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Unlike trees, plastic is not self-renewing. So when humanity goes extinct, there will no longer be a steady supply of plastic for these microbes. They will crash just as quickly (geologically speaking) as they arose.
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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If you actually look up ancient trees they were basically just giant ferns. Versions of them are still around today although they do now rot of course when they die. They're super creepy looking.
I would really like some for my fern garden but unfortunately it is literally cheaper to buy a top of the range smartphone than it is to buy those things. It's really weird going to a garden centre with everything costing single digit prices and then suddenly there is this tree thingy with commas in its price.
Hypothetically, if we were alive during that time period. We would have microwood in our balls and not microplastic?
You wouldn't survive very long. The oxygen level was insanely high back then, and for some reason very high oxygen levels can make you go blind if you breathe the air for too long. Also it would have got unimaginably cold at night even in the tropics (virtually no greenhouse gases) so you'd probably freeze to death.
But also you'd starve to death because there would be nothing to eat since fruit and vegetables wouldn't have yet evolved.
You would probably have better luck surviving on an alien planet than Earth several hundred million years ago.
If we were alive back then, either we took those bacteria with us, or we would cease being alive fairly quickly; I don't think our intestines work without them anymore
Hypothetically, if were absent of contaminating the environment by not having that bacteria and instead used nano technology to break down food.
Would we still have microwood in our balls?
Every species started out as an invasive species.
the first trees wernt trees in the technical sense, since gymnosperms hadnt evolved yet, it was large version of todays lycophytes(which are smaller versions of the carbiniferous giants)
"Tree" isn't a phylogeny, it's a strategy. They definitely were trees.
Coal is this, except it's largely fronds, which the trees shed three same way modern ones shed leaves. IIRC the trees were related to ferns. Before that there were big fungus pillars that served as trees.
Fungus pillars? Like giant mushrooms??
Yes (sorta maybe)! They were pillars, no dick topper, and may have been covered in algae. There're also signs of animals living within them. Truly the trees of their time.
What, you eat polyester? That does it. We'll coat the whole world in PFAS, try and crack those.
Kind regards, humanity
This all true, but wood still burned. You think forest fires are bad now? Imagine several centuries of dry timber stacked up waiting for a lightning strike.
Now imagine the atmosphere is ~%30 O²
Suddenly it makes sense why some trees only disperse seeds after a forest fire.
Some trees have phases that depend on fire. The long leaf pine has a grass phase where it just looks like grass for a few years and stores energy in its roots. When a fire comes through and burns the above ground part, it will grow 3-4 feet in a few months.
I had to look this up as it sounded unusual, but looking at the younh plant it is basically a small trunk covered in long floppy pine leaves/needles that superficially looks like a clump of grass at first. I suspect there's no evolutionary advantage to looking like grass, but storing up energy before growing upwards makes sense if there's a periodic fire risk with each fire risk period being over a couple of years. Also handy for dealing with browsing pressure from particulary hungry critters following a fire.
The long leaf pine has a grass phase where it just looks like grass
Trees are weird, because phylogenetically there is no such thing as trees. As in: there is no single branch of the evolutionary tree where trees split off from other plants and there’s just an entire branch of different trees. Instead, different plants in separate parts of the evolutionary tree evolved into trees, and sometimes back into non-tree plants, and sometime even back into trees again. So a tree that spends part of its lifecycle as grass is par for the course.
Yup. I always wondered what evolutionary advantage resulted in that type of thing happening. Now it feels a bit obvious, although of course nature is crazy complex, so now I wonder what other environmental factors would also lead to that sorta stuff happening. But if there's deadwood piled up to the point it would choke off new growth, obviously don't reproduce until it burns away.
There is a huge diversity of plastics being produced today and each one will require a unique evolutionary adaptation to be biodegraded. We’re also continuously developing new plastics and new combinations of plastics such as core-shell polymers. You also had much more wood available than you have plastic scattered across the earth, meaning much more energy available for any microorganisms that evolved to degrade wood and thus a greater evolutionary advantage. I don’t think microbes are going to save us from the plastic scourge anytime soon.
Agree with all points except the availability of plastic.
There might have been more wood, but the mass of plastic is enormous. I remember that it's more than the mass of all animals. The value should be from this study, but it's closed access, so I can't check.
Wouldn't it also be pertinent that we store a lot of waste plastic with our other plastics? I mean, our landfills are pitri dishes for a massive variety of microbes to have a go at consuming plastic. Compared to a much less diverse population of those that would have been around at the time to learn to consume wood.
I remember in the early days of Ultima Online the game would allow persistence of things dropped, and it got so bad people were asking each other to help pick up and destroy "trash" because it lagged the servers. I can't recall why that couldn't be quickly patched or how long it lasted.
Well, in programming, garbage cleanup routines (which are important so data in memory that's no longer needed is released - get it wrong and you either have a memory leak where the longer your app runs the more RAM it consumes, or you have bizarre bugs that are hard to replicate cause memory was released early) in general are actually quite tricky to get right, so usually you use APIs built into whatever programming language you're using. You don't have that luxury inside a video game's environment. Imagine if they got it wrong and your character is mistakenly treated as some dead monster and poof it's gone.
I think it was just a missed problem, as so many updates are for. Later games that I played would do something as simple as a timer attached to a dropped item to then force removal (including your old corpses). But I saw the mention of persistence in the post and the UO trash dilemma came to mind.
Oh it could easily have been that. I'm no expert at programming, but I know enough to be aware of some of the weird things that you gotta get right behind the scenes. There's a lot of moving parts that gotta stay synchronized, more than a lot of folks realize.
Edit: I guess in other words, just cause it sounds simple and straightforward does not mean it is easy to implement. In fact, the opposite can often be true in that there may be surprisingly complex things needed under the hood to make sure the visible result "just works".
old lady from the Titanic -meme
It's been 60 million years
60
More like three hundred (unless you mean how long it lasted).
I meant how long it lasted
Is chemical energy more readily available from plastics than from wood? You'd have to imagine it is if evolution is adapting these timescales.
with wood, the problem was with lignin which is tightly crosslinked, meaning that it's insoluble and organism willing to eat it has to secrete some enzymes to break it down in smaller bits that can be absorbed
depending on plastic, this first step might be easier or even happening on its own. there are already bacteria that feed on nylon but nylon starting materials are easier to digest for them
lignin balls
Wasn't there some effort to guide that particular evolution? Or was it really just one of those,"holy shit look at this" discoveries?
Now my curiosity is piqued; I may have to look that up later today.
Life finds a way