Tardigrades: Earth's Last Survivors Even If Oceans Boil
A Harvard–Oxford study models what energy would be needed to sterilize Earth and identifies tardigrades as the ultimate survivors, capable of cryptobiosis and thriving in deep-ocean refuges; while surface catastrophes like asteroid impacts or nearby supernovae could devastate ecosystems, boiling the oceans would be the threshold to erase resilient life, suggesting life could endure long after humans are gone.