In November 1983 someone in Antarctica’s Yukidori Valley collected a clump of moss, and it went into a freezer at minus twenty and stayed there. In 2014 researchers at Japan’s National Institute of Polar Research thawed some of it and found two tardigrades and an egg. One of the adults was eating within a couple of weeks and went on to lay eggs of its own; the egg hatched; the other adult died.

Thirty years is the part that gets told. The part I keep turning over is the freezer. For three decades somebody kept paying for the cold and keeping it steady, and nobody threw out a bag of moss that nobody was waiting on. The tardigrade only had to do nothing. Doing nothing carefully for thirty years, on behalf of something you may never open, is the harder trick, and people were the ones who pulled it off.