Overview
- Laboratory evidence shows tardigrades can endure decades without food or water, temperatures from near absolute zero to about 150 °C, intense radiation, crushing pressure, and vacuum through cryptobiosis that removes over 95% of body water.
- A 2017 Oxford–Harvard modeling study concluded they would likely persist through asteroid impacts, nearby supernovas, and gamma‑ray bursts unless the events boiled away Earth’s oceans, requiring extreme proximities such as ~0.14 light‑years for a supernova or ~40 light‑years for a gamma‑ray burst.
- AGU Advances simulations indicate a large nuclear war could block sunlight for roughly a decade and cool the planet by up to about 10 °C within three years, collapsing marine photosynthesis and threatening complex food webs.
- Scientists underscore human vulnerability to relatively small environmental shifts, with an Oxford physicist calling tardigrades the closest thing to indestructible on Earth.
- The articles stress that these conclusions compile prior laboratory results and climate‑astrophysics models, and note the Sun’s red‑giant phase in roughly five billion years as the ultimate limit for life on Earth.