Don't assume someone hasn't read the article. It currently exists in the wild but states only that scientists "managed to isolate a bacterium", indicating that it is not abundant and likely not capable of working at a large scale. The obvious question of "what happens when [the industrial version of] this gets out" is a reasonable one that the article doesn't even address.

It might have been better to say, “In the article, they say that this is a microbe that already exists in the wild.”

Your words make you sound rude, though you may not have meant to be.

Thank you, I'm quite aware that it made me sound rude.

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.

The HN site guidelines ask us to be kind:

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I imagine the plan is to engineer it to increase its potency. It's clearly not at a dangerous/critical point in its current form.

Extremely rapidly degrading plastics would still be a better situation than extremely slowly degrading plastics.