September 5, 2019 • 35 mins
How did tardigrades end up on the moon? Today we're joined by special guest Prof. Brian Keating
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Okay, or Hey, how long do you think life on
Earth will last? I mean human life or just life
in general on Earth. So let's assume the humanity somehow
manages to off itself. What do you think is going
to survive? I'm not sure we can. We have to
assume that it's looking pretty probable these days. Probably some
(00:29):
of the stuff in the back of my fridge that
looks pretty pretty hardy. It's been there for thousands and
millions of years. Well, my wife would like that answer,
since she's a microbiologist. They are a tough bunch microbes.
But let's think bigger. What about multicellular life. You think
anything like that could survive like an actual like animal organism. Yeah, um, don't.
They say cockroaches can survive in nuclear explosion, But I'm
(00:53):
not sure that's true. I'm not sure that's true either.
I think it's just good pr by the cockroach lobby.
But there is something on Earth that is eve and
tougher than the conquerae. I hear it's cuter too. That's
not a very high barred pass. I am Orge, I'm
(01:22):
a cartoonism the creator of PhD Comics. Hi, I'm Daniel,
I'm a particle physicist, and welcome to our podcast, Daniel
and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I Heart
Radio in which we go all around the universe and
find interesting, weird, crazy, little creepy crawley stuff to talk
to you about and explain it to you in a
way that hopefully you find entertaining. Cute little creatures and
(01:44):
also horrifyingly scary looking creatures sometimes they're even the same organism.
That's true, you know, Um, there are lots of things
which look scary when they're big, and that are just
cute and cuddly when they're small. Like if you walk
next to a mountain lion, you'd be freaked out. Everybody's
house cat is basically a miniaturized mountain lion. It's all
about the scale. It's all about the scale. The opposite
(02:06):
is true. Also, take anything you find cute a dragonfly,
and make it the size of a school bus, and
all of a sudden, it's terrifying. It's terrifying. Yeah, so
some things are cute when they're tiny and terrifying when
they're huge, and one of kind of like children too
in corrupt into teenagers. Terrifying cute is a toddlers terrifying
(02:29):
as teens exactly, and especially terrifying if you're toddler grows
up to be the size of a school bus. So
if you never were going to talk about something that's
been on the news lately, right, Daniel, it's been apparently
it's now been colonizing the moon lately. That's right. This
is a fascinating little creature. It's a bit of a
departure for us because it's not quite physics, but it
appeared in the news recently. And also we had a
(02:50):
listener right in and say this is her favorite thing
in the whole world, and could we please talk about
it on the podcast. Her favorite thing in the world.
Is this creature that we're going to talk about, Yes, exactly?
Is this that it may now be colonizing the moon? Exactly?
So today on the program we'll be talking about cart grade.
(03:13):
What is the tart grade and why are they so interesting?
And how did they end up on the moon? That's
the question we'll be talking about today. Yeah, it turns
out there are a crazy little creature that can do
things no other creature we know of can do. So
it's quite amazing. Yeah, and it's also a little bit
cute slash terrifying at the same time. So if you
(03:33):
are not driving right now and have a moment, you're
welcome to past our podcast right now and just go
on the internet and search for images of Tardi grades
and what you will find will both make you go
all and if you imagine one the size of a
school bus. So yeah, tart grades are um these creatures
(03:55):
and they look wild right like, if you could look
at a picture of them, they look like monstrous from
a science fiction movie. They do look like crazy little creatures.
And you know, usually at this point in the podcast,
we go in and we ask people on the street
what they know about the subject. But today we're doing
something a little bit different. Today instead of starting with
asking people on the street what they think at hard
(04:15):
to Grade is, We're going to try a news segment
today called Ask the Wrong Expert, which we bring somebody
on is a world class expert on one topic and
ask him about something completely different that's right. And I
feel like this is only fair since I'm always springing
questions on random people at you see Irvine, they're not experts,
(04:35):
and what I'm asking them about and we hear them
speculate and sometimes struggle and guests. So I thought it
might be fun to also hear what happens when you
ask an expert, a scientist about something they don't know
anything about. And so to the on the program, we
have our good friend Brian Keating. Welcome Brian, right, guys,
great to be with you again virtually through the ether. Alright. So,
Brian is a professor of astrophysics at you see San
(04:56):
Diego's Department of Physics. He has over a hundred scientific
public asian and holds two US patents. Tell it, Brian,
what do you what kind of what are you an
expert in? My specialty is experimental cosmology, So I build
new universes, and no I don't do that. I build
telescopes that can see invisible radiation known as the cosmic
(05:17):
microwave background radiation. And my number one project now is
going to be one of the world's highest altitude observatories
on Earth, called the Simon's Observatory. I'm the director of it,
and it's a collaboration of about two hundred and sixties
scientists on all seven continents on planet Earth. Brian, you're
also the author of a book called losing the Noble Prize.
(05:39):
That Buck was published in eighteen and the Pipe paperback edition,
the new and improved paperback edition is about to come
out any day now. It's a really fun book for
those of you who haven't checked it out. It chronicles
Brian's adventures and misadventures in physics um, which I think
is really fascinating. I think it's really brave of you
to talk all about how your experiment thought they saw
(06:01):
something and then turns out they didn't. This two part
memoir really a part of it's a story about what
it's like to actually do experimental science. You know, a
lot of our colleagues, you know, Daniel, you excluded, but
a lot of our colleagues brainiac scientists as they are,
are theoreticians, which means that they deal at the esoterica
between their ears and and perhaps to be discovered centuries
(06:23):
long after they're gone. Uh. And these include you know,
wonderful writers Stephen Hawking, Brian Green, Lisa Randall, etcetera, etcetera.
And they're wonderful, as they say, and they inspire us.
But an experimentalist, in some sense has a unique vantage
point on the process of how science is done. So
I want to chronicle what it's like to do experimental
science at the world's extremes and what it's how it
(06:46):
took me from a small telescope as a twelve year
old kid all the way to the bottom of the
Earth at the South Pole, Antarctica, where I've been several
times and done research along with the team that thought
we had glimpsed the afterglow of what's called inflation. I
know you guys have done some some podcast episodes on that.
I won't get into too much detail, but suffice it
to say, inflation is the epoch theorized by theorists, our
(07:09):
friends Alan Gooth and others, to have produced the the
bang in the Big Bang, the what caused the expansion
of the universe to accelerate incredibly rapidly at extremely early times.
And when we made this announcement on St. Patrick's Day,
the world was really uh in awe that we had discovered,
as they say, the aftershocks of of the Big Bang itself,
(07:30):
so to speak. This set the world's attention and media
on fire, with millions and millions of people around the
world excited about these discoveries, and as I recount in
the book the extraordinary experience that it was like to
be once be the leader of this team and then
go to being kind of on the outskirts of it,
just as we were being positioned to potentially be the
recipients of the Nobel Prize for the magnitude of this discovery.
(07:53):
So it's a memoir of that process. And then along
the way, immediately after the Dnument, as they say, of
that episode, I was asked by the Swedish Royal Academy
of Sciences to nominate the winners of the Nobel Prize
that I potentially could have been eligible for. So it
would be kind of like, you know, somebody coming up
to you and saying, you know, guys, you guys have
a great podcast, but can you introduce me to Neil
(08:15):
de grasse Tyson because I'd really rather be on that show.
Uh So it's kind of humiliating in a sense, and
because I had aspired to win a Nobel Prize for
a long time and it really impelled me to look
at the Nobel Prize and what it did to me
personally and perhaps other scientists around the world too, So
it was sort of cathartic in a way. And many
scientists have written to say that they agree with the
(08:37):
kind of um conjectures and proposals that I put forth
to reform what's arguably not just science is highest honor,
but humanity's highest honor. There's really, you know, nowhere to
go from there but down in terms of accolades that
a human being can receive. So it's a it's a
memoir coupled with a little polemic, you know, dash side
order of polemicism on the side, and received any feedback.
