Tiny survivor will be the last living thing on our planet
A new twist emerges in a story that has dogged the White House and added to questions about potential coordination between Russia and Donald Trump’s election campaign.
The first decent gamma ray burst would mean the end for humans, but life would persist in the oceans. A large asteroid impact might kick up enough dust to stop sunlight and kill all the fish – but other creatures would survive around volcanic vents.
Eventually, though, after the universe has thrown all it can at our planet, just one creature will survive: the tardigrade.
So impervious is it that scientists have calculated that this eightlegged microscopic ‘‘extremophile’’ will be eking out its resilient existence Sun die.
Tardigrades are probably the most durable animal known to humans. They can survive for several minutes in temperatures as low as minus 270 degrees C and as high as 150C. They can spend decades at minus 20C.
They cannot be killed by a trip into the vacuum of space. Neither are they be fazed by a spell in the crushing pressures at the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean. Come a nuclear apocalypse, they will rub tentacles with the cockroaches, enduring radiation hundreds of times higher than the lethal dose for a human. long enough to see the
In Japan, scientists froze one for 30 years and then revived it as if nothing had happened.
Because tardigrades will probably be the last animals to survive on Earth, researchers from Oxford and Harvard have tried to ascertain just what it would take to kill them – and, by extension, what would sterilise a planet.
‘‘Over the past few decades, we have started seeing extrasolar planets,’’ said David Sloan, from Oxford’s department of physics, whose paper was published in Scientific Reports. ‘‘There are Earth-like planets orbiting Sun-like stars, so we have got excited – these are the sort of places where
US Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley described Akhmetshin in a letter to the Justice Department in March as ‘‘a former member of the Russian military intelligence services (GRU)’’ who was working to overturn the 2012 Magnitsky Act passed by Congress, which blacklists Russians for human rights abuses. The Kremlin has often complained about the act.
Congressional records show that Akhmetshin lobbied Congress last year for the Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation, a Washington-based advocacy group that says it is working to get rid of laws that prevent US residents from adopting Russian children. Those laws were put in place by Moscow in response to the Magnitsky Act.
Trump Jr’s lawyer, Alan Futerfas, said he had talked with a person who came to the meeting between Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and Trump aides.
‘‘He told me specifically he was not working for the Russian government, and in fact laughed when I asked him that question,’’ Futerfas told NBC. It was not immediately clear if the person he referred to was Akhmetshin.
He said Trump Jr knew nothing about the man’s background at the time of the meeting.
The Russian lawyer at the meeting, Veselnitskaya, has said she was not working for Russian authorities, but she told The Wall Street Journal yesterday that she was meeting with Russian authorities regularly.
Veselnitskaya said she shared information about a US-born fund manager who had lobbied for passage of the Magnitsky Act with the Russian prosecutor-general’s office, the Journal said. life can start.’’
But, he wondered, are they also the places where life ends? The odds of finding life depend not just on whether it starts, but whether it persists.
‘‘There are many, many disastrous events that could wipe out the human race,’’ Sloan said. In most such events, though, he found that ‘‘these tough little micro-animals pretty much wouldn’t notice’’.
‘‘It is hard to work out how to kill tardigrades. Could you get the planet cold enough? No. Increase the pressure enough? No. Make the oceans acidic enough? No.’’
He and his colleagues worked out that only an event that boiled all the oceans would get rid of them completely. And that ‘‘is not a simple task’’.
So life will endure. But is it not depressing that all the richness of the Earth could be distilled down to an animal about which the most interesting fact is it can do absolutely nothing for 30 years and still survive?
Sloan says that what matters is that the seeds of evolution remain.
‘‘Mass extinctions reset the evolutionary clock. The hope would be that these things are sufficiently complex that with enough time, they could evolve back into more interesting organisms.’’