The year is 50424

The Picard Maneuver@lemmy.world to Memes@sopuli.xyz – 682 points –
41

It probably won't be that long before some organism evolves the ability to digest plastic.

Already exists, actually. Just not widespread yet

Cool, didn't know that. Now just hope they don't make us sick or we're really screwed. With all the microplastics in our bodies they're going to be everywhere.

The waste is toxic. Because the input is toxic, but locked into relatively stable polymers, until something breaks it down.

Toxicity isn't as simple as "toxic = toxic + toxic." While some byproducts of plastic breakdown are toxic, the bacteria are further dissolving those as well, going until they get glucose, as they wouldn't be able to eat it if that wasn't the end product. There are probably still some toxic byproducts that get excreted rather than broken down, but plastic breakdown already releases toxins under normal conditions, so that's already a problem we're going to have to tackle. If these bacteria can get past the first issue of breaking it down in the first place, then that's a net positive.

Yeah, if “toxic + toxic = toxic” made sense then table salt would be extremely dangerous.

Sodium = extremely volatile and usually explosive metal when interacting with water (more than half of what makes us)

Chlorine = gas at room temperature that can kill you in minutes at concentrations of 1000ppm or more

Sodium + Chlorine = Sodium Chloride = delicious table salt that makes food yummy and helps power our neurons

Thinking about it, we work on a whole bunch of highly volatile chemicals bound to a bit less volatile ones for stability.

We’re biochemical foundries. It’s pretty damn cool.

It's a part of a potential solution, but right now if you dump a bunch of plastivores in a trash pit instead of a bunch of plastic in a hole that won't break down from a thousand years you get a toxic slurry capable of entering groundwater supplies.

Of course, micro plastics are also doing that, so pick your poison I suppose.

That's enough time for us to evolve into carbon dioxide plastic eating beings, isn't it?

For something completely new like that 50k years is not all that much.

Perhaps enough time for the existing plastic eating bacteria to spread across the world, tho a lot of plastics are buried deep in soil already, so artefacts might survive. Same as with wood, before the wood/cellulose eating bacteria got all over the place, dead trees just for buried. So at high pressure plastic might turn once again into oil.

Tf is that?

1 more...

It would probably just be microplastics by then?

Those crabs will probably just be microplastic by then, at least if our trajectory as a species has anything to say about it.

I think 50k years is a bit too short for major evolution to happen*. And 5 million years too long for plastic figures.

* We needed about 100k to adapt our body hair to clothes.

curious what reference they use for year 0.
any theories?

Such a stupid system. AD and BC are the same amount of letters. CE and BCE don't line up when written. Drives me crazy!

And they could've just said "BC" stands for "before the common era." Fuck it, why not? And make up some other meaning for AD, so we can just hand-wave a non-problem.

This is the date system we use. We're not switching. It's rooted in a religiously-venerated dead guy. Get over it. It's not even accurate to that specific guy. They already fudged it all over the place a thousand years ago.

I believe it's used in the scientific community to avoid the religion. I'm not sure in what way it needs to line up when written.

Why would crabs use the same reference dates as humans

I just assumed since the crab was speaking English

oh that's funny because i assumed it was speaking crab language