Never Mind the Selenites, Here's the Moon Pigs

Tardigrade (aka water bear, aka moss piglet)

Picture: eyeofscience / science source images

According to excited news reports this week, the Moon may be inhabited - not by Selenites - but by thousands of tardigrades, transported there aboard an Israeli spacecraft that crashed on the lunar surface back in April. 

Tardigrades - for those who don't know - are incredibly resilient, micro-creatures that have fascinated scientists ever since their discovery, in 1773, by German zoologist Johann August Ephraim Goeze who, rather Romantically, called them kleine Wasserbären.

Found virtually everywhere, even in the most extreme conditions, these eight-legged wonders would stand a pretty good chance of surviving in space for many years in a state of deathly hibernation or cryptobiosis; again, for those who don't know, tardigrades have the ability to expell nearly all bodily fluid and shrivel into a seed-like pod, reducing their metabolism to almost zero.        

Of course, in order to become active again and feed and reproduce as normal, they would need to be rehydrated and there's no possibility of that on a celestial body that lacks atmosphere and liquid water. And so they'd have to be brought back to Earth in order to be brought back to life. But, presently, they're stranded on the Moon, and it's kind of nice to look up at night and think of them.   


Thanks to Thom B. for suggesting this post.

They Came from Outer Space

One of the more amusing oh, if only it were true, stories doing the rounds this week concerns our old friend the octopus ... According to a group of researchers, octopuses are extraterrestrial biological entities; i.e. alien beings from another world and not just highly intelligent deep sea creatures. 

Of course, there's no actual evidence to support such a claim and it's not only been rejected by the wider scientific community, but mocked in the media: You've got to be squidding me! being a typical tabloid headline.   

Despite anticipating such a reaction, the authors of the paper published in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, boldy insist that the so-called Cambrian explosion - a sudden burst of life that occurred c. 540 million years ago - can only be explained as an event with cosmic origins.

Essentially, the idea is that alien viruses were transported to Earth by a meteor and infected the life that already existed here; in this case, a population of primitive squid-like organisms, causing them to mutate into an alien hybrid - commonly known as an octopus. Alternatively, some suggest that fertilised octopus eggs came ready frozen from out of space.

Either way, this is obviously a reimagining of the panspermia hypothesis which posits that life exists throughout the universe and was seeded on Earth via comets, asteroids, space dust, or shooting stars. It's an old idea - very old; even the ancient Greeks were speculating along these lines and the first known use of the term is found in the writings of the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras.

More recently, Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe have been influential proponents of the theory; indeed, the latter is one of the authors of the new paper on alien cephalopods. He and his colleagues argue that so suddenly did octopuses evolve their astonishing features (including large brains and a sophisticated nervous sytem) that it is plausible to suggest they were "borrowed from a far distant future [...] or more realistically from the cosmos at large".

Having said that, the authors concede that such an extraterrestrial explanation for the emergence of these and other unusual features does run "counter to the prevailing dominant paradigm". And, of course, there are good reasons why this is so ...

For a start, it's borderline crackpot; although they may not wear tinfoil hats, not one of the authors is a zoologist and much of the speculation rests on the claim that the genetics of the octopus is uniquely mysterious. A 2015 paper published in Nature, however, revealed that the genome of the creature in question had been fully and successfully mapped and one of the things it showed was how the octopus fits into the generally accepted theory of (terrestrial) evolution.

Thus there's simply no need to imagine an alien origin - no matter how otherworldly the octopus may be in appearance or how unnatural its abilities may seem to us.        

See: J. Steele et al, 'Cause of Cambrian Explosion - Terrestrial or Cosmic?', Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, (available online 13 March, 2018): click here. 

For an earlier post in praise of the octopus that anticipates this one, click here.