(09:00):
The Nobel Prize committee themselves they opened your reform proposals.
Oh yes, they embrace it wildly. They want to adopt
them completely, change it to the Keating prose. You want
to give the Nobel Prize in Literature just for the book.
So being hausin Felder, I guess I'm sure you guys know.
She she wrote a kind of a critical review of
(09:20):
my book, but in the end she said, the writing
is so good, you know, maybe he'll win. He'll lose
the Nobel Prize in Literature next but losing another losing
his second Nobel prize exactly, all right, Brian, So you
are an expert in astrophysics and the Big Bang and cosmology,
and experimental physics. But today we are going to be
asking you about today's topic, which is about Tarty grades.
(09:44):
Have you heard of Tarty grades before? Yes? I used
to receive a lot of negative ones in school for
being late. Get it, Get it? That's quite good, Yes,
I I I know about Tartar grades. I don't call
them tart gredes. They called them water bears alight and
and I understand there's not only plenty of them on Earth,
but there's also a few in the heavens. That's right,
(10:07):
they have established. And maybe you are an expert in
Tarte grades, then well let's find out. The point of
this game asked the wrong expert is to see how
scientists think when we take them out of there, you know,
the little niche that they've developed an expertise in, and
asked them to think carefully about something else. And so
that's why, Brian, we wanted to ask you questions about
something that wasn't your field. So feel free to answer
(10:28):
wildly and share your thoughts. And you haven't had time
to look this up in Google or anything right right
now aloud, I'm not looking on with right now. I
promise you first question is true or false. Tarte grades
are sometimes called moss piglets. Moss piglets, I'll say true,
(10:51):
all right, true or false. The name Tartar grade means
slow moving. That sounds about right. True, alright, true or false.
Daniel named one of his children after Tartar grades. No,
but I know that you have some rats in the house,
so maybe you're named a rat after our tartar grade.
You have water bears in your house, has water rats,
(11:13):
and I'm sure actually everybody does have water bears in
their house there everywhere. Yeah, all right, well you are
three for three on that one, Brian, I'm verily impressed.
Thank you. I'd like to thank the Academy, the Noble Academy.
You're not done yet. We got more. There is a
Nobel Prize for podcast guessing. Podcast guessing. Alright. Second question, Brian,
(11:39):
is which involves first Tartar grades or dinosaurs. Oh that's
a good one. Um, you mean which is old or not?
I'm in their presumably co evolved at some points water
bear or the dinosaur. I'm gonna say some form of dinosaur,
some form of creature would have free dated them. Maybe,
(12:00):
So you're going with dinosaurs. I'll go with some form
of well, actually you're making hedgehogging. I'm most pickling. Well,
I appreciate your change direction. There. You're correct in your
final answer, they're not your preliminary one. Tarte grade do
outdate the dinosaurs. Wow, they don't look a day over sixty.
(12:23):
Al right. Next question, Tarte grades can live almost anywhere.
But where did they like to live? A volcanoes be
undervending machines? See a two bedroom condo in Hollywood or
d any place damp? I'm gonna go with the last one. Date.
I think lots of two bedroom condos in Hollywood are
(12:43):
probably pretty damp. Also, that's true too, Yeah, maybe, yeah,
that's true. They can live wherever they want. Probably they
can live in space. They don't need water. So I'm
gonna gonna revise my answer. But see them. No, your
first answer was right, It's all right, all right. Next
question is what's the highest temperature a Tarte grade can tolerate?
Is it a hundred degrees fahrenheit? B three hundred degrees
(13:07):
fahrenheit see one million degrees fahrenheit or D They haven
survived LHC collisions at five point five million degrees. I'm
gonna go with b you are a good guess or
Brian that you have a very very deep knowledge our
fast internet connection. Just kidding, I doubt Are you feeding
(13:27):
all these questions into Siri? Is she listening in and answers?
All right? Last question, which the two scenarios is more
likely in your opinion? A A robot revolution in which
we all become slaves to artificial intelligence or B Tarte
Grades building a civilization on the moon and becoming our
lunar overlords. Well, we know that they're living there now.
(13:49):
They got their courtesy of an Israeli spacecraft. I'll say A.
It is more likely because these these little Carte grades
are you know we're going to keep them at bay
on the moon. All right, Well, it's it's good to
know that you worry more about AI revolution than the
coming of our lunar apocalypse. I want to see that
movie where we become slaves to the artificial intelligence robots,
(14:10):
but then the Tarting Grades come down from the moon
to save us. Just a great giant battle between water
bears and robots, even some dinosaurs you get throw in.
This is giving me an idea for a new book.
It's start a grade hypothesis. That's a literature Nobel prize
right there. That's right, yeah, team up with Michael Bay.
I'm sure there'll be a big hit. That's right. I'll
share you share the opening credits with each other. All right,
(14:32):
thank you very much for playing our silly game and
doing so well. We need to come up with some
sort of prize. How about ten Tarte grades. Are you
going to record his answering machine, Daniel or maybe? All right, Well,
thanks very much for being a guest on the podcast,
and folks, check out Brian's book. Tell us again, Brian,
what it's called. It's called Losing the Nobel Prize and
(14:53):
it is available in paperback as we speak, hopefully, all right,
so check that out and you can lose your own
Nobel prize. Alright, So Brian did pretty well on our quiz.
I was impressed with how well he was able to
answer questions about something he does not have a PhD in.
And so we'll get into what a tardy grade is,
where can it survive and where can you find them?
(15:14):
But first let's take a quick break. All right, we're
talking about Tardi grades. What are they? What are they
so funny looking? Are they so cute and scary at
(15:36):
the same time. They are crazy little creatures. And so
for those of you who don't have a Google image
in front of you, let's try to sketch it out
for you in your mind. Oh man, let's let's try
to paint the nightmare. Yeah, exactly. And remember they're tiny, alright.
So first of all, these things are tiny. They range
from point three to one point two millimeters, so they're
(15:56):
absolutely microscopic. But they do look a little bit like bears,
I mean, except that they have eight legs. Yeah. I
think if anyone's not not seen him of these before,
I would describe them as like little plush teddy bear
animals with like giant claws and horrifying mouth with teeth.
(16:16):
That's kind of The face is horrifying, right, You've got
the legs, so they've got eight legs, four on each side,
with little claws in them, and there's sort of poofy
like a pillow, you say. But the mouth, the face,
that's the part that's terrifying because there's no discernible eyes.
It's just like list sucking thing in the front, relying
with teeth all around. Right, Yeah, have you are you
a watcher of Stranger Things. I am. Yeah, I'm a
(16:37):
huge fan. Yeah. I think that these things might have
been the inspiration for the demigorg or whatever that thing
is that comes out of the upside down, because it
also has this eyeless face that's featuring just a big mouth, yeah,
line with a bunch of teeth. Yeah, exactly. So I
think this thing would be really terrifying. If it was
the size of a school bus or you know, even
like a red wagon, it would be pretty scary. But
(17:00):
the fact that it's microscopic means that you know, it
can't really do you any harm. But still it's it's
pretty scary. And even though I know that there are
only like a millimeter or less than a millimeter in length,
it's scary to think that those things are out there.
