The newest development in the European Space Agency's illustrious TARDIS (TARdigrades In Space) experiment has been bizarrely successful. Sent up to space on a satellite, a selection of Tardigrades, more commonly known as "water bears", actually survived direct vacuum exposure for 90 minutes in
orbit, and the lucky ones facing the right way even endured direct cosmic radiation, yet some still survived. The capsule was ejected from the Foton-3 satellite recently launched with the help of several different space agencies; hatches opened for an hour and a half to expose the specimens to space, before the container reentered over Kazakhstan, where several Tardigrades were actually still alive.
In order to accomplish this, the Tardigrades were brought into suspended animation to survive the vacuum. Quoting the article on Wired,
"The tardigrades had already been coaxed into an anhydrobiotic state, during which their metabolisms slow by a factor of 10,000. This allows them to survive vacuums, starvation, dessication and temperatures above 300 degrees Fahrenheit and below minus 240 degrees Fahrenheit."
Tardigrades would seem to be the last things to be susceptible to any human analogy, but such an extreme hibernation ability shows promise in the field of cryogenic preservation and emergency medically-induced suspended animation. Such ideas used to long be the realm of science fiction, but still hold much promise when it comes to saving people after damage that would currently be unchangeably fatal; thousands of lives could be rescued from otherwise fatal accidents.
Maybe one day we can also engineer gigantic space monsters, too, just like the science fiction films. It would just be hard to overcome the accelerated energy expenditure that would come from trying to operate life in absolute zero, but then again...who knows.
