This weird creature might just be the
best living explorer in the universe.
We took 'em into space,
put 'em on a satellite,
opened up the door, set 'em outside,
exposed 'em to extreme temperatures, vacuum,
right, hot, cold, huge radiation,
and they they come back alive.
This is the tardigrade.
Often called the water bear.
And you can probably guess why.
And they might even hold clues as to whether
life on Earth arrived from outer space.
These creatures are the best candidates to
explore whether life came from somewhere else
in the universe or it emerged on Earth.
Could they even be the origin of life themselves?
So what is a tardigrade?
They're aquatic microscopic animals
barely visible to the naked eye
as they're transparent
and only about a millimetre long.
They also love mossy conditions
which has earned tardigrades their adorable
nickname moss piglets.
Aw!
Tardigrade means this Latin name slow stepper.
Tardi mean slow and grade it refers to foot.
You can start to see he's got long,
thin filaments coming off his body,
and some actual more almost look like horns
coming off his head that he uses in feeding.
So why are these moss piglets the ultimate
space explorers?
Well, despite being water-dwelling creatures
they have a special process of morphing or
adapting to hostile surroundings
like radiation or freezing temperatures
by drying themselves out
they can cope with all kinds of nasty conditions.
As that sample jar starts to dry out,
as that specimen starts to dry out,
what's cool about these guys is they can survive
that extreme desiccation.
Drying down to like a crispy little booger.
It's called a tun.
They roll up into a special tight ball essentially.
They're like a roly poly bug almost,
and then go through a series of radical
chemical changes in the cells in their bodies
to deal with this loss of water.
Being in a tun form, tardigrades are as far
from alive as you can be,
but give them a splash of water
and they spring back to life.
What better place to test the robustness of a
tun state tardigrade than the freezing
sprawls of Antarctica?
We extracted 'em from soils in Antarctica,
shipped 'em back here frozen solid,
and they've been frozen solid here at
at least minus 60 since 2012.
Holy moly!
It's mind-blowing, dude.
It's basically the same community that I saw
when I collected them in Antarctica.
We put 'em in a tube,
froze 'em, shipped 'em,
four / five years later
we want to study 'em, right?
Pulled 'em out. We thawed 'em out.
And now what I'm seeing now
looks almost exactly like
what I saw when I was looking at 'em
like fresh in Antarctica.
So they can survive the most extreme
conditions on Earth.
But what about in space?
Byron and his colleague Carl took them on a
special outing to the
International Space Station.
Took 'em into space, put 'em on a satellite,
opened up the door, set 'em outside,
exposed 'em to extreme temperatures,
vacuum, right, hot, cold, huge radiation.
And then when they brought 'em back to Earth,
they did what you're seeing here.
They dumped some water on 'em,
to see if they actually reanimated.
Voila.
They take the water up, man, and they start. Right?
They they swap it out the molecules and
like a machine man.
You add the water to it, they take 'em up.
Cells start to do their thing again,
and they come back alive.
It always blows my-
look I'm an old fat dude,
and I've looked at these one hundred times.
Thousands of times.
Millions, maybe!
You're not that old, Well.
And then when I actually
look at 'em under the microscope
every single time, I'm like,
Dang, that's cool, man.
Just like that, the mighty water bear enters
tun state and navigates brutal conditions
that would kill
almost every other living thing.
So if we know they can survive in
space and we know they survive on Earth,
could it be possible that these space
explorers traveled between the two,
possibly even sparking life on Earth?
When the Israeli space agency SpaceIL
crashed their lunar lander Beresheet
in April 2019
one scientist began to wonder:
Could the colony of tardigrades
they had on board have survived?
And could they survive a crash landing to
Earth if they hitched a ride on a meteorite?
Alejandra Traspas-Muina of the
University of Kent set about replicating the
Beresheet crash and the kinds of pressures
that this little batch of bears
would have experienced.
By firing them out of a gun.
Ok, so not quite a gun like that,
more of a lab-based gas gun.
Alejandra re-created the moon's conditions
in a chamber and then fired
the tardigrades into sand to recreate the
impact that they would have had on that
fateful day.
Knowing how fast the spacecraft from the
Beresheet mission crashed, we thought,
Well, let's try different speeds
up to one kilometre per second,
which if you think about it, if
just to get it into a daily activity,
just think you're in your car and your car
starts going faster and faster and faster.
Up to 3600 kilometres per hour.
So this is how fast tardigrades were shot.
So we started with 0.5, which they all survive.
100% survival. So that's great.
We researchers happy, tardigrades happy,
and we kept going.
We went up to 0.7 and they again survived.
Then we went up to 0.9.
And unfortunately at these speeds,
tardigrades couldn't make it,
which means they they
didn't survive the Beresheet mission.
But this isn't the end of tardigrades
in space.
Alejandra's studies continue.
She and her team are testing whether they
could survive in the water plumes or the icy
surfaces of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter.
These creatures are the best candidates to
explore whether life came from somewhere else
in the universe or it emerged on Earth.
I do not believe life is unique to Earth,
So don't write off tardigrades just yet.
They and other extremophiles
could still provide the answer
to the life we live today.