As humanity prepares to return to the Moon in earnest, a NASA-led modeling study quietly complicates the journey: the ordinary microbes that travel on human skin, in soil, and in bathroom corners may not perish upon arrival, but instead fall into a dormant waiting state capable of outlasting the lunar surface's brutal extremes. The finding is less a discovery of lunar life than a reminder that life's persistence is more stubborn and more subtle than our protocols have assumed. It asks us to reckon with what we carry with us — always — into the unknown.