It could be on me, inside of me. Maybe, I
don't know. They're almost certainly some on you. I mean,
these things are found everywhere. There are in sand dunes,
(17:22):
there in soil, They're in leaf litter, they're in water,
especially like any sort of damp place at all, you'll
find them. And if you scoop up, like you know,
a leader of sort of gunky water near the edge
of a pond. You probably get about twenty five thousand
of them in a leader like any old pond all
over the world, from the tops of mountains to you know,
(17:43):
wet goopie places to basically everywhere. These things have adapted
to live in almost every environment on Earth. And just
to be clear, are they insects? Are they bugs? Are
they like bacteria? What? What? What are they? What are
they officially classify under? Well, they are not back to
rear right there, multicellular. There actually are an animal. They're
officially categorized as an micro animal. But they're in the
(18:06):
Kingdom and Animalia. They're not an insect, they're not bacteria,
they're not a microbe. But they are just a tiny, tiny,
tiny little animal. And genetically people think that they evolved
to be tiny from something larger. Oh no, kidding, they
started out bigger. Yeah, that's that's not scary at all, exactly.
It's an example of miniaturization. And you know, I love
when this thing, when this happens in evolution, when things
(18:28):
like change dramatically in scale, you know, like horses used
to be much smaller, and whales evolved from something much smaller,
and these tartar grades evolved from something larger, like we
don't know exactly how much larger that there are some
fossilized versions, but it's a bit of speculation. But imagine, like,
you know, there could have been like a time when
they were big tarte grades roaming the Earth. Yeah, like
a hand sized tarte grade or maybe even bigger. But yeah,
(18:50):
these are one of the tiniest little animals on Earth.
And they've been on the news lately because apparently they've
made it all the way to the Moon. Somehow. There
is now life on the Moon. There is now life
on the Moon. Yes, this is really landed. They sent
up to the moon UM had this project on it
to sort of record human and Earth DNA, and they said,
you know, if something goes wrong on the Earth, it
(19:12):
might be good to have sort of like a backup
copy of people and all sorts of other stuff somewhere
else that's protected. So they were flying to the Moon
and they thought, oh, let's put some you know, human
DNA UM to bring up to the Moon and while
we're at it, we'll bring some tart grades. What could
go wrong and go wrong And then of course it
crash landed right, and a lot of it was vaporized,
(19:33):
and people think that nothing survived except maybe the tart
degrades because they are really tough little critters. They are
really really hard to kill. Yeah, so that's kind of
what they're known for, rights is their hardiness and their
ability to survive even the craziest of environments. Yeah, they
are really hard to kill, and people have found them
in all sorts of places on Earth, Like they found
(19:55):
them in hot springs, they find them in the Himalayas,
they found them on the bottom of the the ocean,
they find them in layers of solid ice, and they've
done all sorts of crazy experiments on them just to
sort of test how far they can push the survival
of a tartar grade. Wow. So what are some of
the most extreme conditions that we know that they can survive. Well,
one thing they've done is just like dose them with radiation,
(20:17):
because you know, radiation is one thing that kills people,
and it kills people when you're an outer space, so
when you're in the surface of the Earth, and so
what they've done is just like stick them in the microwave.
See what happens with some grapes, which is more exciting. Yeah,
exactly know, they just like blasted them with gamma rays,
you know. And it turns out that tarte grades can
survive radiation doses that would kill humans and even more like,
(20:40):
they can survive radiation doses that are hundreds of times
the radiation dose that would be deadly to a human being. Wow.
But my question is how can they do that? How
can they survive all of that radiation? Is are they
just made out of like tougher materials or the the
DNA is more I don't know, more like redundant or
(21:02):
what's what's your secret? There are some organisms that are
called extremal files that are adapted to live in crazy
environments like high radiation, etcetera. And some of those bacteria,
for example, they have extra copies of their DNA and
just in case one of them gets blasted, they can
recopy them, right, And so that's adapting for living in
those environments. Tarte grades aren't like that. They're not adapted
(21:23):
to live in these environments. They just sort of can
survive because they're extra tough and one and the way
they do is they have this special protein inside their
body um that protects them. And these proteins can turn
into glass and help them survive when it gets really
really dry, or when there's a lot of radiation, or
basically when anything happens. Yeah, exactly, but it's arm inside.
(21:47):
It's not like a shell. It's something inside the body.
Because the thing that happens when you get hit by
radiation is that the stuff inside your body gets torn apart. Right,
it's the same problem that when you freeze. For example,
why can you not freeze the human being and then
fall them out? The reason is that when water freezes,
it gets bigger, right, Ice is bigger than liquid water,
(22:08):
and so each of your cells, for example, is a
little bag of water, and when it freezes, it turns
into ice, which is bigger than the cell membrane, and
it basically bursts the cell. And so wa, wait wait
wait you mean Captain America could not have survived being
frozen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, not a documentary Starry
to Break Too. But somehow these um little animals they
(22:32):
can survive being frozen, and they can survive super high
temperatures and pressures and radiation. And you're saying it's all
because they something in like the liquid of their cells
or something surrounding their cells kind of gives them that protection. Yeah,
it's like the liquid that's inside their cells is different
from the liquid that's inside our cells. And it's hardier. Um,
(22:54):
And that's not heartier, like you make a better soup,
though maybe it would. I don't know what tartar grade
soup taste like. But it's hardier, like it's more robust.
But chances are you are probably eating a couple of
Tarte grades when you can drink your soup, right, every
soup is targegrade whatever. Um. Yeah, but it's the soup
of the inside their cells that's more robust. So for example,
(23:17):
when they when they freeze these proteins inside their cells,
turned into a kind of glass that protects the cell
right from the inside. Like like it crystallizes into something unbreakable. Yeah,
it's described as turning into glass. I know the glass
is not a crystal, so I'm not sure if crystallizing
is exactly correct, but essentially, yeah, it's instead of turning
(23:37):
into an ice cube, which is bigger than the drop
of water it originated from, it turns into this little
bit of glass. And they call this this has this
awesome name. They call it cryptobiosis, right man, And so
to survive these environments, the tartar grades, you know, these
proteins turned into glass and then they can do crazy
stuff like they can survive outer space. You can just
(24:00):
like throw tarte grades into space, collect them again and
add water and they wake up. Put them in the microwave.
What we haven't done is put them in the LHC.
That was a funny suggestion, but it's not something I'm
aware that we've actually done. It's like, well, put put
it in the next proposal, Daniel, you could you can
make a cryptobiotic breakthrough. I'm going to build a tartar
(24:22):
grade collider. I want to see what happens when you
accelerate tartar grades to the speed of light and collide
them against each other. So it's kind of almost the
opposite when they freeze, instead of forming crystals that might
break the cells, you're saying that it has some sort
of something in there in there inside of their bodies
that somehow hold it together, so that you maybe don't
get those crystals. That's right. You don't get sort of
ice crystals exactly. You get this other stuff which doesn't
(24:44):
expand because remember ice is sort of special right, ice
is one of the few things that when you freeze it,
it gets bigger. It's a special property of water. Most
things in the universe when you freeze and they get smaller.
And so this has some other stuff inside itsel so
that when it freezes, it doesn't get bigger and sort
of avoids popping even though we are mostly water. And
then how do they survive the high temperatures? Then? Is
(25:05):
it just like a thick skin or like a like
everything just held together better or what they're just held
together better? And so they can survive these high temperatures,
they can survive these super low temperatures. They can even
be dried out and um, you can you can suck
all the water out of these tartar grades and it
doesn't again, it doesn't like rearrange what's inside them in
(25:26):
a way that breaks them like naturally zips it up.
And so they've seen these tartar grades. They can get
down to like one percent of the normal moisture they have.
You know, it's like beef jerk. It's like tartar grade jerky.
And then you add water back and it's just like
flips up and goes about his business happily chumping away.
