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Comment by Traubenfuchs | Hacker News Reader

Imagine a beach completely consisting of nurdles. Imagine an ecosystem of bacteria, microorganisms, fish and other seafood creatures adapted to living on it. I feel like as humanity we could totally reach a point where evolution to that kind of ecosystem becomes the only choice. Same for our immune, digestive and lymph system. We could end up at a point where most of life NEEDS microplastic to survive! Then we can finally stop caring about micro plastics and start loving them instead.

I for one love nurdles!

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"Evolve" here is a neat word for "countless trillions of creatures die preventable deaths or otherwise fail to reproduce over geological time". If your terminal goal is to "finally stop caring about micro plastics" rather than "protect Earth's existing ecosystem", why wait? Just nuke the planet to glass. Microplastic worry over.

(A similarly nihilist viewpoint comes from the people who pontificate that "the planet will be fine, it's humans who will suffer". Sure, if by "the planet" you mean "a lump of mass orbiting the sun". Low bar for your ethical framework.)

> Low bar for your ethical framework

Or highest. Puts overall species diversity ahead of the future of a single species (us).

That would be a defensible (if unpopular) position - see VHEMT - but usually the people saying this are arguing against the ethical consequentiality of anthropogenic ecosystem damage ("the planet will be fine") which is very harmful to biodiversity. Nobody's really offered a sane ethical framework in which it's a good thing for humans to wreck the planet, killing themselves and most everything else in the process.

There's a broad read on the definition of "social Darwinism" I like to remember.

Natural selection is a scientific concept and process. When people hijack these concepts for social or political aims, it's no longer scientific, and it's something else entirely.

This is such a strange spot for a glass half full take lol. "At least it's warm in hell!"

I think the good news is that we can adapt to enjoy how warm it is in hell. So it’s bad news that we’re going to hell, good news is that we’ll eventually like it.

The trouble with that notion is this: imagining that a plastic-based ecosystem arises (horrifying thought!) it means that there are life-forms capable of deriving energy from plastics, breaking them down. That makes plastics useless to us humans, because any time we try to use plastics for all the things we currently do with them, those life-forms are going to come along and attack, break down the stuff we deem "useful plastics"; the critters will make no distinction between nurdles lost on the beach and the plastics holding your car/house/clothes/aeroplane together. i.e. It's Game Over for plastics use.

That's not necessarily true. There is an ecosystem for breaking down wood, and my house is framed in wood.

Termites are a good example.

They are a natural way to break down wood. And they can eat your house. Thus we have come up with ways to mitigate them. Now there is an entire industry around preventing termites, fixing termite damage, etc..

So, the problem is, we find some microbe that eats plastics. Boom, now we have a new problem, we need an entire industry to prevent them from eating the plastics we don't want them to eat. Think of traveling with your laptop, 'oops, got a little bit of plastic eating microbe, guess i'm buying a new laptop'

Well wood also doesn't rot away within a day. You have to unmaintain it for years, or spray termites over it, if you want it gone fast. So that is nice, if you have that flexibiliy. Once a plastic part is thrown away it will be processed at the composting company.

I mean sure, with issues like plastics, global warming, ozone layer hole, melted polar caps, extreme weather events, bug collapse, etc etc etc, life will find a way. It's not a "final" extinction event per se, nor one as catastrophic as the meteor strike from back when.

But we are living in a mass extinction event. Billions of crabs died. Bug population has collapsed. Biodiversity has nosedived.

Humanity hasn't suffered yet in terms of total population, but that's because we're able to adapt our environment accordingly. That said, we will see famines and scarcities in our lifetime. Hell, we already do, but it mainly presents itself in day to day life (in "the west") as some products going out of shelves (the UK having supply problems due to brexit / long border queues) or prices spiking (e.g. produce from Ukraine). But worldwide we will see more of that.

As for (micro)plastics, IIRC we've yet to determine the full impact. But we know these nurdles break down into microplastics over time due to UV exposure and the like, but they don't disappear completely and find their way into everything. We'll only know the full impact looking back in a few hundred years.

Harvest in England the second worst on record because of wet weather https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/10/harvest-...

Fast forward to that future, someone says: imagine a world where we don't have to live in our own waste ... how much more efficient would our biology be?

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