[extropy-chat] Death is irreversible - unless you are a cute little moss piglet.

[The Avantguardian]

Behold the "water bears" aka "moss piglets" - phylum
tardigrada. Yeah, they have their own phylum all to
themselves with about 650 representative species. 

The videos on the first site are exceptionally cool.
http://www.tardigrades.com/
http://www.iwu.edu/~tardisdp/tardigrade_facts.html

When the going gets rough, they can just shut down
metabolism to undetectable levels in a process called
cryptobiosis that theoretically last for a century or
more. Then when things start looking up again, they
come back to life and pick up right where they left
off. They make their own cyroprotectant that lets them
run around at temperatures below freezing. They can
survive, high and low pressures, heat, cold,
dessication, acids, solvents, and tons of radiation.  


Yeah so what? Lots of microorganisms make
ultra-resistant spores that cheat death you say? Well
the really cool thing about these guys is that they
don't form spores but instead they turn into little
corpses called tuns that look like little mummified
versions of themselves. Furthermore they are not
bacteria, not fungi, and are not even unicellular
organisms, but bona fide ANIMALS composed of cells and
organs. They have eyes, muscles, legs, claws, and even
multi-lobed BRAINS. They come in male and female
varieties and have red-hot-animal-sex. I wonder if
they subscribe to the thread or pattern view of
consciousness? :)




Stuart LaForge
alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu

"A human being is part of the whole called by us 'the universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

-St. Einstein

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