It's our own K-T layer
"The Plastocene – Plastic in the sedimentary record"
https://blogs.egu.eu/divisions/ssp/2019/01/09/the-plastocene...
Plastic is a source of energy. I am sure that we need to gameplan for a post-plastic world in the future after some bacteria/fungi learn to eat it
We are increasingly finding bacteria and fungi that eat various plastics. Not just lab-grown, but actual organically evolved bacteria eating PLA and the like
That said, I doubt this will become apocalyptic. Wood is highly biodegradable, yet even untreated wood will last decades if you keep it dry and away from soil. Microorganisms eating plastic will make it less weather-resistant and maybe worse food packaging, but it won't kill all use of plastic
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We already make car wiring insulation out of soya-based plastic, which is highly biodegradable and palatable to micro- and macro-organisms of all sorts.
Which is why so many modern cars have weird electrical faults and fires.
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I can attest that the soya-based wiring can be a nightmare in some locales. A family member bought a new Acura in the 2010s and the car was a constant target of the local rat population that would climb into the engine bay and fill up on wiring insulation like it was gummy candy. He had the wiring harnesses replaced several times but ultimately gave up and sold it after the final repair.
It seems like they could incorporate capsaicin and other deterrents into the polymers, but that probably isn't pleasant for individuals involved in the production process.
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FWIW, it's a myth. Confirmation bias continues to drive it. Rats love wires no matter what they are made of, they happily chew up petroleum-based plastics too.
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Yeah I've replaced wiring in farm rigs going back to the mid-70s. Rats and mice just like wiring.
The myth will never die. Plastics that use soy degrade no faster than petroleum based plastics, and do not attract rodents to a greater extent either. Rodents love to chew on all wires, including petroleum-based ones.
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How frequently do you repair electrical faults on cars?
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Not as often lately, because as I have gotten older I started buying newer cars and not keeping them as long.
Not sure what the point of your question is, though.
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Well, on a lot of the stuff I repair, you can see the soya-based stuff gets destroyed, not just by mice and rats but it gets white stuff on and then goes brittle and crumbly.
Meanwhile with the exception of wires in high-temperature areas, PVC just doesn't do that.
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Now you're conflating rodent chewing and other degradation. That just increases my suspicion that there's confirmation bias going on.
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Notice how in my first comment I said "highly biodegradable"? It's just a couple of posts above this one. In fact here you go, have a permalink:
The thing to understand about the soy stuff is that the soy part gets completely reformed chemically into a polymer, it's not anything food-like by the time it becomes part of the plastic.
Aside from that ... this is not an anecdote vs anecdote debate, these wires have been around for decades and this exact question has been studied scientifically. The degradation rate and wire-chewing prevalence are comparable with PVC.
I hope it will though (kill all use of plastic).
Reminds me of the classic George Carlin bit:
"The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?”
"Saving the Planet" (George Carlin)
https://youtu.be/7W33HRc1A6c?si=HqyW8mys0uNBuFdW&t=147
Humorous, but not inaccurate about what climate change means to primates. =3
The planet is fine; the people are fucked!
>It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed.
Sadly this really isn't the case, and there are a lot of things we can do that will permanently fuck the planet. It can't be certain that we will kill ourselves off before we cross some tipping point that will eventually turn the Earth into just another lifeless rock in our solar system.
That seems pretty arrogant that a hundred million years or more won’t restart life back on Earth. But I also might just be ignorant. What could we do to end all life on earth and prevent future life from forming?
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Well there are some well-described scenarios of what could've happened to a hypothetical ancient life on Mars. There's some evidence suggestion methane-producing microbes may have lived on Mars 3.7 to 4.1 billion years ago that may have lead to the CO2 and hydrogen being replaced with methane, stripping away the planet's protection and leading to rapid glaciation and total extinction.
Indeed earth has itself had a few close calls with total extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medea_hypothesis
99.5% of life may have died during the Great Oxidation Event. 96% of all marine life may have died during the Permian–Triassic extinction event
TBH it's no short of a miracle that we're still here.
