These animals will live on Earth until the Sun dies
We already know tardigrades — those tiny eight-legged water creatures — are as tough as they are ugly. They can survive for 30 years in a freezer and live in space and other extreme temperatures. But a new study paints things in bleaker terms: these creatures will outlive all of us. They will be around for 10 billion years. They will survive until the Sun dies.
For the study, published in Scientific Reports, astrophysicists at Oxford and Harvard University calculated the probability of objects in space colliding into the Earth, boiling the oceans dry, and killing everything.
The key finding, write the scientists, is that no space phenomena are strong enough to dry up the oceans completely, and so the tardigrades can make do with what’s…
