TARDIGRADE By Johnny Rodger
It comes to consciousness. Slowly untangles its whiskers. Shifts gradually, one by one, all eight of its tiny armoured legs. Claws grapple on the giant leaves, and it clambers off through the moss.
It’s a perfect thing. But then, perhaps ‘perfect’ isn’t the right word. Although if we are going to be pedantic, can it truly be described as a ‘thing’?
But nor is this just any ordinary ‘waking up’. Unless you also consider Rip Van Winkle to have been partial to a quick 40 winks. You might be looking down through your microscope: you see it unravel itself, from a little barrel shape, slowly stretching out its diminutive bulk; it finds its balance, gives its head a shake and seems to stare back into the lens at you. It may have been lying there for hundreds of years, rolled up, in this closed off, non-animated state, with its metabolism in suspension. When the water dried up the little mite had just pulled its legs in, curled up and desiccated itself for centuries on end.
Starting again, even as a non-thing, is not inconceivable for the tardigrade. It is also known colloquially as the water-bear or the moss-piglet. But the actual kind of non-thing it is, is a creature. That is to say that this tiny organism – related to the insect and the crustacean – does not just exist as an object for some other being. It has however, been at the centre of some controversy of late, and has brought our attention to some questions of serious import for the future of our universe – if indeed there is to be any future for that universe.
The environmental temperature might drop drastically – the tardigrade has been wind-blown into a glacier for example, or into your mother’s fridge freezer; the tardigrade produces special proteins which allow it to freeze its whole body extra quickly. This prevents
the formation of large ice-crystals which damage cells. When the kitchen finally, some decades later, gets a revamp, and the old fridge-freezer is bumped down the stairs and driven on the back of a van to the municipal dump, there’s no need to worry then either. These proteins also allow the wee beastie to thaw as quickly as it froze itself – no jagged slivers of ice form to pierce through its flesh. It unravels, shakes its head again in the newly temperate climate of the old fridge freezer plastic trays, and ambles off into a corner glutted with defrosted moss.
The tardigrade may not be perfect then, but it has certainly proved indestructible.Yet what significance is there in our determination to establish that fact? What or who should wish to destroy it, and why? It might well stare back up at the lens of the microscope, but our scientists have taken up that challenge. They have drowned the little blighter in liquid helium at near absolute zero degrees temperature with no observable effect; they have blasted it with X-rays, not even a wrinkle in its thick skin; it hovers around in an artificial vacuum, bobbing off the sides of the vessel, and comes crawling out, apparently no worse for wear, at the end of the experiment; and a blasting with an electron microscope evidently made no impression whatsoever. They state, the scientists, with some credible authority, that it would be the only creature on earth to survive a nuclear holocaust.
If this creature never comes to an end, one wonders in what way we can even describe it as being? Is it in any way like we are? Contemporary thinkers have offered us a new formulation of just that question. Imagine the scene: you are an equally tiny creature – one of scale comparable with the tardigrade. At most, that is to say, you measure, from head to toe, one millimetre. You are a homunculus. And for the purposes of this preamble to an illustration, you are understood to inhabit a territory which has been successively failing to provide nourishment for the so-called water-bear. What does the hungry creature do? It does not starve. Should it deflect X-rays
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and blasts of electron and nuclear radiation only to fall in the primordial muck and die of common or garden starvation? No. The tardigrade encysts itself: withdrawing and producing a thick shell in which it closes down consciousness throughout the period – however long – of no nourishment. Then you, the homunculus, take stage. You happen in your desultory and disinterested way upon the scene of tardigradual dearth. It happens also, and again for the purposes of this preamble, that their famine, so to speak, is contemporaneous with your feast. (There are, for sure, a number of striking temporal sequences and also synchronicities on which this preamble depends, a feature, we note, which may prove highly ironic given the direction we are taking.) You, the homunculi of this area, that is to say, are yourselves so deeply enjoying an era of plenty, that the arts and sciences flourish amongst you, as do sporting and leisure activities. But perhaps you or your homunculus chums have never seen a moss piglet before. At any rate you do not recognise it in its encysted form, which seems ever so much like a dried up leathery old football which you stumble over on your way. And why should you care about some old thing lying so casually and haphazardly on the ground that it has clearly been abandoned, and is so dried up and tatty that it couldn’t possibly be a living being? Life however, is good for you, and you have time … you pick up the ball, bounce it a couple of times, shout an encouragement to your mates, and drop kick it off into the distance. Hurrah …
