Tardigrades Rule!

I was intrigued by the story of the tiny tardigrade that survived quantum entanglement [ FT416:25]. They are known to have likewise resisted radiation damage to their DNA and have survived the major mass-extinctions. This struck me as an amusing case of fact following fiction, because these persistent creatures had already appeared in the TV series Star Trek: Discovery, set on the scientific exploration vessel USS Discovery, 10 years before

Kirk and Spock met up on the

USS Enterprise.

In season one’s episode four (first aired on 8 October 2017), a unique navigation ‘device’ is brought onto the science vessel and found to be a perfect interface with the ship’s ‘mycelial spore drive’, correctly computing the navigation of longdistance ‘jumps’ of hundreds of light years. This ‘device’ is discovered to be a large specimen, genetically related to ancient Earth tardigrades, that acts as a natural computer.

To add a curious footnote to this obscure topic, the US game developer Anas Abdin, in 2018, filed a suit against CBS and Netflix for copyright infringement, alleging that

Star Trek: Discovery’s use of a spacefaring tardigrade was taken from a game that Abdin had been designing since 2014.

In a formal written opinion (reported in

Gizmodo, 17 August 2020), Judge Denny Chin ruled to dismiss the case, stating that “Abdin’s spacetravelling tardigrade is an unprotectable idea because it is a generalized expression of a scientific fact

– namely, the known ability of a tardigrade to survive in space.” Bob Rickard

London