The Spillage of the Tardigrades
From the day we are born, we are obliged to abide by laws. But what happens to these rules when we leave solid ground, and travel beyond our own atmosphere? What are our obligations then, in outer space, where humans are increasingly focusing their explorations and adventures? If, one day, we truly will be able to walk upon, settle upon, colonise other planets or space itself, what rules will we then be bound to?
Within a few weeks of being born here on planet Earth, we must be registered to become a legal, existing, identifiable human. We must sit in the correct type of car seat. Our parents must drive within the rules of the road. We must not steal, we must file our tax returns, we must pay rent, we must not litter, we must not harm another unless it is in the name of sport or food consumption or national protection, and even then, there are rules and regulations around what and how and when and where we can do such harm. Should we stray from these rules, we will be penalised - financially, socially, and perhaps even by having our freedom removed. Depending on which school of thought you’re from, you might think rules are made to be broken, or that they are what holds our society together; either way, they’re here, there and everywhere.
The Outer Space Treaty is the foundation of international space law, presenting principles for space exploration and operation. Its main stipulations are as follows.
Space activities are for the benefit of all nations, and any country is free to explore orbit and beyond.
There is no claim for sovereignty in space; no nation can “own” space, the Moon or any other body.
Weapons of mass destruction are forbidden in orbit and beyond, and the Moon, the planets, and other celestial bodies can only be used for peaceful purposes.
Any astronaut from any nation is an “envoy of mankind,” and signatory states must provide all possible help to astronauts when needed, including emergency landing in a foreign country or at sea.
Signatory states are each responsible for their space activities, including private commercial endeavours, and must provide authorization and continuing supervision.
Nations are responsible for damage caused by their space objects and must avoid contaminating space and celestial bodies.
This reads as a list of ‘rules we also have on planet Earth but have broken since the dawn of humanity.’ It’s therefore difficult to assume that, as humans broaden and further their exploration and inhabitation of outer space, they will stick to these rules; it’s perhaps more realistic to assume that, as is humanity’s way, we will break them. In 1979, an additional space treaty was drafted specifically to govern the exploration and use of the Moon and other celestial bodies, emphasising that the Moon and its natural resources are the ‘common heritage of mankind’ and that no state or organisation can claim to ‘own’ the resources available there. In a rather concerning yet unsurprising move, China, the USA and Russia have refused to sign this treaty.
We have already broken the contamination rule. NASA keep a log of every item that is known to have been left on the Moon, and it’s surprisingly extensive. From golf balls to a golden olive branch, flags to signed family photographs, used faecal collection devices and emesis bags, hammers and pieces of equipment to the large vessels, cameras and mirrors which were intentionally or unintentionally crashed into the moon’s surface; mankind’s presence is forever marked on the lunar landscape. Having reached the moon and facing the return journey, astronauts are obliged to rid themselves and their spacecraft of anything unnecessary in order to lighten their loads and maximise the efficiency and safety of their return trip back to Earth. As such, each mission to the moon has resulted in its own ‘toss zone’; something which is seen in archaeology, where an individual, group or civilisation have buried or cast aside that which was no longer necessary to them, leaving a snapshot of their time in that location; whether it was minutes or centuries. During the Apollo 11 mission, the astronauts were required to discard any excess weight on the surface of the moon prior to their departure. They tossed many objects which had been crucial to the mission but which had served their purpose; arm rests, the tube which carried the flag, the television camera with which Aldrin and Armstrong shared their historic moment with the world, sampling tools like scoops and tongs. Their ‘toss zone’ tells the tale that all toss zones have through history; a thing of low value was replaced with a thing of high value, and in that process, it becomes clear what was expendable to those humans in that situation. For this mission, it is clear that comfort wasn’t a priority; keeping the spacecraft light and getting samples back safely was key.
The biological waste has its own tale to tell. Human faeces provides a rich form of information to anyone with the means to decode it. If someone were compelled to study the discarded bagfuls after a significant time period, they would be able to shed light on how time spent on the moon’s surface would affect the human body and how biological waste breaks down in such an environment. Such a study has not been made a priority, for obvious reasons, quite yet.
