It's a little fascinating when something pops up in my current events news feed that actually resolves unanswered questions from Star Trek - life imitating art, as it were.
Apparently back in April, Israel Aerospace Industry's Beresheet* lunar mission crashed-landed on the Moon. Along with a sample of human blood and a 30-million page archive of human history, the probe contained several thousand microscopic tardigrades, also known as water bears or moss piglets, one of the toughest organisms in existence.** Tardigrades have already proven that they are capable of surviving exposure to space, and in this case they were dehydrated - which placed them in a state of suspended animation - and then protectively encased in artificial amber.
Fast forward 237 years**, and boom, we have a captive giant space tardigrade manipulating space using the mycelial network spore drive on the USS Discovery. Well, at least now we know why it's a tardigrade - the next question is how it got to be so damned BIG.
- Sid
* Hebrew for "In a beginning" - the first word of the Torah.
** If you're wondering why any of this would be on a moon mission , there's a group called the Arch Mission Foundation that wanted to create a backup of Terran lifeforms, history and knowledge.
*** According to the Memory Alpha Star Trek database, the events of Season One of Discovery take place between 2256-2258 AD.
