The weight of the trees was so great that the ones on the bottom got squished and became coal. That’s where coal is from. Bonus fact: the whole time this was happening, sharks were hunting in the oceans. Sharks are older than trees and fungus!
Fungi in general are about twice as old as sharks. Roughly a billion years vs ~450 million years.
The point is there just weren’t any which had bacteria to decompose trees, as no bacteria had evolved the ability yet. Until there were. Took millions of years though.
Fun fact, now we have mushrooms which can deal with plastic.
Pestalotiopsis microspora is a type of endophytic fungus discovered in the Amazon rainforest in 2011 which contains bacteria that can biodegrade and break down synthetic plastic polymers.
that’s what i was thinkin… surely single-cell eukaryote (fungi) is earlier than complex eukaryote (shark)?
At some point this will happen with plastics too. Soo much plastic is ending up in nature, with soo much energy ready for the taking. When one fungus or bacteria mutates just right to munch on that feast of plastic, that vast energy source will ensure that organism multiplies rapidly.
And that is when plastic stops beeing useful for many of the tasks we humans use it for. If your plastic container decomposes as rapidly as a cardboard box, it will quickly become much less usefull.
There are already organisms which can digest certain plastics. The problem (AFAIK) is they can digest other stuff more easily. So maybe in landfills ill work, not so much in nature were there’s other organic matter for the taking.
If your plastic container decomposes as rapidly as a cardboard box, it will quickly become much less usefull.
How so? Plastic would retain its current properties, just something may break it down over time. Wood is still useful after all.
Cardboard boxes last almost indefinitely in a cool dry warehouse. It’s not just a matter of time, but the environment that matters.
It would depend on how well we can control it.
Ideally the material would be completely nonreactive for as long as you’re using it and then instantly degrade into component elements.
The faster things degrade, the higher the chance that they’ll degrade when you don’t want it to.
Well the carboniferous period lasted 60 million years. If life takes even a fraction of that to figure out plastics, humans will be long, long dead by the time they do. But I’m sure it’ll be something interesting for future non-human civilizations to ponder over.
Speak for yourself there, buddy. I plan on being around for at least another 82 million years. I’m uploading my brain into a terrible android as we speak.
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I use this regularly use this as an example/precedent of a previous macro-cancer of the natural world that was detrimental to Earth’s ecosystem from a mistake of evolution.
The trees removed too much carbon from the atmosphere, leading to an Ice age.
We homo-sapiens are just doing the opposite. 🔥
Don’t worry though, our mother eventually found a solution to the tree’s carbon capture problem, and I have every confidence she will find a solution to us and in a few million years, nothing to her 3.8 billion year old story of life, she’ll finish cleaning up our mess. Problem solved, life will flourish, and new ecosystems in homeostasis with the Earth will develop… until the next macro-tumor of the natural world, at least.
if trees survived their self-inflected apocalypse, why can’t we?
They didn’t know what they were doing, we do, and we actively choose to keep doing it. Unlike those trees mindlessly performing a base biological imperative, we possess the capacity to stop and simply don’t because we’d lose some of the comfort and convenience our destructive tech provides.
We’re cruel to this planet, all the other creatures on it, and one another. So my reverse ask is, why do you want us to survive? Just because ra-ra home team? Because billions subsisting to serve the whims and ego of a few thousand of our worst, most broken, greedy sociopaths in perpetuity is somehow meaningful? Genuinely asking.
I don’t understand why you believe there is a difference between choosing to continue destroying the world and just “destroying the world”
The difference is intent, which matters to me.
I wouldn’t equate a meteor that struck Germany killing millions to Adolf Hitler killing millions because there’s no reason to hate the meteor. It did nothing wrong because it had no agency or sapience, you might as well be mad at physical reality. Its a tragedy, but no one did it, causality set that meteor on our path from some random collision millions of years ago, and it just happened.
Your comment is akin to not seeing a difference between someone who drops dead from some internal reason like a heart attack or brain aneurism, and someone who was shot in the head. After all, who cares how, that person is dead, what’s the difference, amirite?
But their question wasn’t “Do humans deserve to go extinct?”, it was “Can we survive?” Your (valid) issues with human-driven climate change don’t really have anything to do with what they brought up.
Completely fair and correct criticism. I mistook their how query as a why query. I was wrong.
lol@we know what we’re doing
ho boy
Just because wealthy business interests have spent a century pointing and laughing at the scientists warning us of what were doing to our only habitat(with our obedient consent because “jerb creators”), doesn’t mean we have ignorance as an excuse. Pretending the science was wrong out of convenience still means we knew and are responsible.
Nah we can just blow up the planet, take that mother nature
No shrooms?! Shitty year
Bonus fact bonus fact: Shakes are older than the rings of Saturn.
You did a great job in the Star Waes prequals, btw
Whoa, good fact! Thanks
