Tardigrades

[ysabetwordsmith]

 ... are so indestructible they would count as superpowers except it's all species gifts.  Don't worry, even if we wipe out humanity and most other macrolife, the tardigrades will blithely continue onward until the sun swallows the Earth.

Comments

[kengr]

They forgot one "minor" detail.

The tardigrades may survive, but will anything they can eat survive?

Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I put my money on "life finds a way."

Re: Well ...

[gatheringrivers]

Mycelial network! *giggles insanely*

[siliconshaman]

Given that there are Tardigrades that eat just about anything, including rocks, then probably yes.

Come to think of it...there was a Japanese researcher that found a species of tardigrade that photosynthesises just recently. If all else fails, they can live off that.

Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

You can pretty much bet that if the biosphere gets cooked down to tardigrades and other extremophiles, after the amount of chemicals and radiation we've already put into it, the post-bottleneck biosphere would include superpowers all over the place.

Somehow, this makes me less sad.

Re: Well ...

[siliconshaman]

Yup, not to mention all those ecological niches that are suddenly open, plus all that mutation going on.. species diversity and evolution will sky-rocket! You'd be looking at something like the Cambrian explosion of life. Nature will get wild and wacky for a bit.

Sucks for us, unless we somehow manage to avoid species extinction... but life for the next few million years afterwards would be having a fun time!

[siliconshaman]

There is also the point that with a big enough Kaboom! chunks of rock and dirt get flung out into space...

and the Tardigrades would survive that... and quite possibly reentry too, tucked away in cracks inside the rock.

So, depending on how far those involuntary micro-astronauts have/will spread, they could outlive the Earth.

Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I would really not be surprised to find panspermia!tardigrades all over the galaxy.

Re: Yes ...

[siliconshaman]

There's some evidence to suggest that Tardigrades did not originate here. So, yeah, quite possibly.

Heck, given what we know of them, Voyager and the Pioneer probes probably have some little stowaways aboard, as the sterilization protocols wouldn't have been adequate, and NASA's air-con systems are and were, a breeding ground for Tardigrades.

Re: Yes ...

[lone_cat]

Sounds like there's a not-unreasonable chance some of them might have hitched a ride to Mars.

Re: Yes ...

[siliconshaman]

Possibly, the clean-room protocols for mars landers has always been more stringent, but less was known about Tardigrades during the earlier Viking era landers... but I don't have enough data to say for sure.

[cmcmck]

There were cornflowers blooming at ground zero in Hiroshima three days after the blast.

So much for the power of the atom............

[siliconshaman]

and Kudzu or japanese knotweed started resprouting more or less immediately too. There are a lot of species that are less than impressed with humans efforts to wipe them out.

[zesty_pinto]

All hail the water bear! The one proof that some form of multicellular life on this rock could handle traveling through space without a ridiculous amount of life support equipment!