Do you think it remember, like, do you think it's
still thinking when it's dehydrated. I think we need to
(25:49):
have one on the podcast so we can ask these
kind of questions. Yeah, what is it like to be
for them to evolve the moon? And then we'll ask
him a question? So they can survive in you're saying
volcano even like hot springs kind of up in the mountains,
the bottom of the sea. Yeah, they can survive four
d twenty degrees kelvin. What Yeah, it's pretty crazy, down
(26:11):
to one degree kelvin all the way up to four
hundred and twenty degrees kelvin. It's really hard to kill
these things. What is four degrees kelling relatives little to
like water boiling or a fire. Kelvin is about a
hundred and fifty degrees celsius, which is higher than the
boiling point of water. So you can make targar grade
soup and the tartar grades will still be happily swimming
(26:32):
around inside, swimming around drinking. You're drinking with their horrifying mouth,
that's right. So when you eat tartar grade soup, are
you eating the tartar grades or are they eating you?
All right? And so they somehow ended up in space
because the Israelis put him there as an experiment to
see if they would survive the moon trip or or
in the moon. Is that kind of So they were
(26:53):
kind of thinking about landing these things on the moon
or not. They intended to land these things on the moon,
that was the idea, right, But they had them so
have contained in a special little device, and they were
of course in their crypto biotic state. Um. But when
it crash landed, you know, all that whole thing got
ruptured and they got you know, tossed out and they're
tumbling along on the surface of the Moon now, and
(27:14):
so you know, if the right drop of water hits them,
then they could wake up. And you might think, well,
there's no chance you're gonna get water on the Moon, right,
But that's not that unlikely because the surface of the
Moon is pelted constantly by a rubble from outer space
and some of that is ice, right, A huge back
into the stuff that's out there in the Solar System
is ice. So you have this momentary impact of basically
(27:35):
high speed ice on the surface of the Moon. If
it just happens to hit a tartar grade, it could
melt turn into water. Wake up that tarte grade. Hello,
you're on the moon. What what's going on? Where am I? What?
I'm on the moon? Last thing I knew I was
in Israel. Yeah, because when they go into this cryptobiotic state,
they're not dead right there, and they're not totally paused.
(27:59):
Their metabolism actually still going, but it goes down to
point oh one percent of its normal metabolism, so it's
like one in a thousand. So it's like your body
is running at one one thousands of its normal speed.
It's amazing. I don't know what that's like that, but
I'd love to know. All right, let's get into what
it means we have tart grades on the moon. But
first let's take a quick break. All right, we're talking
(28:33):
about Carti grades on the moon, and so there are
now tarty grades on the moon, kind of on purpose,
but kind of by accident. Also, right, I mean we
meant to send them to the moon, but they got out.
That's right, Like in a bad science fiction movie. Nobody
can imagine this stuff, and if they did, nobody would
believe it. Right, But it is our life, This is
our universe. There are tart grades on the Moon. We
(28:55):
don't know if they're walking around, We don't know if
they're munching on on stuff, but they are there, and
can they survive? Is there stuff for them to eat? What?
What did Tardi grades eat? Yeah, that's a great question.
Tarte grade they eat plants, and they eat little bacteria
because remember they're super tiny, and sometimes they also eat
tartar grades. So many, there's only one tart grade on
the move right now. It's one big tartar grade now
(29:17):
and it's hungry. It ain't all the other ones. It's
a grumpy tartar grade and it's looking to come back
to Earth for lunch. All right, Well, good job humans,
you've now colonized the moon, that's right, or our little allies, hopefully,
our friendly little allies have colonized the Moon. And you know,
it's funny to joke about, like, um, Tartar grades on
(29:38):
the Moon surviving some sort of global apocalypse or catastrophe
the humans bring on. But you know, Tartar grades have
already survived a lot of global catastrophes. Yeah, that's right,
they've been around. I mean we said it before. They're
they've been around longer than the dinosaurs, which means they've
they've seen it all. They've seen it all, they've seen
everything else come and go their board. Right, they're not
(30:01):
interested in climate change and nuclear apocalypse. To them, that's
no big deal. They've seen craziest stuff. You know, in
the history of our planet, we've had five of these
things we call mass extinctions, where something happens that changes
the climate or the environment and a lot of species die.
And we've had five of those so far. And tarte
grades um predate even the first one. They evolved before
(30:25):
the first mass extinction, and they're still here, which means
they've survived all five of them. Right, that's a little
suspicious if you ask me, if you think about it,
isn't it you think that makes them suspect number one?
I mean, there isn't any other suspect. I think it's
pretty awesome. I'm amazed. I love these little creatures. I mean,
I don't want to see one the size of a
(30:45):
school bus walking into my backyard. And they are a
little creepy, but they're also sort of awesome. Like what
evolutionary path led to them? Could we survive this way? Like?
Could we copy this technology somehow to become more radioactive,
more protective from radiation. It just it seems so awesome
when when evolution finds a little niche to reveal secrets
to you. And it's amazing to think about what we
(31:08):
must look like to them. You know, imagine being such
a hardy being and seeing all these other animals around
you that are really, if you think think about it,
compared to them, were super fragile and really vulnerable. That's right,
where these huge squishy meat bags. Right, all you have
to do is pocus and boom it's over. Yeah, just
(31:29):
a little pooke. These are crazy little creatures. There's also
a lot of really other fun little facts you can
learn about them, Like they actually molt like snakes. Do
you know they shed their skin? What? Yeah, they really
are tiny little creatures. I mean they're the size of microbes,
but they really are animals. It's sort of like ant man,
you know, like actually getting shrunk down to the microscopic
(31:51):
world and living among these creatures. Like they have organs
inside and everything. Oh yeah, no, they poop and everything,
Like they eat, they poop. They are little creatures. Yeah, absolutely,
there's tardy poop. They might be tarted podcasts for all
we know. So they molt like snakes. Yeah, they molt
like snakes, and there's lots of versions of them. There's
one that I find particularly hilarious that doesn't poop except
(32:14):
when it molts. It's like it holds it in for
months and then it gets rid of its skin and
just leaves it all behind. So I'm not sure we
really want to adopt like all of the culture of
these tartar grades. You know, there's some things we do
want to pick and choose. It's like a buffet. Well,
I don't know. You know, if you only have to
go to the bathroom once every couple of months, that
(32:35):
would save you a lot of time and conserve water
which might be in low supply in the future. Yeah,
that's true. If you're holding that all in, you might
also want to leave that skin behind because it seems
kind of soiled. All right. So those are Tardi grades,
little tiny, actual animals, not insects, not bugs, not bacteria,
but actual little animals that will probably outlive all of us,
(32:58):
almost certainly outlive all of us. And you know, each
individual Tartar grade doesn't actually live that long. They only
live for like three months, maybe up to two years.
But the course, yeah, they reproduce. I mean unless they
get frozen in space or something. Yeah, that's right. Yeah,
then they can live longer, but sort of like a
live time unfrozen time is is not that long. Um,
(33:18):
So it's not like they are like thousand year old
tartar grades combing the earth, you know, with ancient wisdom
in them or anything. Oh man, they're busy. They're busy,
getting busy. They are there, male tarte grades, their female
tartar grades as a whole society. You know, they probably
have dating apps. They've been around a lot longer than us,
so they've got this thing w Yeah, to survive at
(33:40):
that scale and that they must be pretty busy reproducing, right,
And they're definitely more tartar grades are unearthed than people.
All right, I'm just gonna go have some nightmares right now.
And just like your housecat would be terrifying if it
was larger, these things are tiny and so you don't
have to worry about them. Well, thanks to jays l
Her writing in and asking us to talk about teger grades.
(34:02):
There are a really fun subject. Hope you enjoyed it,
And when next time you look up at the moon,
you can know that we have some neighbors out there
and wave to the moon and be friendly because we
don't know what their intentions are. You ape you enjoyed that,
See you next time. If you still have a question
(34:24):
after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line.
