this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2026
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If this was to happen next week, what would it mean for life on earth? I get that I would probably have to cancel my appointments, but what's the most complex form of life that could realistically survive the blow, if any?
It would negatively affect the trout population.
Edit for serious answer: It would burn away the atmosphere and boil off the oceans, so all multicellular life would be gone.
Anoxic single-celled organisms living deep inside the bedrock could survive.
Oh no, not the trout population! 😱
Even the woman and the children!
If the entire crust is liquified, it is likely no life survives. However if chunks of still solid earth are thrown off the planet, get trapped in orbit, and eventually fall back down to the surface after it mostly resolidifies, some bacteria/archaea might be able to recolonize.
There are bacteria that can survive launch and atmospheric reentry. I’d imagine being embedded in a solid rock would help with this and it’s common to find archaea deep in the earth. Archaea are simple single cells but they are almost all extremophiles or just durable as hell enough to not care about environments we’d call extreme. (Some don’t do too well in oxygen though, hence the thriving underground)
Bacteria are also single celled, but more complex. This is where photosynthesis could restart without having to evolve again. And while bacteria are typically more sensitive to the environment than most archaea, there are bacteria that can survive launch, space, and atmospheric reentry.
As for multicellular life… larger organisms tend to be dependent on smaller ones. So hopefully the complex things that could survive ejection fall back down after bacteria recolonize the surface first.
Some fungal spores are likely to survive via ejecta just like the bacteria/archaea would. But without organic matter to eat or bond with, it’s unlikely those spores would reawaken. To be fair, fungal spores could probably just wait for ideal conditions before waking up so even some mushrooms might survive, they’d just not wake up till the surface is recolonized by other microbes.
Tardigrades are the most complex life I think might be able to survive. They can also do something similar to fungi but it would take some luck to make sure they were in their hibernating state before ejection and that they stay in that state through reentry and impact and onwards until there is water and a stable food source enough to sustain them.
Bacteria predate archaea, btw..
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Good to know, this isn’t my field and I was definitely correlating eukaryotes with bacteria and prokaryotes as archaea. My bad
you forget lichen. These guys do not need anything but water and some substrate.
Lichen requires phytobacteria or some algae though right? It’s a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and a photosynthesizing microbe right?
I was thinking more on the lines of single organisms. I guess if that pair made it to space and came back that’d probably work though
Fantastic answer, thank you! I was thinking about tardigrades, I heard they can survive in space but this would clearly require a little more than that.
The fungal spores lying dormant waiting for the right time to reawaken sounds like a crazy sci-fi plot.