Thousands of ancient, eight-legged, nigh-indestructible creatures have crash-landed on the moon — and they’ll probably be there long after the human species is wiped off the face of the Earth. They’re called tardigrades, and 10,000 of them were suspended in artificial amber and loaded onto an Israeli spacecraft that crashed onto the moon in April.
"Tardigrade is one of the, if not the, most durable forms of life that we know of. They’re ancient, multicellular, nearly indestructible, microscopic organisms that have survived all five mass extinctions on Earth," Nova Spivack, whose organization shipped the creatures into space, told As It Happens guest host Piya Chattopadhyay.
"And now there are some of them on the moon."
Spivack is the founder and CEO of the Arch Mission Foundation, a non-profit with a mission of "backing up planet Earth." To this end, they created a "lunar library" with a 30-million-page archive of human history "etched into nickel films," as well as millions of cells, human DNA, and tardigrades in suspended animation. […]
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