Reference: Tardigrades Survive Being Shot Out of a Gun at Speeds up to 2,000 Mph (businessinsider.com)
Tardigrades are “also known as water bears or moss piglets. . . . these 0.05-inch-long organisms look like eight-legged potatoes with scrunched up faces and tiny paws under a microscope. . . . The critters can withstand temperatures between minus 458 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 272 degrees Celsius) and 304 degrees Fahrenheit (151 degrees Celsius) and pressure up to six times that of the deepest part of Earth’s oceans. . . . Tardigrades can go without water and oxygen for long periods of time in a state of suspended animation called cryptobiosis, in which their bodies dry up and their metabolisms shut down. . . . “
Thus when an Israeli spaceship carrying a bunch of tardigrades crash-landed on the Moon in 2019, scientists assumed they had survived. But scientists, being what they are, had to know. So some genius decided hey, let’s shoot a bunch of tardigrades out of a big gun at high speeds to see if they would have survived the impact of crashing into the Moon.
Someone somehow finagled some research money from somewhere, and Alejandra Traspas, an astrochemist at Queen Mary University in London and her pals came up with some tests to see whether tardigrades could have survived crashing on the Moon or not.
“To test the theory [that they survived], Traspas’ team froze 20 tardigrades (to get them to hibernate), loaded them into hollow nylon bullets, and fired them at sandbags using a high-speed gun. They found the animals just couldn’t survive an impact if the bullet was fired at more than 2,000 miles per hour — only fragments of the tardigrades remained — because the pressure of 1.14 gigapascals from the impact was just too great.” “Being shot more than 2,000 mph meant the critters experienced 1.14 gigapascals of pressure on impact — that’s equivalent to the pressure of about 40,000 people standing on your back at once. “‘They just mush,'” Traspas told Science. . . . This suggests tardigrades that crash landed on the moon in 2019 did not survive.”
PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, is always the first one to throwing blood on people wearing fur coats or freeing lab testing animals or protesting cosmetic manufacturers’ torturing of cute bunnies to check out eyeliner formulations. Where are they when these poor tardigrades are herded into some lab, stuffed into hollow bullets, and then just blasted into oblivion, all for the sake of satisfying some nosy scientist’s idle curiosity? Where are the protesters? Why is this going unchallenged? Tardigrades are animals too, at least these scientists think so.
On their website, at www.peta.org, PETA loudly claims that ” Bigotry begins when categories such as race, age, gender, disability, sexual orientation, or species are used to justify discrimination. END SPECIESISM.” So these scientists turn out to be nothing more than “speciesists”. We’re not sure if that’s an actual insult, but it certainly sounds ugly – who wants to be called a speciesist?
Rabbits, monkeys, horses, elephants, apes of various sorts, cats, dogs, big cats, big dogs, chickens, cattle, dolphins, the list goes on and on of the species PETA claims to protect, but tardigrades are not mentioned anywhere on their website. SHAME ON YOU PETA! Scientists, in the name of science (and their own idle curiosity), who massacre poor innocent tardigrades who never did anyone any harm, should be ashamed of themselves too. Will no one stand up for the tiny tardigrade? Anyone? Remember, if no one cares enough to stand up for the tardigrades, will anyone stand up for you when the scientists come for you?