.

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SixSigma
Oxidation

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freezer_burn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freezer_burn)

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stargazer-3
But that shouldn't be a problem for tardigrades frozen in a block of ice,
because they are not in direct contact with air.

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SixSigma
I would suspect that some of the oxygen from the water is liberated
occasionally.

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refurb
A quick google search didn't turn up anything, but I'd suspect that water
spontaneously liberating oxygen is a very rare occurrence.

Oxygen is in a high oxidation state and once reduced to water is quite stable.
In order for oxygen to form from water, you'd need an oxidizer of considerable
power (e.g. ozone?).

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honksillet
Is there anything wrong with trying to actively seed the cosmos with these
suckers?

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88e282102ae2e5b
They (and the bacteria on their skin) could wipe out native life forms and
prevent us from knowing if life ever started truly independently on other
planets.

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dogma1138
Its still technically a natural process cosmic life isn't dependent on random
abiogenesis, in fact it's probably even more interesting than a simple case of
biochemistry and luck.

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awl130
could this ultimately lead to the invention of that now familiar sci-fi trope:
deep hibernation for long-period space travel?

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lafar6502
please, no more tardigrade posts