We'd love to hear from you. You can find us
at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's
one Word, or email us at Feedback at Daniel and
Jorge dot com. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel
and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of I
Heart Radio. For more podcast from my Heart Radio, visit
(34:47):
the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Okay, or Hey, how long do you think life on
Earth will last? I mean human life or just life
in general on Earth. So let's assume the humanity somehow
manages to off itself. What do you think is going
to survive? I'm not sure we can. We have to
assume that it's looking pretty probable these days. Probably some
(00:29):
of the stuff in the back of my fridge that
looks pretty pretty hardy. It's been there for thousands and
millions of years. Well, my wife would like that answer,
since she's a microbiologist. They are a tough bunch microbes.
But let's think bigger. What about multicellular life. You think
anything like that could survive like an actual like animal organism. Yeah, um, don't.
They say cockroaches can survive in nuclear explosion, But I'm
(00:53):
not sure that's true. I'm not sure that's true either.
I think it's just good pr by the cockroach lobby.
But there is something on Earth that is eve and
tougher than the conquerae. I hear it's cuter too. That's
not a very high barred pass. I am Orge, I'm
(01:22):
a cartoonism the creator of PhD Comics. Hi, I'm Daniel,
I'm a particle physicist, and welcome to our podcast, Daniel
and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I Heart
Radio in which we go all around the universe and
find interesting, weird, crazy, little creepy crawley stuff to talk
to you about and explain it to you in a
way that hopefully you find entertaining. Cute little creatures and
(01:44):
also horrifyingly scary looking creatures sometimes they're even the same organism.
That's true, you know, Um, there are lots of things
which look scary when they're big, and that are just
cute and cuddly when they're small. Like if you walk
next to a mountain lion, you'd be freaked out. Everybody's
house cat is basically a miniaturized mountain lion. It's all
about the scale. It's all about the scale. The opposite
(02:06):
is true. Also, take anything you find cute a dragonfly,
and make it the size of a school bus, and
all of a sudden, it's terrifying. It's terrifying. Yeah, so
some things are cute when they're tiny and terrifying when
they're huge, and one of kind of like children too
in corrupt into teenagers. Terrifying cute is a toddlers terrifying
(02:29):
as teens exactly, and especially terrifying if you're toddler grows
up to be the size of a school bus. So
if you never were going to talk about something that's
been on the news lately, right, Daniel, it's been apparently
it's now been colonizing the moon lately. That's right. This
is a fascinating little creature. It's a bit of a
departure for us because it's not quite physics, but it
appeared in the news recently. And also we had a
(02:50):
listener right in and say this is her favorite thing
in the whole world, and could we please talk about
it on the podcast. Her favorite thing in the world.
Is this creature that we're going to talk about, Yes, exactly?
Is this that it may now be colonizing the moon? Exactly?
So today on the program we'll be talking about cart grade.
(03:13):
What is the tart grade and why are they so interesting?
And how did they end up on the moon? That's
the question we'll be talking about today. Yeah, it turns
out there are a crazy little creature that can do
things no other creature we know of can do. So
it's quite amazing. Yeah, and it's also a little bit
cute slash terrifying at the same time. So if you
(03:33):
are not driving right now and have a moment, you're
welcome to past our podcast right now and just go
on the internet and search for images of Tardi grades
and what you will find will both make you go
all and if you imagine one the size of a
school bus. So yeah, tart grades are um these creatures
(03:55):
and they look wild right like, if you could look
at a picture of them, they look like monstrous from
a science fiction movie. They do look like crazy little creatures.
And you know, usually at this point in the podcast,
we go in and we ask people on the street
what they know about the subject. But today we're doing
something a little bit different. Today instead of starting with
asking people on the street what they think at hard
(04:15):
to Grade is, We're going to try a news segment
today called Ask the Wrong Expert, which we bring somebody
on is a world class expert on one topic and
ask him about something completely different that's right. And I
feel like this is only fair since I'm always springing
questions on random people at you see Irvine, they're not experts,
(04:35):
and what I'm asking them about and we hear them
speculate and sometimes struggle and guests. So I thought it
might be fun to also hear what happens when you
ask an expert, a scientist about something they don't know
anything about. And so to the on the program, we
have our good friend Brian Keating. Welcome Brian, right, guys,
great to be with you again virtually through the ether. Alright. So,
Brian is a professor of astrophysics at you see San
(04:56):
Diego's Department of Physics. He has over a hundred scientific
public asian and holds two US patents. Tell it, Brian,
what do you what kind of what are you an
expert in? My specialty is experimental cosmology, So I build
new universes, and no I don't do that. I build
telescopes that can see invisible radiation known as the cosmic
(05:17):
microwave background radiation. And my number one project now is
going to be one of the world's highest altitude observatories
on Earth, called the Simon's Observatory. I'm the director of it,
and it's a collaboration of about two hundred and sixties
scientists on all seven continents on planet Earth. Brian, you're
also the author of a book called losing the Noble Prize.
(05:39):
That Buck was published in eighteen and the Pipe paperback edition,
the new and improved paperback edition is about to come
out any day now. It's a really fun book for
those of you who haven't checked it out. It chronicles
Brian's adventures and misadventures in physics um, which I think
is really fascinating. I think it's really brave of you
to talk all about how your experiment thought they saw
(06:01):
something and then turns out they didn't. This two part
memoir really a part of it's a story about what
it's like to actually do experimental science. You know, a
lot of our colleagues, you know, Daniel, you excluded, but
a lot of our colleagues brainiac scientists as they are,
are theoreticians, which means that they deal at the esoterica
between their ears and and perhaps to be discovered centuries
(06:23):
long after they're gone. Uh. And these include you know,
wonderful writers Stephen Hawking, Brian Green, Lisa Randall, etcetera, etcetera.
And they're wonderful, as they say, and they inspire us.
But an experimentalist, in some sense has a unique vantage
point on the process of how science is done. So
I want to chronicle what it's like to do experimental
science at the world's extremes and what it's how it
(06:46):
took me from a small telescope as a twelve year
old kid all the way to the bottom of the
Earth at the South Pole, Antarctica, where I've been several
times and done research along with the team that thought
we had glimpsed the afterglow of what's called inflation. I
know you guys have done some some podcast episodes on that.
I won't get into too much detail, but suffice it
to say, inflation is the epoch theorized by theorists, our
(07:09):
friends Alan Gooth and others, to have produced the the
bang in the Big Bang, the what caused the expansion
of the universe to accelerate incredibly rapidly at extremely early times.
And when we made this announcement on St. Patrick's Day,
the world was really uh in awe that we had discovered,
as they say, the aftershocks of of the Big Bang itself,
(07:30):
so to speak. This set the world's attention and media
on fire, with millions and millions of people around the
world excited about these discoveries, and as I recount in
the book the extraordinary experience that it was like to
be once be the leader of this team and then
go to being kind of on the outskirts of it,
just as we were being positioned to potentially be the
recipients of the Nobel Prize for the magnitude of this discovery.
(07:53):
So it's a memoir of that process. And then along
the way, immediately after the Dnument, as they say, of
that episode, I was asked by the Swedish Royal Academy
of Sciences to nominate the winners of the Nobel Prize
that I potentially could have been eligible for. So it
would be kind of like, you know, somebody coming up
to you and saying, you know, guys, you guys have
a great podcast, but can you introduce me to Neil
(08:15):
de grasse Tyson because I'd really rather be on that show.
Uh So it's kind of humiliating in a sense, and
because I had aspired to win a Nobel Prize for
a long time and it really impelled me to look
at the Nobel Prize and what it did to me
personally and perhaps other scientists around the world too, So
it was sort of cathartic in a way. And many
scientists have written to say that they agree with the
(08:37):
kind of um conjectures and proposals that I put forth
to reform what's arguably not just science is highest honor,
but humanity's highest honor. There's really, you know, nowhere to
go from there but down in terms of accolades that
a human being can receive. So it's a it's a
memoir coupled with a little polemic, you know, dash side
order of polemicism on the side, and received any feedback.