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Well there we go. TIL.
I love that word, “may.” The linchpin of so many suppositions.
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Well yes, I don't shy away from explicitly calling them hypotheses and nothing more.
GP asked for a possible scenario and I think this is a valid answer.
Well, "permanently fuck the planet" can be a matter of perspective. The great oxidation event "fucked up" the planet for anaerobic life, but we would not exist without it, so it was a huge blessing for us. Even human CO2 emissions could be viewed as a huge blessing for biosphere in the far future since it releases captured carbon ("the currency of life") thus significantly delaying the timeline of atmospheric CO2 depletion to levels at which photosynthesis becomes impossible.
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Natures capacity to bounce back has been overestimated it turns out https://phys.org/news/2026-10-nature-capacity-species-lost-v...
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That’s only in the short term. It doesn’t touch on natures capacity to bounce back over millions of years. We could kill off entire branches and trunks of the tree of life, crash every ecosystem on the planet, and life would still bounce back eventually. Molds would grow on the debris, some would find the slurry of radioactive plastics a tasty treat, and eventually it would rebuild.
We could ruin the planet in the “short” term, but we probably cannot extinguish life, even if we tried our hardest.
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I think it's better we just change course now and I wrote a book about how we can do that. If you are interested the link is in my profile description.
There isn't infinite time left in "eventually" - maybe a billion years, out of 4.5 billion passed so far. A billion years is about how long it took to go from "multicellular colonies" to "concept of an animal". So no, not guaranteed to bounce back from mouldy radioactive slurry.
So you are telling me that after eons, people will rise again as Lego figurines?
We probably couldn't sterilize the earth even if the entire humanity wanted it more than anything else and threw everything it had to make it happen and then some more.
Even destroying the entire humanity would be hard, civilization could go, we have plenty of scenarios for that, but killing every human, even the odd tribe of refugees who could survive in a cave somewhere is something else. I'd say it is the maximum extent of what our technology could do. By that I mean nuking everything we could nuke, including things like volcanoes, mass produce all the greenhouse gases, the ozone depleting ones, the poisonous ones just to release them all, have our finest biologists prepare a pandemic, we may even try to bring in some asteroids.
To sterilize the Earth we would need to destroy all the extremophile bacteria, the tardigrades, the deep biosphere,... That's not happening. Note that we are very careful to sterilize Mars rovers, so that we don't contaminate Mars with Earth life. That's how hardy we consider life to be.
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>We probably couldn't sterilize the earth even if the entire humanity wanted it more than anything else and threw everything it had to make it happen and then some more.
That's a rather fun thought experiment. If we were outright trying to destroy the earth it'd be pretty easy!
There are already concerns about what irreversible harm geoengineering could do accidentally. We'd just have to intentionally destroy our ozone layer again and let the runaway greenhouse effect heat the planet up enough to boil off the oceans and send the water into space via atmospheric escape. We (and most living things on Earth) wouldn't survive long enough to see the oceans become desert, but we could set the feedback loop up to continue without us.
Very little can survive without water and once the water is gone it's gone. Water wouldn't return to Earth unless it came on the backs of asteroids (which would be its own problem). The extra solar radiation would help finish off what was left.
If we were going to actively bring in asteroids, the goal shouldn't be to hit the planet with them, the goal should be to use their gravity to move the planet into a less habitable zone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Earth) or even into the collision path of another planet.
We could also put all our resources into making Grey goo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo) happen.
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What conditions do you need for runaway greenhouse effect at 1 AU. earth has had over 20% CO2 in the past, but the sun was cooler then.
Moving the planet and pulverising with an impact large enough to kill everything are firmly in the bounds of not currently feasible.
I really doubt humans could do it, it would have to be done in one fell swoop, because any attempt to push the earth beyond a tipping point for bacteria to be killed would require pushing for longer than we, the pushers, could survive.