We can’t really blame the cosmonauts who have visited the moon for leaving their mark. After all, who wouldn’t want to swing a golf club and see how a golf ball travels across the moon’s surface? Who could experience being in such a remarkable place and not feel compelled to leave a trace? We have long carved our names into trees, school desks, left cave walls adorned with our stories, sought to make it known that we were here. It is unlikely that the detritus left on the moon would have any negative impact on the moon’s habitat itself; many objects, such as Charlie Duke’s family photo, would likely already have been broken down under ultraviolet light and a steady hail of micrometeorites. There is not, so far as we currently know, a fragile topsoil which would be altered by the presence of space wreckage or man-made objects. The objects exist only as a record of humanity’s intent on the moon; the cameras, the parts and pieces of our vessels, our emotional and societal offerings for anyone or anything who may later find them.
In April 2019, something happened which forced scientists and space enthusiasts to think a little harder about the traces humans have left behind on the Moon. An Israeli space craft crash-landed; nothing unusual in itself, as the Moon’s surface is littered with semi-destroyed space crafts. But onboard were thousands of planet Earth’s most remarkable animals; and it’s believed that they survived the impact. Tardigrades, water bears and moss piglets as they are sometimes known, are tiny aquatic creatures - under a millimetre long - that are found just about anywhere where there’s liquid water; from the ocean, freshwater lakes and rivers to damp terrestrial mosses and lichens. They are found at altitudes of over 6,000 metres in the Himalayan mountain range and at ocean depths more than 4,700 metres below the surface. Comical and quite cute in appearance, these little creatures resemble fat caterpillars with eight legs, ending in little clawed feet. They have a bizarre cylindrical snout, and walk with an endearing toddle. Cute, right? They’re also pretty much indestructible. A tardigrade can withstand temperatures as low as minus 200 degrees celsius and hotter than 150 degrees celsius. They can survive exposure to radiation, boiling liquids, and up to six times the pressure of the deepest part of the ocean. When necessary, a tardigrade can transform into a dehydrated ball called a tun, and it can remain in this state indefinitely. They are unaffected by solar ultraviolet radiation and the vacuum of space. We have shot them out of high-speed guns at 900 metres per second to see whether they could survive a crushing impact of 1.14 gigapascals of pressure and, rather unsurprisingly, they can. It’s nigh on impossible to kill a tardigrade.
So when thousands of tun-state tardigrades found themselves crashing into the moon, they probably didn’t even suffer a bruise. It is most likely that they survived; that humans have therefore unwittingly introduced an indestructible life form onto the Moon. It sounds like the premise for a brilliant science fiction movie. Tardigrades, when deprived of their usual food sources of plants and fungus, will eat each other. They reproduce both sexually and asexually - capable of going it alone - and they take just 14 days to reach full development. The tardigrade tuns which exist on the moon are protected at a cellular level by a water-soluble protein unique only to tardigrades, known as Tardigrade Disordered Proteins. In many tardigrades, fluorescence lends them protection against radiation by transforming UV rays into harmless blue light. They have formed a tough, glass-like, impenetrable layer around every one of their cells, able to be reanimated only by water. The oldest tun to be reanimated was 120 years old; no studies have been carried out beyond that timeframe, but it’s highly likely that a tardigrade can survive for longer. They won’t be able to reanimate on the Moon without water, so it’s unlikely that the science-fiction movie will play out how our imagination might expect it to - the Moon won’t be overrun by a colony of giant, mutant, unstoppable moss piglets - but they’ll await their rescue patiently, and we can expect some fascinating data when they are safely retrieved and brought back to life with a simple droplet of water.
The tardigrades were part of the Arch Mission, a mission which has created a “backup” of planet Earth - human knowledge and the planet’s biology stored and sent out to various solar locations in case of a life-ending event on our planet. The ‘lunar library’ - something akin to a DVD containing a 30-million-page archive of human history viewable under microscopes, as well as human DNA - was being carried on the Beresheet robot lander along with the tardigrades when it crashed. The Lunar Library carried on the Beresheet lander was a levelled-up version of that which is circulating in Elon’s car; 25 layers of nickel, each only a few microns thick. The first four layers contain roughly 60,000 high-resolution images of book pages, which include language primers, textbooks, and keys to decoding the other 21 layers. Those other 21 layers hold nearly all of the English Wikipedia, thousands of classic books, and even the secrets to David Copperfield’s magic tricks. Along with this remarkable resource were thin layers of epoxy resin, a synthetic equivalent of the tree resin that preserves ancient insects (yes, the amber stuff from Jurassic Park) and into this resin were tucked hair follicles and blood samples from 24 humans representing a diverse genetic cross-section of human ancestry. Finally, the scientists added samples from major holy sites - such as the Bodhi tree in India - and this tiny snapshot of human existence was sent forth, along with its tardigrade guardians.
