In Siberian permafrost, in the Arctic, in Chile’s nearly rainless Atacama Desert, and in the dark forests of Poland, organisms have been found that appear lifeless yet will revive and become fully functional when propitious environmental conditions arise. The question these discoveries evoke is not merely how life endures in harsh, inhospitable-to-life places, but what, exactly, it retains while doing so.

Consider the bdelloid rotifer, a microscopic animal invisible to the naked eye and seemingly indifferent to the usual limits of survival. In a laboratory in Pushchino, Russia, researchers revived rotifers that had been frozen in Siberian permafrost for more than 24,000 years. During that interval, the animals existed in cryptobiosis, a reversible state of suspended animation. “This is the hardest proof so far,” Stas Malavin, one of the researchers, remarked, “that multicellular animals can withstand tens of thousands of years in a state of almost completely arrested metabolism.”

Cryptobiosis is not death, though it resembles it closely enough to make the distinction difficult. Growth stops. Repair ceases. There is no signaling, no transcription, and no detectable metabolism. Biological processes halt, and life retreats to something like a shadow of the real thing.
The organism remains poised, asleep, waiting for Prince Charming to kiss her and bring her water, energy (warmth), and oxygen. When that happens, no matter how much time has passed, the organism awakens and carries on as before.

Along the western coast of South America lies the Atacama Desert, so dry that rain may not arrive for decades. Beneath its soil, scientists have found bacteria that showed no visible activity for years revive and reproduce when moisture finally........

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