We would have to be better at designing than evolution to make Grey Goo, otherwise evolution would probably have already done it, and it has, to date, designed some pretty out there things.
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>What conditions do you need for runaway greenhouse effect at 1 AU
If you want specifics you might check out this paper which concluded that "runaway greenhouse could in theory be triggered by increased greenhouse forcing" (https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo1892). It's going to happen eventually (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_the_Earth#Loss_of_oc...) so all we'd really be doing is speeding up the process.
>Moving the planet and pulverising with an impact large enough to kill everything are firmly in the bounds of not currently feasible.
I mean, it sure seems unlikely, but I'm not as qualified as Dr. Greg Laughlin and his team at NASA, so without at least some kind of evidence indicating that we couldn't do it, I'm okay with trusting them on it being "not at all far-fetched".
'The technology is not at all far-fetched,' said Dr Greg Laughlin, of the Nasa Ames Research Center in California. 'It involves the same techniques that people now suggest could be used to deflect asteroids or comets heading towards Earth. We don't need raw power to move Earth, we just require delicacy of planning and manoeuvring.' (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2001/jun/10/globalwa...)
Obviously, their plan wasn't to destroy all life on Earth, but to just move the Earth a helpful distance away and then stop, but even in that case they were concerned about sterilizing the planet.
The plan has one or two worrying aspects, however. For a start, space engineers would have to be very careful about how they directed their asteroid or comet towards Earth. The slightest miscalculation in orbit could fire it straight at Earth - with devastating consequences. It is a point acknowledged by the group. 'The collision of a 100-kilometre diameter object with the Earth at cosmic velocity would sterilise the biosphere most effectively, at least to the level of bacteria,' they state in a paper in Astrophysics and Space Science. 'The danger cannot be overemphasised.'
>We would have to be better at designing than evolution to make Grey Goo
Evolution is notoriously bad at designing. It's perfectly fine with a poor or half-assed job as long as the evolving thing typically manages to survive just long enough to make a baby or two. Survival rates can even be outright dismal and design choices absurd if the evolving thing pops out enough babies quickly.
Even a drunk engineer could have done better than evolution when designing a giant squid brain (http://ldtaxonomy.com/podcast/giant-squid/) or a hyena clitoris (https://www.wired.com/2009/07/st-best-5/). While I'm on the subject, putting the ostia at the top of the maxillary sinus instead of the bottom was a dick move.
There's a massive difference between intentionally designing something to self-replicate like crazy until all life on earth is either consumed or crushed and just settling for a replication rate that is "good enough, mostly".
I'd believe it when I see it. Global warming predictions even at the bad end aren't hot enough to boil the oceans.
Aslo life is plentiful miles underground https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/24/magazine/earth-geomicrobi... Even if you nuked everything on the surface there would be loads surviving, if only microbes.
Oh well as long as there's a tardigrade or two left that's all fine then...
Can you expand more on what these things are?
Life on earth survived both the Cryogenian period with 5°C mean surface temperature [1] and Paleocene–Eocene thermal maximum with esimated 27.2–34.5°C mean surface temperature [2]. For comparison the current mean temperature is 15–16°C, the preindustrial was approximately 14°C.
I'm not even sure it's easy to exterminate humanity: our species has displayed an extreme ability to adapt. Surely, billions of humans could die in a big cataclysm but it's genuinely hard to imagine an event that will exterminate every last pocket of survivors. Even harder if we speak roaches and bacteria. The "lifeless rock" will happen when the sun turns into the red giant.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryogenian
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene–Eocene_thermal_maxim...
It's not self correcting indeed because there is no correct state.
Sure the preindustrial environment was cozy for cute and fuzzy things and ourselves.
But you are greatly underestimating life if you think we can kill it all off. Sure it might be slimes and jellies and fungi for a while but life has been there before.
Yes, and this era of comedy is thankfully over. Carlin became quite preachy in his later years. He has way better material.
Well if leading scientist George Carlin says "the earth will be renewed" conjecture is true then it must be true. The science is settled everybody, no need to panic.