(09:00):
The Nobel Prize committee themselves they opened your reform proposals.
Oh yes, they embrace it wildly. They want to adopt
them completely, change it to the Keating prose. You want
to give the Nobel Prize in Literature just for the book.
So being hausin Felder, I guess I'm sure you guys know.
She she wrote a kind of a critical review of
(09:20):
my book, but in the end she said, the writing
is so good, you know, maybe he'll win. He'll lose
the Nobel Prize in Literature next but losing another losing
his second Nobel prize exactly, all right, Brian, So you
are an expert in astrophysics and the Big Bang and cosmology,
and experimental physics. But today we are going to be
asking you about today's topic, which is about Tarty grades.
(09:44):
Have you heard of Tarty grades before? Yes? I used
to receive a lot of negative ones in school for
being late. Get it, Get it? That's quite good, Yes,
I I I know about Tartar grades. I don't call
them tart gredes. They called them water bears alight and
and I understand there's not only plenty of them on Earth,
but there's also a few in the heavens. That's right,
(10:07):
they have established. And maybe you are an expert in
Tarte grades, then well let's find out. The point of
this game asked the wrong expert is to see how
scientists think when we take them out of there, you know,
the little niche that they've developed an expertise in, and
asked them to think carefully about something else. And so
that's why, Brian, we wanted to ask you questions about
something that wasn't your field. So feel free to answer
(10:28):
wildly and share your thoughts. And you haven't had time
to look this up in Google or anything right right
now aloud, I'm not looking on with right now. I
promise you first question is true or false. Tarte grades
are sometimes called moss piglets. Moss piglets, I'll say true,
(10:51):
all right, true or false. The name Tartar grade means
slow moving. That sounds about right. True, alright, true or false.
Daniel named one of his children after Tartar grades. No,
but I know that you have some rats in the house,
so maybe you're named a rat after our tartar grade.
You have water bears in your house, has water rats,
(11:13):
and I'm sure actually everybody does have water bears in
their house there everywhere. Yeah, all right, well you are
three for three on that one, Brian, I'm verily impressed.
Thank you. I'd like to thank the Academy, the Noble Academy.
You're not done yet. We got more. There is a
Nobel Prize for podcast guessing. Podcast guessing. Alright. Second question, Brian,
(11:39):
is which involves first Tartar grades or dinosaurs. Oh that's
a good one. Um, you mean which is old or not?
I'm in their presumably co evolved at some points water
bear or the dinosaur. I'm gonna say some form of dinosaur,
some form of creature would have free dated them. Maybe,
(12:00):
So you're going with dinosaurs. I'll go with some form
of well, actually you're making hedgehogging. I'm most pickling. Well,
I appreciate your change direction. There. You're correct in your
final answer, they're not your preliminary one. Tarte grade do
outdate the dinosaurs. Wow, they don't look a day over sixty.
(12:23):
Al right. Next question, Tarte grades can live almost anywhere.
But where did they like to live? A volcanoes be
undervending machines? See a two bedroom condo in Hollywood or
d any place damp? I'm gonna go with the last one. Date.
I think lots of two bedroom condos in Hollywood are
(12:43):
probably pretty damp. Also, that's true too, Yeah, maybe, yeah,
that's true. They can live wherever they want. Probably they
can live in space. They don't need water. So I'm
gonna gonna revise my answer. But see them. No, your
first answer was right, It's all right, all right. Next
question is what's the highest temperature a Tarte grade can tolerate?
Is it a hundred degrees fahrenheit? B three hundred degrees
(13:07):
fahrenheit see one million degrees fahrenheit or D They haven
survived LHC collisions at five point five million degrees. I'm
gonna go with b you are a good guess or
Brian that you have a very very deep knowledge our
fast internet connection. Just kidding, I doubt Are you feeding
(13:27):
all these questions into Siri? Is she listening in and answers?
All right? Last question, which the two scenarios is more
likely in your opinion? A A robot revolution in which
we all become slaves to artificial intelligence or B Tarte
Grades building a civilization on the moon and becoming our
lunar overlords. Well, we know that they're living there now.
(13:49):
They got their courtesy of an Israeli spacecraft. I'll say A.
It is more likely because these these little Carte grades
are you know we're going to keep them at bay
on the moon. All right, Well, it's it's good to
know that you worry more about AI revolution than the
coming of our lunar apocalypse. I want to see that
movie where we become slaves to the artificial intelligence robots,
(14:10):
but then the Tarting Grades come down from the moon
to save us. Just a great giant battle between water
bears and robots, even some dinosaurs you get throw in.
This is giving me an idea for a new book.
It's start a grade hypothesis. That's a literature Nobel prize
right there. That's right, yeah, team up with Michael Bay.
I'm sure there'll be a big hit. That's right. I'll
share you share the opening credits with each other. All right,
(14:32):
thank you very much for playing our silly game and
doing so well. We need to come up with some
sort of prize. How about ten Tarte grades. Are you
going to record his answering machine, Daniel or maybe? All right, Well,
thanks very much for being a guest on the podcast,
and folks, check out Brian's book. Tell us again, Brian,
what it's called. It's called Losing the Nobel Prize and
(14:53):
it is available in paperback as we speak, hopefully, all right,
so check that out and you can lose your own
Nobel prize. Alright, So Brian did pretty well on our quiz.
I was impressed with how well he was able to
answer questions about something he does not have a PhD in.
And so we'll get into what a tardy grade is,
where can it survive and where can you find them?
(15:14):
But first let's take a quick break. All right, we're
talking about Tardi grades. What are they? What are they
so funny looking? Are they so cute and scary at
(15:36):
the same time. They are crazy little creatures. And so
for those of you who don't have a Google image
in front of you, let's try to sketch it out
for you in your mind. Oh man, let's let's try
to paint the nightmare. Yeah, exactly. And remember they're tiny, alright.
So first of all, these things are tiny. They range
from point three to one point two millimeters, so they're
(15:56):
absolutely microscopic. But they do look a little bit like bears,
I mean, except that they have eight legs. Yeah. I
think if anyone's not not seen him of these before,
I would describe them as like little plush teddy bear
animals with like giant claws and horrifying mouth with teeth.
(16:16):
That's kind of The face is horrifying, right, You've got
the legs, so they've got eight legs, four on each side,
with little claws in them, and there's sort of poofy
like a pillow, you say. But the mouth, the face,
that's the part that's terrifying because there's no discernible eyes.
It's just like list sucking thing in the front, relying
with teeth all around. Right, Yeah, have you are you
a watcher of Stranger Things. I am. Yeah, I'm a
(16:37):
huge fan. Yeah. I think that these things might have
been the inspiration for the demigorg or whatever that thing
is that comes out of the upside down, because it
also has this eyeless face that's featuring just a big mouth, yeah,
line with a bunch of teeth. Yeah, exactly. So I
think this thing would be really terrifying. If it was
the size of a school bus or you know, even
like a red wagon, it would be pretty scary. But
(17:00):
the fact that it's microscopic means that you know, it
can't really do you any harm. But still it's it's
pretty scary. And even though I know that there are
only like a millimeter or less than a millimeter in length,
it's scary to think that those things are out there.
