Comment on Plastic-eating bacteria discovered in the ocean
bitteroldcoot@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
Has anyone considered the flip side of this. if we are unintentionally creating a bacteria that eats plastic, and our civilization is made of plastic, then this is a bad thing. Hospital equipment, airplanes, computers food storage, electrical wires…..
Don’t get me wrong, I think we should end all plastic use. but in a controlled way, not with a plastic eating plague.
There are plenty of wood eating bacteria and fungus all around you and yet wooden buildings still exists.
These microorganisms need a favourable environment to start digesting wood, for example. That’s why you can stack firewood outside without it being decomposed, but leave a tree out in the mud and it gets eaten.
There are exceptions, something like Serpula lacrymans, can bring down whole buildings, but even there the wood needs to be humid enough for it to be attacked by this fungus.
We don’t use wood for clinical medically settings though or long term food preservation or flying planes or cars etc etc etc. not being able to rot is one of the reasons they are used in these applications
We don’t use that anymore, but all of these things have been used in this applications, plastic has more advantages than not rotting in some cases.
Wooden airplanes were still used successfully in the 2nd world war and in general aviation they still exist.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_DR400 - here is a widely used example.
To be fair, this has happened before, and I understand it was far hard for the bacteria then.
There was a time when cellulose could not be broken down. Trees fell and piled up for … miles? Anyway, then bacteria figured out how to break it down. (We also got coal from the trees that were burred.) Anyway, we still build out of cellulose. Sometimes we treat the cellulose, sometimes we don’t.
Plastic may, or may not, end up the same way.
It could always burn though. And in fact burned easier, with a higher O2 level in the atmosphere. And while bacteria did figure out how to break down some wood molecules, fungi evolved and are the more important wood digesters.
Thank you. I always hear about the fungi and not the bacteria…
Great reminder about the fires. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous in the section titled “Atmospheric oxygen levels”.
For example: the increasing occurrence of charcoal produced by wildfires from the Late Devonian into the Carboniferous indicates increasing oxygen levels,…
I don’t think bacteria can stop Big Oil from pumping oil to make plastic and Big Plastic from making consumer things.
When the plastic eating bacteria starts endangering the existence of artificial consciousness in the machine, life on earth will be purposefully wiped out.
porcoesphino@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
Kind of, but there are plenty of paper and wood decomposers and we still use plenty of those. It will have consequences but you already have to service vehicles and you already need to sanitise hospital equipment