Tardigrades have a max lifespan of ~2 years, on average they live months
Tardigrades are awesome, but what about those unaging jellyfish?
I mean yeah still not quite the same thing. IE obviously I don’t see jellyfish surviving in space. But do tardigrades age?
Which side note it looks like they do… while they can basically go in suspended animation, waterbears seem to have about a 3 year lifespan.
So, these guys are virtually unkillable for 3 years, but Turritopsis dohrnii while it can be killed, can live forever.
came here to say this
Tartigrades are sith.
would be fun to find out that tartigrades are the source of all life on earth
Probably not! They are, after all, animals. And there’s a whole lot of crazy shit on Earth that came before animals.
That being said, panspermia is still my favorite theory of life on Earth.
My favorite theory at the moment is that life has always been here, before the planet.
Back when the universe was smaller, before mass was formed as stars and planets, the density of free floating mass was at some point high enough that there would have been temperatures around 20°c everywhere in the universe and water and other molecules were floating freely in space. At that point, for millions of years, life could have evolved in space.
When the universe expanded, mass got separated and formed into galaxies, planets and stars from gravity, while life was just dormant luggage hiding everywhere possible. On Earth the conditions once again got just right to step out of hibernation and evolve, but it could potentially happen on any other planet as well.
I like this theory because it doesn’t involve as much random chance and it could mean that we can discover life elsewhere in our own solar system, instead of only hoping that future generations will eventually encounter it in other star systems…
fully fledged whole body animals that may have distributed microbes that had hitched a ride on or inside of them on their ride through open space, or on the surface of a meteor