It could be on me, inside of me. Maybe, I
don't know. They're almost certainly some on you. I mean,
these things are found everywhere. There are in sand dunes,
(17:22):
there in soil, They're in leaf litter, they're in water,
especially like any sort of damp place at all, you'll
find them. And if you scoop up, like you know,
a leader of sort of gunky water near the edge
of a pond. You probably get about twenty five thousand
of them in a leader like any old pond all
over the world, from the tops of mountains to you know,
(17:43):
wet goopie places to basically everywhere. These things have adapted
to live in almost every environment on Earth. And just
to be clear, are they insects? Are they bugs? Are
they like bacteria? What? What? What are they? What are
they officially classify under? Well, they are not back to
rear right there, multicellular. There actually are an animal. They're
officially categorized as an micro animal. But they're in the
(18:06):
Kingdom and Animalia. They're not an insect, they're not bacteria,
they're not a microbe. But they are just a tiny, tiny,
tiny little animal. And genetically people think that they evolved
to be tiny from something larger. Oh no, kidding, they
started out bigger. Yeah, that's that's not scary at all, exactly.
It's an example of miniaturization. And you know, I love
when this thing, when this happens in evolution, when things
(18:28):
like change dramatically in scale, you know, like horses used
to be much smaller, and whales evolved from something much smaller,
and these tartar grades evolved from something larger, like we
don't know exactly how much larger that there are some
fossilized versions, but it's a bit of speculation. But imagine, like,
you know, there could have been like a time when
they were big tarte grades roaming the Earth. Yeah, like
a hand sized tarte grade or maybe even bigger. But yeah,
(18:50):
these are one of the tiniest little animals on Earth.
And they've been on the news lately because apparently they've
made it all the way to the Moon. Somehow. There
is now life on the Moon. There is now life
on the Moon. Yes, this is really landed. They sent
up to the moon UM had this project on it
to sort of record human and Earth DNA, and they said,
you know, if something goes wrong on the Earth, it
(19:12):
might be good to have sort of like a backup
copy of people and all sorts of other stuff somewhere
else that's protected. So they were flying to the Moon
and they thought, oh, let's put some you know, human
DNA UM to bring up to the Moon and while
we're at it, we'll bring some tart grades. What could
go wrong and go wrong And then of course it
crash landed right, and a lot of it was vaporized,
(19:33):
and people think that nothing survived except maybe the tart
degrades because they are really tough little critters. They are
really really hard to kill. Yeah, so that's kind of
what they're known for, rights is their hardiness and their
ability to survive even the craziest of environments. Yeah, they
are really hard to kill, and people have found them
in all sorts of places on Earth, Like they found
(19:55):
them in hot springs, they find them in the Himalayas,
they found them on the bottom of the the ocean,
they find them in layers of solid ice, and they've
done all sorts of crazy experiments on them just to
sort of test how far they can push the survival
of a tartar grade. Wow. So what are some of
the most extreme conditions that we know that they can survive. Well,
one thing they've done is just like dose them with radiation,
(20:17):
because you know, radiation is one thing that kills people,
and it kills people when you're an outer space, so
when you're in the surface of the Earth, and so
what they've done is just like stick them in the microwave.
See what happens with some grapes, which is more exciting. Yeah,
exactly know, they just like blasted them with gamma rays,
you know. And it turns out that tarte grades can
survive radiation doses that would kill humans and even more like,
(20:40):
they can survive radiation doses that are hundreds of times
the radiation dose that would be deadly to a human being. Wow.
But my question is how can they do that? How
can they survive all of that radiation? Is are they
just made out of like tougher materials or the the
DNA is more I don't know, more like redundant or
(21:02):
what's what's your secret? There are some organisms that are
called extremal files that are adapted to live in crazy
environments like high radiation, etcetera. And some of those bacteria,
for example, they have extra copies of their DNA and
just in case one of them gets blasted, they can
recopy them, right, And so that's adapting for living in
those environments. Tarte grades aren't like that. They're not adapted
(21:23):
to live in these environments. They just sort of can
survive because they're extra tough and one and the way
they do is they have this special protein inside their
body um that protects them. And these proteins can turn
into glass and help them survive when it gets really
really dry, or when there's a lot of radiation, or
basically when anything happens. Yeah, exactly, but it's arm inside.
(21:47):
It's not like a shell. It's something inside the body.
Because the thing that happens when you get hit by
radiation is that the stuff inside your body gets torn apart. Right,
it's the same problem that when you freeze. For example,
why can you not freeze the human being and then
fall them out? The reason is that when water freezes,
it gets bigger, right, Ice is bigger than liquid water,
(22:08):
and so each of your cells, for example, is a
little bag of water, and when it freezes, it turns
into ice, which is bigger than the cell membrane, and
it basically bursts the cell. And so wa, wait wait
wait you mean Captain America could not have survived being
frozen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, not a documentary Starry
to Break Too. But somehow these um little animals they
(22:32):
can survive being frozen, and they can survive super high
temperatures and pressures and radiation. And you're saying it's all
because they something in like the liquid of their cells
or something surrounding their cells kind of gives them that protection. Yeah,
it's like the liquid that's inside their cells is different
from the liquid that's inside our cells. And it's hardier. Um,
(22:54):
And that's not heartier, like you make a better soup,
though maybe it would. I don't know what tartar grade
soup taste like. But it's hardier, like it's more robust.
But chances are you are probably eating a couple of
Tarte grades when you can drink your soup, right, every
soup is targegrade whatever. Um. Yeah, but it's the soup
of the inside their cells that's more robust. So for example,
(23:17):
when they when they freeze these proteins inside their cells,
turned into a kind of glass that protects the cell
right from the inside. Like like it crystallizes into something unbreakable. Yeah,
it's described as turning into glass. I know the glass
is not a crystal, so I'm not sure if crystallizing
is exactly correct, but essentially, yeah, it's instead of turning
(23:37):
into an ice cube, which is bigger than the drop
of water it originated from, it turns into this little
bit of glass. And they call this this has this
awesome name. They call it cryptobiosis, right man, And so
to survive these environments, the tartar grades, you know, these
proteins turned into glass and then they can do crazy
stuff like they can survive outer space. You can just
(24:00):
like throw tarte grades into space, collect them again and
add water and they wake up. Put them in the microwave.
What we haven't done is put them in the LHC.
That was a funny suggestion, but it's not something I'm
aware that we've actually done. It's like, well, put put
it in the next proposal, Daniel, you could you can
make a cryptobiotic breakthrough. I'm going to build a tartar
(24:22):
grade collider. I want to see what happens when you
accelerate tartar grades to the speed of light and collide
them against each other. So it's kind of almost the
opposite when they freeze, instead of forming crystals that might
break the cells, you're saying that it has some sort
of something in there in there inside of their bodies
that somehow hold it together, so that you maybe don't
get those crystals. That's right. You don't get sort of
ice crystals exactly. You get this other stuff which doesn't
(24:44):
expand because remember ice is sort of special right, ice
is one of the few things that when you freeze it,
it gets bigger. It's a special property of water. Most
things in the universe when you freeze and they get smaller.
And so this has some other stuff inside itsel so
that when it freezes, it doesn't get bigger and sort
of avoids popping even though we are mostly water. And
then how do they survive the high temperatures? Then? Is
(25:05):
it just like a thick skin or like a like
everything just held together better or what they're just held
together better? And so they can survive these high temperatures,
they can survive these super low temperatures. They can even
be dried out and um, you can you can suck
all the water out of these tartar grades and it
doesn't again, it doesn't like rearrange what's inside them in
(25:26):
a way that breaks them like naturally zips it up.
And so they've seen these tartar grades. They can get
down to like one percent of the normal moisture they have.
You know, it's like beef jerk. It's like tartar grade jerky.
And then you add water back and it's just like
flips up and goes about his business happily chumping away.