I don't think it's a question of science. More aesthetics as to whether you think an Earth cleansed of us lot is nice or not.
>And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable
I believe it's matter of time for having lifeforms degrading plastic. When trees appeared, there was nothing can degrade dead trees for a long time. And that became fossil fuels. So plastic would be degraded eventually. And some amount of it buried deep enough would be another kind of fossil fuels.
This has been known for decades already. In the historical records we'll be known as the plastic age
The article says it's already being called the plasticene.
It even has a theme song from 1980: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k8vaoGQCuyg
More synth: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s3BIxesgWqI
In the cycle of life everything becomes a rock.
You might have to wait a very long time for some of the gas to become a rock.
Except rocks. They become dirt.
Or gas.
I think its inevitable that something (either from humans or nature) will figure out how to digest plastic. Similar to the Devonian Wood Crisis.
Bacteria and fungi are like, "Hold my beer...":
Bacteria: https://microbenotes.com/ideonella-sakaiensis-plastic-eating...
Fungi: https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/2021/11/04/plastic-eating-m...
It's unfortunate that the mushrooms grown on plastic waste absorb chemicals that make them unsafe to eat. What a gamechanger otherwise.
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From the linked article:
"The oyster mushroom is capable of decomposing plastic while still creating an edible mushroom. This opens up doors for its use as an at-home recycling system."
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The mushroom strain is edible yes, but I went looking around mycology forums and it is my understanding that decomposing plastic causes them to absorb chemicals that make them unfit to eat for humans. I think there's some overlap between "can be eaten" and "would be bad for you long term".
That's not to say there isn't a use for the mushrooms in some further process of dispersal or breakdown (animal feed, biogas...) but I don't think these can go in the stew pot.
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Can you provide a link to the forums you referenced?
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This thread for example - the oyster mushrooms break down the plastic polymers into smaller polymers, but you don't necessarily want to be eating those either. There's also the added complexity of there being many types of plastic, with many types of additives, and unless your waste plastic is single-source it is difficult to know exactly what is being released into your mushrooms when they're working on the plastic.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mycology/comments/10wboly/blue_oyst...
Sure, but in evolutionary timescales a hundred years of selective pressure from newly abundant plastic waste might produce an organism optimized to exploit the niche from human landfills and ocean trash in a breezy 20 million or so years.
>While more research is needed to determine the exact origin of plasticorals — one likely source is beach bonfires
Considering the last picture they have is a bit of plastic (or wax), on top of some leaves, with burn marks, this seems like a logical conclusion.
How would a bonfire on a beach end up mixing plastic with coral in the ocean?
The keyword here is coral rubble. This is dead coral gravel in a beach, not living corals including plastic in their tissues. Dead corals are just another rock stained after a bonfire and the tide movement will erode the soft plastic from the rocks again.
This is not different than saying than pouring molting aluminum in a fire-ant nest creates a new type of pollution: the aluminant.
It's in the headline "New form of plastic pollution discovered on the shores of vulnerable coral reefs"
"on the shores"
and the "form" part of that headline is literal. It's not a new pollution, just a new physical "form" of that pollution: plastic that would have been floating around on its own instead stuck to old bits of coral that would have been sitting next to it.
Seems intentionally deceiving/alarmist.
Plasticoral could be simulated to make a new man made craft material. Then when an artist becomes known for working it it a lot and takes a break, they can say, "I'm not doing anything in plasticoral at the moment".
By the way on the coral front, for the Great Barrier Reef "in terms of coral cover, the past five years were the best on record" https://financialpost.com/opinion/bjorn-lomborg-the-great-ba...
Plastic also visibly in rocks on the beach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5UoVDxjG1g
https://www.science.org/content/article/rocks-made-plastic-f...
And invisibly in trees: https://www.waldwissen.net/en/forest-ecology/climate-and-env...
Pick your favorite Disney movie, the beautiful nature in it is now infused with plastic.