This news item suggests that an Israeli organisation introduced a number of dehydrated Tardigrades aka moss piglets or water bears to the moon in April 2019. These are indestructible multi cellular organisms capable of regenerating back to life.
Did they acquire permission to do this? Why did they think this was a good idea. What kind of punishment is appropriate?
Since the news item also suggests that the water bears’ arrival was due to an unintended crash landing of the spacecraft, I’m gonna go with “Probably not,” “irrelevant,” and “irrelevant.”
Besides, we might just visit in a thousand years or so and discover that they’ve terraformed the place for us. Thank you, Israeli scientists!
In fact, have any of the Panspermia theorists considered the possibility that tardigrades might be the vehicle through which our planet gave rise to (eventually) Homo Sapiens?
We’d better hope that climate change doesn’t come to the moon.
An appropriate punishment might be to sneak into Israeli researchers’ homes and sprinkle dehydrated moss piglets on their beds and furniture. :eek:
According to this Wired article it’s not a problem.
Fortunately for Spivack and the Arch Mission Foundation, spewing DNA and water bears across the moon is totally legal. NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection classifies missions based on the likelihood that their targets are of interest to our understanding of life. As such, missions destined for places like Mars are subject to more stringent sterilization processes than missions to the Moon, which has few of the necessary conditions for life and isn’t at risk of contamination.
Read a bit further for astronaut poo :eek:
Impossible. All known life on Earth is related, as evidenced by the shared genetic code. If life arrived on Earth via panspermia rather than arising locally, then the organism that landed must be the common ancestor of all current life, including forms much simpler than tardigrades.
Which isn’t even getting into the basic absurdity of panspermia, namely, that if life didn’t come from Earth, then it must have come from somewhere even more improbable.
Well, it’s not like the water bears are going to do anything there. Unless someone goes and gets them, they’ll just stay dormant until they get killed by radiation.
If there is ever a movie made called Attack of the Water Bears from the Moon, this line will be spoken by some distinguished looking scientist within the first ten minutes of the film.
They are hardy in ways that seem absurd to humans, but they are not indestructible. Experiments exposing them to the hazards of space show that it’s unlikely a future mission can pick them up and revive them.
From the Tardigrade article on Wikipedia.
So a third of them were killed by the conditions of space in 10 days.
Tardigrades aren’t indestructible, that’s just toxic minusculinity.
I’m not aware that NASA had any criminal law jurisdiction over the Moon or Israel.
Right, that’s the LunacyIA.
I think contaminating the moon is a ship that’s long since sailed; in the article referenced above by gregorio, the Apollo astronauts left nearly 100 bags of poop on the moon.
And of course the radiation will have mutated the water bears to the size of the insects in Them!. But it needs a catchier name. Hmmm…
Revenge of the Tardigrades
The Moss Piglets Strike Back
Tardigrades have a microbiome - so I guess it’s possible (albeit unlikely) that tardigrades served as tiny colony ships
Snerk. 
Yep, but honestly they will just stay dormant until they die- radiation, meteorite, etc.
“Where did life come from?”
“Easy: Outer space! It came here on a comet! Problem solved!”
“But that doesn’t solve anything! It just pushes it out to wherever the comet came from.”
“Problem. Solved.”
You can’t solve a problem by pushing it around on your plate a little bit.
I’ll take tardigrades on the moon over whalers on the moon.
It’s just tardigrades all the way down.
Jeff Goldblum will get a curious look on his face when it gets said, he may or may not rebut but he WILL inhale sharply.
US law is relevant here because the mission concerned originated in the US - it took of from Cape Canaveral, courtesy of US company Spaceflight Industries, which provided and operated the launch vehicle. The mission payload doesn’t escape US jurisdiction on the basis of being owned by a non-US agency.
If US law forbade missions transporting living organisms to the moon, the mission would not have proceeded - or not from the US, anyway.