New plastic pollution discovered: 'Plasticorals' coral rubble fused with plastic
oist.jpReminds 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?”
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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 seems unlikely, but I'm not as qualified as Dr. Greg Laughlin and his team at NASA, so without evidence indicating that we couldn't do it, I'm going to trust 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 was to move it a helpful amount 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. 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/)
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.
Natures capacity to bounce back has been overestimated it turns out https://phys.org/news/2026-10-nature-capacity-species-lost-v...
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?
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.
I love that word, “may.” The linchpin of so many suppositions.
Well there we go. TIL.
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.
Yes, and this era of comedy is thankfully over. Carlin became quite preachy in his later years. He has way better material.
"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!
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".
I think its inevitable that something (either from humans or nature) will figure out how to digest plastic. Similar to the Devonian Wood Crisis.
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.
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...
> 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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
How frequently do you repair electrical faults on cars?
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.
I hope it will though (kill all use of plastic).
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...
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