Tardigrades: We're now polluting the moon with near indestructible little creatures

An Israeli spacecraft called Beresheet almost made it to the moon in April. It took a selfie with the lunar surface in the background, but then lost contact with Earth and presumably crashed onto the lunar surface. Now it's been revealed that the mission was carrying a cargo of dehydrated microscopic lifeforms known as tardigrades.

Beresheet was the first stage of a privately-funded initiative to transfer living DNA to the moon. The project is designed to act as Noah's Ark Mark II, providing a repository from which plants and animals could be regenerated to repopulate the Earth should a catastrophe akin to a flood of biblical proportions overtake the planet.

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Tardigrades can survive extremes of temperature and pressure, including the frigid vacuum of space. They don't seem to mind being exposed to radiation and are all-round tough little creatures. When dehydrated, they roll up into a spore-like state that slows down their metabolic rate by about a hundred-fold, enabling them to survive for potentially over 100 years.

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I'm not concerned about polluting the moon with organisms that might reanimate. My concern is about polluting the moon, full stop. There is already a fairly sizeable amount of debris from redundant spacecraft and litter left behind by astronauts. As more missions are planned to the moon, eventually with human passengers and perhaps even settlements, we must learn to clean up as we go along. Otherwise, we are going to have the sort of crisis that we are seeing on Earth with the outcry about environmental damage from plastics.