Do you think it remember, like, do you think it's
still thinking when it's dehydrated. I think we need to
(25:49):
have one on the podcast so we can ask these
kind of questions. Yeah, what is it like to be
for them to evolve the moon? And then we'll ask
him a question? So they can survive in you're saying
volcano even like hot springs kind of up in the mountains,
the bottom of the sea. Yeah, they can survive four
d twenty degrees kelvin. What Yeah, it's pretty crazy, down
(26:11):
to one degree kelvin all the way up to four
hundred and twenty degrees kelvin. It's really hard to kill
these things. What is four degrees kelling relatives little to
like water boiling or a fire. Kelvin is about a
hundred and fifty degrees celsius, which is higher than the
boiling point of water. So you can make targar grade
soup and the tartar grades will still be happily swimming
(26:32):
around inside, swimming around drinking. You're drinking with their horrifying mouth,
that's right. So when you eat tartar grade soup, are
you eating the tartar grades or are they eating you?
All right? And so they somehow ended up in space
because the Israelis put him there as an experiment to
see if they would survive the moon trip or or
in the moon. Is that kind of So they were
(26:53):
kind of thinking about landing these things on the moon
or not. They intended to land these things on the moon,
that was the idea, right, But they had them so
have contained in a special little device, and they were
of course in their crypto biotic state. Um. But when
it crash landed, you know, all that whole thing got
ruptured and they got you know, tossed out and they're
tumbling along on the surface of the Moon now, and
(27:14):
so you know, if the right drop of water hits them,
then they could wake up. And you might think, well,
there's no chance you're gonna get water on the Moon, right,
But that's not that unlikely because the surface of the
Moon is pelted constantly by a rubble from outer space
and some of that is ice, right, A huge back
into the stuff that's out there in the Solar System
is ice. So you have this momentary impact of basically
(27:35):
high speed ice on the surface of the Moon. If
it just happens to hit a tartar grade, it could
melt turn into water. Wake up that tarte grade. Hello,
you're on the moon. What what's going on? Where am I? What?
I'm on the moon? Last thing I knew I was
in Israel. Yeah, because when they go into this cryptobiotic state,
they're not dead right there, and they're not totally paused.
(27:59):
Their metabolism actually still going, but it goes down to
point oh one percent of its normal metabolism, so it's
like one in a thousand. So it's like your body
is running at one one thousands of its normal speed.
It's amazing. I don't know what that's like that, but
I'd love to know. All right, let's get into what
it means we have tart grades on the moon. But
first let's take a quick break. All right, we're talking
(28:33):
about Carti grades on the moon, and so there are
now tarty grades on the moon, kind of on purpose,
but kind of by accident. Also, right, I mean we
meant to send them to the moon, but they got out.
That's right, Like in a bad science fiction movie. Nobody
can imagine this stuff, and if they did, nobody would
believe it. Right, But it is our life, This is
our universe. There are tart grades on the Moon. We
(28:55):
don't know if they're walking around, We don't know if
they're munching on on stuff, but they are there, and
can they survive? Is there stuff for them to eat? What?
What did Tardi grades eat? Yeah, that's a great question.
Tarte grade they eat plants, and they eat little bacteria
because remember they're super tiny, and sometimes they also eat
tartar grades. So many, there's only one tart grade on
the move right now. It's one big tartar grade now
(29:17):
and it's hungry. It ain't all the other ones. It's
a grumpy tartar grade and it's looking to come back
to Earth for lunch. All right, Well, good job humans,
you've now colonized the moon, that's right, or our little allies, hopefully,
our friendly little allies have colonized the Moon. And you know,
it's funny to joke about, like, um, Tartar grades on
(29:38):
the Moon surviving some sort of global apocalypse or catastrophe
the humans bring on. But you know, Tartar grades have
already survived a lot of global catastrophes. Yeah, that's right,
they've been around. I mean we said it before. They're
they've been around longer than the dinosaurs, which means they've
they've seen it all. They've seen it all, they've seen
everything else come and go their board. Right, they're not
(30:01):
interested in climate change and nuclear apocalypse. To them, that's
no big deal. They've seen craziest stuff. You know, in
the history of our planet, we've had five of these
things we call mass extinctions, where something happens that changes
the climate or the environment and a lot of species die.
And we've had five of those so far. And tarte
grades um predate even the first one. They evolved before
(30:25):
the first mass extinction, and they're still here, which means
they've survived all five of them. Right, that's a little
suspicious if you ask me, if you think about it,
isn't it you think that makes them suspect number one?
I mean, there isn't any other suspect. I think it's
pretty awesome. I'm amazed. I love these little creatures. I mean,
I don't want to see one the size of a
(30:45):
school bus walking into my backyard. And they are a
little creepy, but they're also sort of awesome. Like what
evolutionary path led to them? Could we survive this way? Like?
Could we copy this technology somehow to become more radioactive,
more protective from radiation. It just it seems so awesome
when when evolution finds a little niche to reveal secrets
to you. And it's amazing to think about what we
(31:08):
must look like to them. You know, imagine being such
a hardy being and seeing all these other animals around
you that are really, if you think think about it,
compared to them, were super fragile and really vulnerable. That's right,
where these huge squishy meat bags. Right, all you have
to do is pocus and boom it's over. Yeah, just
(31:29):
a little pooke. These are crazy little creatures. There's also
a lot of really other fun little facts you can
learn about them, Like they actually molt like snakes. Do
you know they shed their skin? What? Yeah, they really
are tiny little creatures. I mean they're the size of microbes,
but they really are animals. It's sort of like ant man,
you know, like actually getting shrunk down to the microscopic
(31:51):
world and living among these creatures. Like they have organs
inside and everything. Oh yeah, no, they poop and everything,
Like they eat, they poop. They are little creatures. Yeah, absolutely,
there's tardy poop. They might be tarted podcasts for all
we know. So they molt like snakes. Yeah, they molt
like snakes, and there's lots of versions of them. There's
one that I find particularly hilarious that doesn't poop except
(32:14):
when it molts. It's like it holds it in for
months and then it gets rid of its skin and
just leaves it all behind. So I'm not sure we
really want to adopt like all of the culture of
these tartar grades. You know, there's some things we do
want to pick and choose. It's like a buffet. Well,
I don't know. You know, if you only have to
go to the bathroom once every couple of months, that
(32:35):
would save you a lot of time and conserve water
which might be in low supply in the future. Yeah,
that's true. If you're holding that all in, you might
also want to leave that skin behind because it seems
kind of soiled. All right. So those are Tardi grades,
little tiny, actual animals, not insects, not bugs, not bacteria,
but actual little animals that will probably outlive all of us,
(32:58):
almost certainly outlive all of us. And you know, each
individual Tartar grade doesn't actually live that long. They only
live for like three months, maybe up to two years.
But the course, yeah, they reproduce. I mean unless they
get frozen in space or something. Yeah, that's right. Yeah,
then they can live longer, but sort of like a
live time unfrozen time is is not that long. Um,
(33:18):
So it's not like they are like thousand year old
tartar grades combing the earth, you know, with ancient wisdom
in them or anything. Oh man, they're busy. They're busy,
getting busy. They are there, male tarte grades, their female
tartar grades as a whole society. You know, they probably
have dating apps. They've been around a lot longer than us,
so they've got this thing w Yeah, to survive at
(33:40):
that scale and that they must be pretty busy reproducing, right,
And they're definitely more tartar grades are unearthed than people.
All right, I'm just gonna go have some nightmares right now.
And just like your housecat would be terrifying if it
was larger, these things are tiny and so you don't
have to worry about them. Well, thanks to jays l
Her writing in and asking us to talk about teger grades.
(34:02):
There are a really fun subject. Hope you enjoyed it,
And when next time you look up at the moon,
you can know that we have some neighbors out there
and wave to the moon and be friendly because we
don't know what their intentions are. You ape you enjoyed that,
See you next time. If you still have a question
(34:24):
after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line.
We'd love to hear from you. You can find us
at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's
one Word, or email us at Feedback at Daniel and
Jorge dot com. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel
and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of I
Heart Radio. For more podcast from my Heart Radio, visit
(34:47):
the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Hosts And Creators
Daniel Whiteson
Kelly Weinersmith
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