The scientists can get a pretty close look at the tardigrades and their habits through powerful microscopes. In fact, they’ve been watching their eight-legged slow step through forests of moss ever since they were discovered in the 18th century. We can also imagine – were our fingers small enough and sensitive enough – what these beasts would be like to the touch, especially when they might have lapsed into their survival states of desiccation or encystment. But what about noise, or its call? Are we ever likely to invent sound equipment as sensitive on the minute scale of audibility as is the microscope for visibility? Or can we once again invoke the imagination when it comes to the distress call, or the mating cry, or even just the daily chit-chat of the tiny mite? But what sort of small talk could it have, this creature that lives for ever? Would it not always have heard and said it all already? And if it refuses to be subjected to the trials of all this time it has on its hands (claws, rather), if it simply closes down for the duration of inclement conditions, and so is unthreatened by cold, hunger, drought, or even nuclear holocaust, then what need for distress, or for that matter reproduction?
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It’s thus, in more than one sense, that this little bear’s infinity may be said to be nevertheless a subdued one. Not only is it an extended and very quiet life, but for long stretches at a time it is completely blank. The case is reminiscent – so current day thinkers tell us, but this possibly runs only for the non-scientist – of Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise. The story goes, in Zeno’s way of posing it, that if Achilles gives his old slow coach antagonist a head start in a challenge race, then by the time Achilles catches up with the tortoise’s starting point, the latter will have moved on a bit farther; by the time Achilles then gets on further to that subsequent point, again the tortoise will have moved on a bit further – e così via, as they say – and so in effect, Zeno claims Achilles, that notoriously swift runner, will paradoxically never be able to catch up with the old slow coach. The new telling of this fable of paradox is admittedly only somewhat similar. The a priori have been switched around and it has been given a new title into the bargain. It now does the rounds under the heading of ‘The Paradox of Piglet and the Homunculus’. And when it comes to the a priori, well, where Achilles presumably stands for that human being who was allegedly capable of passing through the greatest stretch of space in any one given time period, then with the tardigrade, we have the living creature which can arguably endure for the longest amount of time in any one given space. The contrast of these two, in the terms given, with the respective capabilities or propensities of the tortoise and the homunculus ought to be obvious. (Although to be sure, we are making here certain assumptions about the parity of the so-called homunculoid life span with that of a full grown human being …) But if in Zeno’s original fable the antagonists step up to the starting line with the intention of being the first to carry their person across a certain physical distance, then in ‘The Paradox of Piglet and the Homunculus’ is not the aim of the competition to prove who can sustain their own selfhood for the longest duration? Just so, then the paradox according to contemporary thinkers would consist in our maintaining that despite the tardigrade’s failure to die, as it were, ever, the truth is that the homunculus is likely to accumulate and survive with a more intelligible sense of self for a more extensive period of time. Needless to say, that particular view of this trial offers us no small measure of anthropocentric relief. But has this most agreeable a prioristic view been taken through some particularly rose-tinted reading spectacles? Zeno’s uncomfortable and apparently nonsensical conclusion can only be discounted when we realise that he is treating the race between Achilles and the tortoise as though it is a series of discrete manoeuvres from one point to another, rather than as the continuous movement from beginning to end which it is in reality. Likewise it may be said, this new version of the paradox fable
makes certain pretentious and sentimental claims to an understanding of the meaning of ‘infinity’ and the workings of personality under microscopic conditions, but also, and possibly more importantly, is underwritten by an evidently non-materialist and non-spiritual conception of selfhood. Something like Hume’s ‘personal identity … proceed(s) entirely from the smooth and uninterrupted progress of thought along a train of connected ideas …’ is surely the unspoken assumption here in an attempt to demonstrate that the human race can defeat the tardigrades on their own ground, or in their own time, as it were. But is that conception of personal identity necessarily such an unsustainable and faux pas in this race to nowhere? Nobody, to our knowledge, has yet proved Hume to be absolutely in the wrong there, after all. Besides, what other conception of personality but an idealist one could possibly have any relevance while one is dealing in the realms of allegory: at once with the longest living organism in the universe, and a fabled microscopic representative of humankind?
