The 8-legged creepy-crawly that will be the last thing alive on Earth
IT’S not pretty... but a tiny eightlegged creature resembling a broken set of bagpipes is likely to be the last surviving life form on Earth, scientists say.
The microscopic water-dwelling tardigrade will stick around for at least another 10billion years, until the death of the sun, they claim.
And it’s hardly surprising – the half-a-millimetre bug can live for 30 years without food or water, endure temperatures as high as 150C, and even survive the frozen vacuum of space.
The Oxford and Harvard scientists looked at the likelihood of tardigrades dying as a result of extreme cosmic cataclysms such as exploding stars, giant
asteroid impacts and gamma ray bursts – incredibly powerful eruptions of energy when blackholes are formed.
But none of these events were thought to pose a threat to the hardy tardigrade, the Scientific Reports journal said.
They have the edge on cockroaches, which are thought of as nature’s ultimate survivalists, because they can live at the very bottom of the ocean.
Dr David Sloan, from Oxford University, said: ‘Because cockroaches live on the surface of the planet, mostly, if you were to strip Earth’s atmosphere, they would die off. But tardigrades, which are underwater, would continue to live on.’
Co-author Dr Rafael Alves Batista, also from Oxford, said the discovery should spur on the search for life on Mars.
He said: ‘If tardigrades are Earth’s most resilient species, who knows what else is out there.’