This Animal Will Survive Until The Sun Dies

The world’s most indestructible species — a stout, microscopic animal with four pairs of legs, known as the water bear or tardigrade — will survive until the sun dies.

According to new research from Oxford University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), they can endure temperatures of up to 150 degrees Celsius, the deep sea, and the frozen vacuum of space.

Tardigrade may be little but they are the toughest form of life on Earth. The water-dwelling micro-animals are known to be able to live for up to 30 years without food or water.

And they can even survive the risk of extinction from cosmic catastrophes — asteroids, supernovas, gamma ray bursts — and likely last for at least 10 billion years, far longer than the human race, according to the new study published in Scientific Reports.

Not bad for an animal that grows to a maximum size of 0.5mm.

The research implies that life on Earth will extend as long as the sun keeps shining. It also reveals that once life emerges, it is surprisingly difficult to destroy, opening the possibility of life on other planets.

‘Tardigrades are as close to indestructible as it gets on Earth, but it is possible that there are other resilient species examples elsewhere in the universe,” said Dr. Rafael Alves Batista, co-author and post-doctoral research associate in the Department of Physics at Oxford University.

The researchers considered three astrophysical events that the universe could throw at us to achieve this: a large asteroid impact, a supernova or a gamma ray burst. A reasonably small space rock could wipe out land-based life, but according to the researchers, it would take something with the mass of Pluto before creatures in the Mariana Trench even noticed. Thankfully for all of us, nothing that big is zipping around anywhere near Earth – at least, as far as we know.

In theory, a supernova meets all the criteria for bubbling the oceans right off the planet, but again, our planet’s position in the galaxy saves us from that threat. The team calculated that for a supernova to blast the Earth with enough radiation to strip away the protective ozone layer, it would need to be less than 0.14 light-years away. But the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is four light-years away and isn’t big enough to go supernova anyway.