Bacteria that eats nylon was first found in the wild: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon-eating_bacteria
With this in mind, it may be worth considering that plastic-eating bacteria that currently exist in the wild do not appear to present any significant threat of a catastrophic event. I'm sure it's just an oversight on my part, but can you help me understand why this newly identified strain would pose a threat?
I'm not concerned yet though, since current landfill sites are effectively perfect selective breeding grounds for 'plastic rot', yet so far we haven't detected any significant increase in the breakdown speeds of plastics in the environment.
Ideally any bacteria, or other microbes, would only breakdown plastics under certain conditions, probably in some kind of bioreactor.
Planet Earth had been evacuated, and all that was left was little robots. All of different types, performing different jobs, but with one major function: to rid the world of a microbe that turned all organic matter into crude oil. Initially this microbe was developed for plastics, but it got out of hand really quickly.
Now, given the world was entirely covered, clean up was an impossible task, so most of the robots just gave up and "zenned out." They'd go into an infinite loop of impossibility and stay there. Our robots were a bit different and instead decided to just pretend to work.
Eventually a catastrophic change happened wherin a small comet hit the Earth. Then growing from that point, all of the sludge began to crystalize. These crystals grew like plague, so any robot that became even an little bit glinty was sure to be a goner soon.
The story ended with all our robots dying, having learned that humanity had sent the crystalizing thing, but also having seen greenery grow once again where the crystals had cleaned up.
Yeah, whenever humans engineer something to fix something else we've broken in the complex system that is earth, it seems like there's a high chance of it messing other stuff up and itself becoming a problem.
You would weep.
i'd literally be flooded with shit if something ate my plumbing, which likely means dead. that is, unless the isolation of electric cabling wouldn't burn me alive first.
weep isn't really on the TODO list in that scenario. covid is peanuts in comparison.
I'm reminded of a reddit discussion on how awful it would be if a coronal mass ejection event destroyed all electronics on Earth. They were lamenting how tragic the loss of Netflix would be given the current lock-down, oblivious to that it would presumably result in society collapsing, with millions or billions dying in the ensuing famine.
We've only had widespread electronics for a handful of decades, but if we lost it overnight, we'd be unable to produce and distribute food at the necessary scale. Restoring the global economy wouldn't even be on the horizon, we'd be too busy dying of famine.
We've only had the internal combustion engine for a handful of decades, but if we lost it overnight we'd be similarly ruined.
If the bacteria only slowly ate plastics, we wouldn't be doomed, it would just make things more costly, as with way rust and rot.
Gasoline and diesel go bad because they are solutions of many hydrocarbons, and the lighter hydrocarbons are the first to evaporate, leaving a heavier-than-intended slurry of what's left plus accrued moisture from atmosphere.
It has little to nothing to do with bacterial growth.
'Fuel Stabilizer', additives that are intended to be added to tanks of vehicles which must have fuel sitting in them for prolonged periods, are oils which are designed to prevent the evaporation of the lighter hydrocarbons and prevent water infiltration; usually through the use of molecules that either bond with water readily, or by layering oil atop the fuel mass to encapsulate it from evaporation to atmosphere.
You didn't mention ethanol but that's what you mean. Normal gasoline is very stable, it's just the federally-mandated corn ethanol added to it that turns into sludge after a few months. Fuel stabilizer keeps that ethanol from degrading.
I would advise anyone with small engines, like lawnmowers or snowblowers, to seek out ethanol-free gasoline and use that exclusively in those engines.
Your words make you sound rude, though you may not have meant to be.
I don't think that hypothetical scare-mongering is very useful in this context. Especially not when it risks mis-representing what the article was actually about. Then it just contributes to the kind of information noise you can find many other places on the internet.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
And to specifically not do what you’ve done here:
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
If a comment inspires you to say something insightful or interesting, say it. Otherwise maybe don’t.