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by stevenpetryk 892 days ago
Feels truly irreversible, save moving to a new earth.
1 comments

life adapts to plastic
Plastic gets consumed by oceanic microorganisms, though slowly. Take a look at the fascinating microscopic images of plastic partially eaten by microorganisms in this 2013 research article, "Life in the Plastisphere: Microbial Communities on Plastic Marine Debris":

http://onemoregeneration.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Life...

Plastics also break down to simpler hydrocarbons and carbon dioxide with prolonged exposure to sunlight. Unfortunately, these gaseous small molecules are greenhouse gases, but they don't persist for as long.

"Production of methane and ethylene from plastic in the environment"

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

It's absolutely insane how, if humanity disappeared today, we would become really hard to detect in pretty short time scales.
I imagine the enormous metal structures we put up are the longest standing evidence, simply because metal is normally found unrefined in earth's crust
Metal corrodes. Ever seen an old car sitting in the sun and rain for a long time? It turns to rust and then disappears.
People tend to care disproportionately about human life. We don’t actually know whether we’ll adapt at the pace required to overcome widespread plastic contamination (or really whether we even need to adapt).

Policy-by-platitude is a bad strategy.

I think the idea we have this highly dense energy source pervasively available across the earth in all biomes with an exposed surface area that is unfathomable, life will adapt to consume that source of carbon rich energy. I suspect we may be bringing the end of the age of plastics rapidly.
And the lifecycle of the likely consumers of this energy source have much faster reproduction cycles, therefore faster ability to evolve to use this energy source.

I'm very curious how we will protect against this, otherwise bacteria will eat away at our car dashboards and such.

Is there any research being done on how our bodies are “hopefully” learning to adapt to this omnipresence of plastics everywhere in and around us?
or maybe all species will start getting sick and die one day because of microplastics contamination.

Some bacteria will survive.