I say all this, but when the good times roll we must not forget that the little armour plated fellow just keeps on ambling through the fields of moss. The scientists assert that the tardigrade may have dropped in on earth from some other planet. Dating techniques show that they have been around as a species for some 700 million years, and they are so abundant that in some places the population is as dense as 500 per gram of soil. But why are we so set on destroying, if not the physical presence, then at least the emotional and intellectual esteem of such a creature, ubiquitous in both time and space? Not content – or rather, not successful – with our attempts to drown, poison, chill, starve, dry and radiate it to death, it seems we cannot pass on the tawdry irony of proving ourselves morally superior into the bargain. But then we have an imagination, it’s necessary for us to believe in something – do you think Zeno really cared about the actual welfare of the personal identity of the tortoise, or Achilles (who may not have ever existed), or a hare, or whoever …?
At least in Zeno’s exposition of paradox the characters Achilles and the tortoise are necessarily conscious that they are actually in competition with one another. They would both have to know what task lay before them otherwise nothing of interest could be exposed through the fable. But when it comes to this so-called ‘new a prioristic’ paradox, ‘Piglet and the Homunculus’ we wonder how the characters can even be aware that they are charged with some mission. The truth is that they are not actually expected to ‘do’ anything, but just to ‘be’. In
that sense, of course, there are no ‘characters’ in this telling, not even as archetypes; but just subjects of enquiry. And as such, it’s less of a myth or a fable than a hypothetical or ideal experiment. But how could these subjects – the tardigrade which can’t be seen with the naked eye, and the homunculus who has definitely never been seen by any means at all – even acknowledge one another’s existence, far less engage together in meaningful activity? The homunculus picks up the dried, leathery old ball. He thinks he knows what it is, and how he can use it: he bounces it a couple of times and then drop-kicks it off into the distance. While he and his mates go screaming and shouting after the ball, scramble for possession of it amongst the dried out moss leaves, punt it back up in this direction, then off in a completely different way altogether, the tardigrade is blissfully unconscious. The homunculi are red-faced, panting, hoarse from shouting, and their bodies are all bruised and bleeding from their rucks and scrummages. The tardigrade, thumped, bounced, crushed and launched into the air as it is, evidently does not know of the players’ existence, far less that it is in competition with them. The disappointing truth about the tardigrade’s behaviour here – or lack of it – may be that it is neither disdainful nor aloof from these red-faced, wellfed sporting oafs, but that it is completely insensible of them. Can it be said even to be a contemporary of theirs? It will make little difference to this tiny unconscious mite if the game – thumping its dried out body around a field – lasts five minutes or 50 years as long as there are no congenial environmental conditions to cause it to wake to consciousness. These particular homunculi may all be dead and gone by the time it comes to. In which case these wouldbe contemporaries, homunculus and tardigrade, have never really existed in the same world. But after such a lengthy blank interval, one wonders anyway if this particular eight-legged mite can ever come to as the same private individual mite who withdrew its legs and curled up in a ball in that dry country of old? It can hardly be said to have undergone a ‘smooth uninterrupted progress of thought along a train of connected ideas’ after all. Indeed, how many such blackouts has it already suffered in its long life, and of what duration were they? But perhaps it does not even understand or experience ‘duration’, or ‘sequence’ as we do. The world, as we have seen, is packed full of these tiny organisms, yet is there such a thing as a private individual moss piglet?
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