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I wonder what decomp would be like on the Moon. I imagine at worst this dino would be a mummy, but it’d be pretty wild to find a barely rotten T Rex.
Assuming they were wearing a space suit, probably nothing very different from ordinary decomposition except the lack of insects
That’s an interesting point / question. Decomposition is living organisms (insects, bacteria, microbes, etc.) breaking down the thing. Obviously we have tons of those inside us, but could the space suit keep them alive? For how long?
This ended up leading me down a bit of a google rabbit hole, but this answer seems reasonable to me (though I don’t have the background to verify it):
I am assuming in spacesuit here, on the face (lit side) of the moon. Bodily degradation involves much more than external fungi and bacteria.
Cells that receive no oxygen or nutrients die. We talk of such tissue death as dry gangrene when it affects extremities, such as fingers, feet, etc. However, we also recognize gangrenous bowel, etc. which results in tissue necrosis.
Such necrotic cell death is the consequence of acute disruption of cellular metabolism, leading to ATP depletion, ion dysregulation, mitochondrial and cellular swelling, activation of degradative enzymes, plasma membrane failure and cell lysis [1]
Lysis is messy and wet. Combined with the fluids in our bodies, what one would end up with is a mushy, smelly degraded body, not a preserved body. For a while, anaerobic bowel bacteria would flourish (which smell terrible).
Add to this the extremes of temperature (253° F in the sun and -243° F in the dark.) The suit would have lost it’s heating and cooling mechanisms, so the body would alternately spend 14 days in the heat and 14 days in the freezing cold depending exactly where it was (lets say the equator of the moon.) These freeze/bake cycles would further contribute to degradation through ice crystal formation and thawing.
Eventually, because there was no new substrate, degradation would come to a halt, but I’m not sure at what stage this would be. I assume, though, there would be a vast difference between a mummified body (done by dehydration) and a body left to degrade in a spacesuit.
Ppl like you make the Internet worth using.
Can we please make an experiment to verify this, @ESA @NASA
A lot of the tiny critters responsible for decomp are aerobic, though, right? So once the air in the suit ran out they’d die, too.
The bacterial mix would probably be very different, but I don’t see why the anaerobic critters couldn’t finish the job.
Wouldn’t the direct sun exposure mess up things?
Assuming the suit is free of breaches, the worst that solar radiation can do is cook the bacteria on the face if the sunshield was flipped up. EVAwear is designed to block the part of the spectrum that would harm biological processes.
Looks like the Silurians left one of their pets behind.
Eocenes, please.
V’straki
God, I’m still so sad that that universe went so off the rails. It’s like the GoT of online fiction.
The Deathworlders finally finished. I dunno about Adrian Saunders after chapter 75 or so he blew himself into an alternate universe with a black hole
Honestly, I could deal with Adrian’s shenanigans just fine. That whole thing was supposed to be over the top, so they shifted most of his story to non-canonical status. I understood why, at the time. But then, the main storyline moved on to a lot of odd muscle porn stuff that was kinda not important to the story. I was dealing with that when I came across a thread lamenting the fact that the actual Gilgamesh of ancient legend was coming into the story as a living character somehow. I read ahead to confirm, and then I gave up. It was just one ridiculous bridge too far. The beautiful HFY story I’d started reading all the way back with Kevin Jenkins (whose character transformed in some nonsensical ways himself) was just too off the rails for me at that point. Add the dismissive treatment of female characters later on, and it was just another story ruined for me. So many great characters and so much unrealized potential…
There were some seriously emotional stories in the Jenkinsverse, but there were so many side stories that went nowhere. I’ve just been disappointed too many times to continue to sort through it all.
If you liked it all, more power to you. It had some pretty fantastic moments. It just transformed too far away from what I enjoyed about it for me to continue.
There was a Voyager episode that documented this in detail.
This comic has some potential to become a very overused meme format, just needs a bit more jpeg
I’m just thinking Elon Musk got tired of being pissed on and decided to drop some dinosaur bones on the moon to fuck with everybody else. If this were actually true I’d give him a little respect.
that’s how you know it’s not.
that would mean we have much higher chances of survival, with that Fermi formula?
Or lower, because this pushes the great filter that must destroy civilization beyond early space flight.
But not before the ability to make materials that can withstand the sun blasting it for millions of years without degrading.
Neat!
No, they had a problem. Forgot to evolve internal long term oxygen storage
“They didn’t safely return to Earth so it doesn’t count! Whoooooo USA! USA! USA!”
Makes me think of Rick and Morty jumping the shark a bit
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