Alien?

>>18837796
That's a tardigrade, a.k.a. waterbear. I don't think they're dangerous, unless you're a unicellular organism.

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https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap170326.html

I don't understand why we don't put millions of those in tiny bullets and spray them everywhere in every direction in space, the would survive in outer space , and in thousand, or millions of years when they hit something , like a planet or asteroid, they would reproduce and multiply, eventually a few more thousands and millions of years and they evolve into more complex life forms, in the end, Earth life could populate the galaxies and universe.

>>18837864
c-cute! :3c

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It appears to me to be wearing some sort of space suit or protective bio suit.

>>18837882
How do you think life got here?

Follow link in: >>18837864

>>18837888

those can't be real living creatures, they don't exist, that looks like a stuffed animal made out of paper, look at the perfectly circle mouth, like a button.

>>18837898
Jealous you dumb asymmetrical human?

>Tardigrades are the most resilient animal known: they can survive extreme conditions that would be rapidly fatal to nearly all other known life forms. They can withstand temperature ranges from 1 K (−458 °F; −272 °C) (close to absolute zero) to about 420 K (300 °F; 150 °C), pressures about six times greater than those found in the deepest ocean trenches, ionizing radiation at doses hundreds of times higher than the lethal dose for a human, and the vacuum of outer space. They can go without food or water for more than 30 years, drying out to the point where they are 3% or less water, only to rehydrate, forage, and reproduce.

Tardigrade=water bear. Nice example of a solid osmooregulator we got here.

>>18837882
The biggest reason is that we're still fuzzy as to how life arose on our planet to begin with, and learning about alien biology could be a potential answer in itself.

Consider the following; what happens if we discover life on another planet that just so happens to be carbon based and utilizes the same 4 base pairs we do?

It could mean 1 of 3 things;
1) Both this life and our life are the result of panspermia
2) Convergent evolution means life MUST arise a specific way
3) We inadvertently contaminated the planet

The first two have broad sweeping implications that hold the key to the origin of life, but the last one tells us nothing we didn't already know about life. Furthermore, there's also a potential risk of contaminating alien life with our own, instigating extinction. Again, destruction of information.

I'm not against deliberate panspermia by any means. But should first establish that we are truly alone before LITERALLY mqking friends.

The reason they are so tough is the cellular repair mechanism for rehydration allows them to steal dna bits from other sources while they are fixing their own cells. Rapid mutation is the result.

>>18837882
just so you know, while we have observed tardigrades surviving in a vacuum, we have only observed this in an experiment spanning a period of 10 days
tardigrades go into a "tun" state to survive these ridiculous conditions and then revive after conditions are more favorable
the "revival" rate after 10 days was below 70% and the subsequent mortality rate for the next hour or so was huge
with solar radiation included the survival rate is even lower to the point where a single digit number of specimens were alive after a 10 day period
tl;dr: you cant just blast these niggers into space and expect them to be fine on their own
t. marine bio major who knows how to use google

>>18837860
[they are onto me]

>>18837860
You can't fool me tardigrade.

>>18838220
Can confirm. It is extremely unlikely that they could survive the travel time on an asteroid. That being said, they're resilient as hell and could possibly survive in extremely hostile environments on other planets/moons.

t.biochemist

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>>18837796
I've seen these things before

>>18837882
except there are far more reasonable and plausible ways to achieve what you are proposing

>>18839521
Like what? What could be more efficient than spreading life throughout the universe than the tardigrade? They are tiny so you could pack millions of them into a tiny spec of sand, and then shoot those sand pieces into other galaxies at near lightspeed. In a million years those millions of sand pieces would hit millions of planets. If only a few of them survived then they would multiple and transform that entire planet. A million years, if that planet survives, there would be intelligent space faring species, that originated from Earth.

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>>18841061
Watson, of Watson and Crick DNA fame, was a big fan of this theory of how life spread. Unfortunately he coined the term 'Panspermia' for it. Panspermia? Come on, that's Bevis and Butthead level there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

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⭕

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>>18837796

>>18837904
let me correct this sentence for you

>Jealous? You dumb asymmetrical human.

Now get back to English class when the bell rings

>>18841061
>What could be more efficient than spreading tardigrades?

Oh I don't know, maybe the several other zooplanktons or amoebas.

>>18837904
t. waternigger

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Any freaky photos like this?

>>18841061
You could achieve something similar by spreading bacterial endospores, which are as resistant as tardigrades (if not more). They're smaller and you can fit even more in a capsule that you could tardigrades.

Also, in the unlikely case that this experiment actually got anywhere where these spores somehow could grow, the mutation rate of the fully functional bacteria would probably be higher and evolution would be made easier than if you could find a place to grow tardigrades.

>>18844346
Also also, considering the luck the spores would need to end up in a place they can grow in, the time it would take for them to reach said place in the huge void of space, and the millions of years evolution itself takes even when it goes fast (and assuming we could monitor the whole thing through somehow), the experiment would probably lose all meaning for the human society that might be there to watch by the time the spores get to do something interesting. Bacterial endospores are not gods anyways; they can stick around for millions of years but eventually radiation or whatever shit will deteriorate them too much to do anything, but one can dream.

Imagine if 3 or 4 million years from now humans (if they're still around) discover life in another planet with similar carbon basis to our own, unaware that those are descendants of earth bacteria that got there because of humans that existed 3 or 4 million years ago.

>>18844311
no pics but that particular bug is from a movie called Starship Troopers if you want to find more shit like that.

>>18837963
why do you know this word

>>18844827
Any tardigrade porn?