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

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!