Most parents cry the first time they see their baby kick in an ultrasound.
I cried the first time I saw something kick under a microscope… after sleeping for 24,000 years.

I’m a cold-regions biologist. That’s the fancy way of saying: I spend my life with ice, dead things, and stories time forgot. My office is a freezer, my perfume is ethanol, and my coworkers are more often mammoths and microbes than actual humans.

That night started like every other “boring” night shift.

We had just drilled 3.5 meters down into Siberian permafrost and brought back mud the color of old coffee. Nothing glamorous. Just another sample, another label, another line in an Excel file. I made myself a cup of instant coffee, texted my husband a picture of our son sleeping, and put the mud under the microscope.

Inside, there was a speck. Smaller than a grain of dust. Dead, I thought.

We warmed it slowly. A few degrees. Then a few more. I added a drop of water, more out of habit than hope.

And then it moved.

At first I thought it was my eyes, or a vibration from the fridge. But no. The little thing stretched. Curled. Wiggled like someone coming out of a long, annoyed nap. Within minutes, the “dead” creature – a bdelloid rotifer – was swimming in my field of view as if it hadn’t just spent 24,000 years locked in ice.

Then it started to clone itself. No mate. No romance. Just: “I’m alive again, let’s copy-paste.”

I stared at it, then at the photo of my baby on my phone screen. One tiny creature slept through mammoths, ice ages, empires… and woke up in a world of smartphones and space travel. My son might live 80 years if we’re lucky. On that timeline, are we even alive long enough to matter?

The freezer hummed, the fluorescent lights buzzed above me, and for a second I felt like I was the fossil.

But this wasn’t the first time ice had shown me something terrifying and beautiful.

I have touched the hair of Lyuba, a baby mammoth who died 42,000 years ago and still has eyelashes. I’ve read Ötzi’s CT scans, the Copper Age man found in the Alps with an arrow in his back and 61 charcoal tattoos along acupuncture points. I’ve seen photos from the Franklin expedition ships, perfectly preserved at the bottom of the Arctic, tables still set for dinner while their crew turned to skeletons on the ice.

Ice doesn’t just freeze bodies. It freezes stories in the exact second they stopped.

The rotifer’s story is simple: sleep, wake, repeat. Almost immortal.

Humans? Our frozen stories are messy. A desperate climb up a mountain with an arrow wound. A ship trapped two years in sea ice because someone trusted the wrong canned food. A baby mammoth who just slipped in the mud and never got up again.

In the lab we joke about “playing god.” Cloning mammoths, editing DNA, borrowing survival tricks from rotifers. Some days it feels real. Scientists are already experimenting with artificial “chaperone” proteins inspired by these creatures, trying to protect human cells from freezing and radiation. There are companies raising millions to bring mammoths and even woolly rhinos back, as if the Ice Age was just a paused Netflix show we can resume.

But standing there with my hands shaking over the microscope, I didn’t feel powerful at all.

I felt small.

Because if a microscopic animal can casually ignore 24,000 years, what is a human life? What is a marriage, a career, a stupid argument with my husband about how often I work late? In the time that rotifer slept, whole civilizations rose, built pyramids, invented gods, kings, wars… and vanished.

I wiped my eyes on my sleeve so it wouldn’t drip on the sample. On the monitor, the rotifer swam calmly, unaware that it had just broken my brain.

And then another thought hit me, even scarier:

If one tiny creature can survive our extinctions, maybe something else can too.

What else is locked in the ice right now, waiting? Ancient viruses? Unknown animals? The remains of lost families who never got to say goodbye? As climate change melts the permafrost, it’s not just carbon that’s being released. It’s stories. Some we can study. Some might hurt us. Some might completely rewrite what we think life is.

That night I went home just before sunrise. My son was still asleep, mouth open, hair sticking everywhere. I watched him breathe, warm and soft and absolutely mortal.

Part of me wanted to wrap him in ice like the rotifer, to pause him until the world became safer, kinder, smarter.

The other part whispered:
“No. He gets one fragile, messy lifetime. That’s the whole point.”

So here I am, still working with ancient ice, still chasing these impossible stories of things that refuse to die. But I hold my boy tighter now. I argue less. I laugh more. Because maybe we’ll never live 24,000 years.

Maybe our superpower is that we don’t.

If you had the chance to “pause” your life and wake up thousands of years later like that tiny creature… would you do it? Or would you choose to live your one short, chaotic life all the way through? 🥶🧊

Tell me honestly in the comments.