It could be seen as celestial pollution; this accidental smearing of indestructible alien life forms over the Moon and propulsion of Proof of Humanity into outer space; but ultimately, it’s what us humans do. We have always carved our initials into trees, painted our stories on cave walls, condensed our existence into photographs and sentences inscribed on tombstones and benches and tattooed on skin and made into movies and music and art. We want and need to be remembered; our toils, our triumphs, our love and passion and conflict and strife, our silly little lives which mean everything and yet nothing in the infinite expanse of space and time. We want our time on this planet - ever nearing its end - to be known to whatever and whoever else is most likely out there, when we are gone.
And it’s this sense of impending doom, which varies from person to person depending on their sources of information, who they trust, the quantity of news they consume and their own system of beliefs, which has led to humankind’s ever-growing interest in space as an alternative home. As per the laws outlined previously, none of us - no leader, no nation nor individual - can claim any of the planets or the endless space between as our own. For a creature with such a consistent background in colonialism, the marking of territories and staking of claim, it’s hard to imagine just how this might happen. Then there’s the practicalities; should we somehow overcome our political issues, the ones that we haven’t quite figured out how to overcome even on terra firma, how on Earth (no pun intended) could a species designed perfectly for life on one planet inhabit another, or the crushing voids between?
Clouds Architecture Office has started to bridge the gap between Earth and space with its Analemma Tower; a skyscraper which, if they can materialise their vision, will hang from an asteroid in space. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s far from outside the realms of possibility. The tower’s designer, Ostap Rudakeyvch, has stated that the tower is an option for habitation when the surface of the Earth becomes too hostile, due to ever-increasing tsunamis, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and extreme shifts in climate. Humans would live inside our own Earth’s atmosphere, but suspended above any potential harm. In 2015, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta Mission successfully landed on the surface of a comet named Churyumov-Geraismenko, showing that it is possible to interact with bodies on the smaller end of the scale in space. The Analemma Tower would be attached to an asteroid via high-strength cabling, and the asteroid would be sent into a controlled orbit around the planet - meaning that the tower itself would constantly be taking a daily journey between the Northern and Southern hemispheres at approximately 300 miles per hour. With the tower made up of lightweight materials such as carbon fibre and aluminium, space-based solar panels providing power and a cloud and rainwater semi-closed loop system providing water, it’s a technologically feasible project for the future; provided we can send an asteroid safely into a controlled orbit. NASA’s ‘Asteroid Redirect Mission’ focuses solely on this, sending a robot to collect a boulder from an asteroid then placing that boulder into a stable orbit around the moon. It’s a fascinating thing to contemplate; humans living in the sky, living in an enormous skyscraper metropolis whose top floors are above our own planet’s troposphere, whooshing round the planet attached to a giant space rock. It may sound ludicrous, but so did planes, trains, space travel itself; until we did it. There are swathes of very intelligent scientists around the world working on similar projects; on ways to ensure that, as our planet continues to degrade, human beings might stand a chance at living on.
But living in outer space itself is a different matter. Space colonisation is a concept fraught with not only economic, social, political and military implications. It’s also something which humanity is just not capable of doing quite yet. Controlled ecological life-support systems for large numbers of humans haven’t been successfully developed yet, our understanding of how human beings would behave in such colonies is limited - we always have the capacity to surprise and horrify ourselves - and it currently costs around £1026 to send a kilo of anything - whether it’s food, metal, human being or tardigrades - into space. That’s £63,612 per average human being. There are ongoing programs aimed at making access to space cheaper, for example via reusable launch systems, and of course we are all aware of several high-profile individuals with seemingly infinite financial resources who are developing their own projects to stake their claim at a life in space; but we are a long, long way away from any actual habitation of another planet or system in space in any significant human numbers.
This will come as a relief to many of us, who believe that resources, research, time and money should all be poured into salvaging what’s left of the planet that we have; and those of us who have watched too many scary space movies and who would rather face Mother Nature’s wrath than live in an apartment suspended from an asteroid. The sad - or comforting, depending on which way you look at it - fact of the matter is that our feelings about it are irrelevant. You and I, dear reader, will not be offered a ticket to space, nor will our children or, most likely, our children’s children. Instead, they will fight the good fight; to keep this planet inhabitable for as long as possible. Maybe the generations that follow will indeed make space colonisation a reality. Maybe they will run out of time, or maybe our human nature, our rules and their clash with our wilful natures will make it impossible but for us, and our generation, our space legacy is - and it’s almost charming in its chaos - a few toss zones, our Lunar Library, some billionaires at play, and a spillage of tardigrades.