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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

That didn't sound too right for me (but my biology knowledge is dated at this point) so I read the relevant section from that page. It concludes wiht:

"""The delayed fungal evolution hypothesis is controversial, however, and has been challenged by other researchers, who conclude that a combination of vast depositional systems present on the continents during the formation of Pangaea and widespread humid, tropical conditions were responsible for the high rate of coal formation."""

It's interesting to think just how much went on before trees with lignin showed up. Flowers are also relatively recent - 150mya.

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Yeah the snippet of the wikipedia page that you link is citing the paper that put the final blow to the fungal lignin breakdown hypothesis. It points out (the last point is particularly strong):

* there is evidence for partial lignin breakdown in existing deposits, so we know it was a thing back then

* if it were just lignin breakdown, then we'd see orders of magnitude more deposits. that is, if you look at the per year deposit rate, you'll see only a small fraction of lignin being deposited.

* a large fraction of deposits doesn't even contain lignin, often below or above deposits with lignin, but without there being a different rate of depositions between them.

(copying my earlier comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34654837 )

In general, it's mind-blowing to travel back in Earth's history and realize there were tens or hundreds of millions of years where strategies that are commonplace today had never been tried before (or they'd tried too early and failed). It makes one wonder, what will be the strategies of future life which no creature has yet evolved? Can we even imagine it?

I think it's almost guaranteed that bacteria eating plastics will proliferate globally at some point, we've put so much of this stuff in the environment and it's just free energy ready to be consumed if your digestive system knows how.

https://www.reed.edu/reed-magazine/articles/2021/reed-biolog...

Where did the Tupperware go?!

Will we have to develop antibacterial plastics to combat this for stuff we don’t want eaten, yet?

Maybe we can just add some broad-spectrum antibiotics into the standard plastic mix.

And make all bacteria known to men immune?

Funny. Just the other day I read an article about where Tupperware has gone.

https://text.npr.org/2023/06/01/1178876648/tupperware-busine...

I used to entertain this idea but I'm somewhat skeptical such a thing could proliferate, there is just not that much plastic relative to the other sources of energy an animal can evolve towards. I'd be interested to hear otherwise though.

There is tons if it some places though

You don't need a ton everywhere. You just need enough in a few places for long enough.

And suddenly plastics won't be the sterile, durable wonders that they are. We are living in The golden age of plastics, folks.

Things degrade wood too, doesn't make it useless.

Wood in today's society needs chemical treatment or physical isolation before we use it a construction material.

Only because we use a lot of pine wood with low density (because cheap&fast). Not all wood is like that: Red cedar, douglas, larch, acacia and more... Where I live, chestnut is even used for roof tiling.

And then there is cork

Indeed... still used for wine bottles. I can't say I'm too happy with it though, given the amount of bottles spoiled by bad cork.

The screw top for wine bottles, one of the best inventions in recent decades.

Yes... easy to open, easy to close, needs no tool, preserves the wine. No drawbacks, unless you're into nostalgia.

I've started seeing screw-tops as an accessibility feature after the last time I got a bottle with a cork that was impossible for my mother to open and ended up crumbling anyway. I'm done with corks forever; they just don't make sense.

Wood is useless for sterile applications because it harbors bacteria and such. Think dentist, doctor, chemistry labs, industrial processes, food manufacturing and packaging, chemical storage, etc etc. All Plastic.

I don't think they'll get through metal and certainly not glass for a long time.

I think metal is already a target of microbial corrosion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbial_corrosion

Rusticals are eating the Titanic.

I've definitely already heard of plastic-eating bacteria. They already have bugs eating it now too

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/14/bugs-acr...

Check out cronenberg's recent movie, crimes of the future, seems relevant haha

Natural selection are now slower than artificial ones except on the microbial levels.

So maybe extinctions after extinctions for animals that are visible to us, and then bunch of new superbugs.

it's also mind blowing to know that there are things which really haven't changed in over a billion years, yet still do just fine. How did my bio prof say it? "Bacteria are like the race cars of the biological world. They don't win by having the best strategy, they win by rate of duplication and acquisition."

Are there species of bacteria that are substantially unchanged in a billion years?

No way to know for sure. But many bacteria today look very similar to what little bit of maybe fossils we might have.

Morphologies of cyanobacteria show that fossils from billion+ years ago show little change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolite

Clearly I don't know much about race cars because that makes no sense to me, lol

I should have mentioned he was an F1 fan.

And grass is even younger - just ~100-65mya! (depending on the source - not sure if it's narrowed down in papers)

This is good news. The idea of the delayed fungal evolution hypothesis was this:

"Before trees grew wood that was unable to rot and so became coal but after fungus came now wood is ruined and it's impossible to make coal again."

Understanding that coal formation is a reversible process and that a new agent didn't permanently ruin the process, is a sigh of relief.

So coal is actually renewable?

On multi-hundred million year timespans.

You know it would be very cool if someone made an UE5 demo that was just a forest with a dozen or so options to change the date and see which types of vegetation appear and disappear.

Presumably flowers proliferated due to insect pollinators?

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