[digging]

In general, it's mind-blowing to travel back in Earth's history and realize there were tens or hundreds of millions of years where strategies that are commonplace today had never been tried before (or they'd tried too early and failed). It makes one wonder, what will be the strategies of future life which no creature has yet evolved? Can we even imagine it?

[gambiting]

I think it's almost guaranteed that bacteria eating plastics will proliferate globally at some point, we've put so much of this stuff in the environment and it's just free energy ready to be consumed if your digestive system knows how.

[jvanderbot]

And suddenly plastics won't be the sterile, durable wonders that they are. We are living in The golden age of plastics, folks.

[ramraj07]

Things degrade wood too, doesn't make it useless.

[samplatt]

Wood in today's society needs chemical treatment or physical isolation before we use it a construction material.

[JodieBenitez]

Only because we use a lot of pine wood with low density (because cheap&fast). Not all wood is like that: Red cedar, douglas, larch, acacia and more... Where I live, chestnut is even used for roof tiling.

[anankaie]

And then there is cork

[jvanderbot]

Wood is useless for sterile applications because it harbors bacteria and such. Think dentist, doctor, chemistry labs, industrial processes, food manufacturing and packaging, chemical storage, etc etc. All Plastic.

[gleenn]

I don't think they'll get through metal and certainly not glass for a long time.

[divbzero]

I think metal is already a target of microbial corrosion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbial_corrosion

[WalterBright]

Rusticals are eating the Titanic.

[gleenn]

I've definitely already heard of plastic-eating bacteria. They already have bugs eating it now too

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/14/bugs-acr...

[peteradio]

I used to entertain this idea but I'm somewhat skeptical such a thing could proliferate, there is just not that much plastic relative to the other sources of energy an animal can evolve towards. I'd be interested to hear otherwise though.

[nonethewiser]

There is tons if it some places though

[eropple]

You don't need a ton everywhere. You just need enough in a few places for long enough.

[irrational]

Where did the Tupperware go?!

Will we have to develop antibacterial plastics to combat this for stuff we don’t want eaten, yet?

[Hnrobert42]

Funny. Just the other day I read an article about where Tupperware has gone.

https://text.npr.org/2023/06/01/1178876648/tupperware-busine...

[plugin-baby]

Maybe we can just add some broad-spectrum antibiotics into the standard plastic mix.

[BurningPenguin]

And make all bacteria known to men immune?

[Etrnl_President]

https://www.reed.edu/reed-magazine/articles/2021/reed-biolog...

[luisfmh]

Check out cronenberg's recent movie, crimes of the future, seems relevant haha

[dekhn]

it's also mind blowing to know that there are things which really haven't changed in over a billion years, yet still do just fine. How did my bio prof say it? "Bacteria are like the race cars of the biological world. They don't win by having the best strategy, they win by rate of duplication and acquisition."

[digging]

Clearly I don't know much about race cars because that makes no sense to me, lol

[dekhn]

I should have mentioned he was an F1 fan.

[throwawaylinux]

Are there species of bacteria that are substantially unchanged in a billion years?

[dekhn]

Morphologies of cyanobacteria show that fossils from billion+ years ago show little change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolite

[lazide]

No way to know for sure. But many bacteria today look very similar to what little bit of maybe fossils we might have.

[Aperocky]

Natural selection are now slower than artificial ones except on the microbial levels.

So maybe extinctions after extinctions for animals that are visible to us, and then bunch of new superbugs.