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Comment by arestifo | Hacker News Reader

Plastic reached where humans never managed to.

Great, just great.

I think about it this way - the planet will survive, humans will not. Within a year of us being gone the planet will take over everything we ever owned. Weeds will break through the streets and house foundations, and in a decade or so (blink of an eye in Earth time) it'll be like we were never here.

Well except for all the garbage we left behind. But even that will become food for something.

There are a number of all clay or stone structures that have been around for centuries/millenia. I think they'd survive a few decades without maintenance, but for the most part I agree with you.

in the grand scheme of things, humans and what we have produced is nothing. Given enough time everything will be decomposed. On in the words of a great comedian: "the planet is fine, people are f'ed"

My worry is that we will transform Earth into a landfill and in desperation we will search (and find) another planet to trash. Humans are very very creative when it comes to survival. Only a fraction of people alive will make it to the new planet. Rinse and repeat.

> in the grand scheme of things, humans and what we have produced is nothing

In my experience, geologists tend towards this type of viewpoint!

not a geologist, but we all have to look at things in perspective

George Carlin had some great quotes indeed (this specific one comes from his take on the environment [1]).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjmtSkl53h4

Given enough time, the Earth will be incinerated by the sun as it expands into a red giant. Solved the plastic problem!

Though as you said, I'm sure we'll have a few hundred (thousand) landfill planets by then.

On a smaller scale, how about using a mass accelerator to dispose of trash by shooting it into the sun?

I think the sun is further away in terms of energy required than one would expect. You don't just have to escape the Earth, you also need to cancel or redirect its orbital velocity around the sun to get a trajectory that reaches the sun.

Then throw it into space, whatever the direction. The universe is so vast, even if the entirety of the earth was garbage it would be nothing compared to it ;)

> I think about it this way - the planet will survive, humans will not.

Will plastic or CO2 kill us, or rather some mass hysteria or a war started by one?

Right now it looks like CO2 is going to cause a lot strife and war as drought and sea level rise cause a lot of displacement. A huge number of people live on or near the coasts of the world. I don't think CO2 will kill us directly but it'll probably a) get us to kill each other over resources or b) set us really far back (I think a lot of people underestimate how much of our modern economy is super interdependent on stable global trade and supply lines).

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