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TIL in the Carboniferous Period, no fungus existed to decompose trees. They just grew on top of each other up and up. (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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!

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[-] [email protected] 142 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 35 points 1 month ago

that's what i was thinkin... surely single-cell eukaryote (fungi) is earlier than complex eukaryote (shark)?

[-] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago

you'd think so, but sharks were in fact the first lifeform to be summoned from the astral planes, everything else evolved from a single shark cell that had the right mutations to survive (all sharks simply died within minutes until plants had created enough oxygen for them to breathe, at which point they died within days until the evolution of other animals)

[-] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago

Awesome, now they'll just dump all the plastic in the Amazon and congratulate themselves for doing the right thing

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[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Fungi are pretty awesome. We can decompose plastic with them. Engage in inter dimensional astral travel with them. And have a nice trip by a campfire without ever leaving the chair.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

...

[-] [email protected] 65 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 46 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 29 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 42 points 1 month ago

Cardboard boxes last almost indefinitely in a cool dry warehouse. It's not just a matter of time, but the environment that matters.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Why terrible?

[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

It was the only one available. I'll upgrade in a few years, probably.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Can you just buy a new one in a few years and have two?

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I guess it depends on how much money I can make as Texas, the Drunk Android.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Probably a lot. But also more than double if you duplicate your consciousness into a second android.

Shit, you sold me. Where can I get a cheap android to upload my consciousness into, so I can make them slave 80 hours per week for me $$

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Unfortunately due to capitalism I can't tell you or it'll cut into my money and thus ability to live for millions of years. Once I've made my money I'll DM you so that you're second in line.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago

Fortunately we've always had a solution: just fucking use glass

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[-] [email protected] 21 points 1 month ago

Bonus fact bonus fact: Shakes are older than the rings of Saturn.

You did a great job in the Star Waes prequals, btw

[-] jballs 26 points 1 month ago

I would've guessed milkshakes were invented in like the 1940s

[-] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

[-] aBundleOfFerrets 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

if trees survived their self-inflected apocalypse, why can’t we?

[-] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago

Oh humans will survive, no problem. I mean, not a lot of them and not happily, and there will probably be a nuclear war at the end there, but humans won't go extinct. We're too smart to not find a nice hole to hide in.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Millions is fine. Its a lot. Billions is just crazy and never should have happened.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago

Trees breed by putting their babies into extremely resilient, heat and cold protected stasis pods that can go centuries without care and attention in the right conditions - like suviving an ice age or forest fire.

Human babies are wimps by comparison - most of them would die after only a few days left outside at 0 degrees C.

Humans probably will survive too - but how many?
Elon + all this 3 mates.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Yeah, I freeze my spurm and I'm pretty sure there's a few thousand different women on this continent who have frozen eggs

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

[-] aBundleOfFerrets 11 points 1 month ago

I don’t understand why you believe there is a difference between choosing to continue destroying the world and just “destroying the world”

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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?

[-] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

Completely fair and correct criticism. I mistook their how query as a why query. I was wrong.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Pretty sure people are gonna keep fucking regardless of if they do it mindfully.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

lol@we know what we're doing

ho boy

[-] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

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[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Nah we can just blow up the planet, take that mother nature

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

The moon did that a long time ago. And here we are today.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago

The trees clogged the land, the water, and when one inevitably got struck by lightning, continent wide forest fires were common.

IIRC, it's these trees, not dinosaur bones that became most of the oil/gas deposits.

It's worth noting that when it comes to a species wrecking the environment, causing mass extinction, changing the climate, or spoiling the atmosphere, humans are not the first and we're not the worst.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

And we definetly won't be the last either

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

We are (probably) the first to actually be (mostly) self-aware of it though. As in we could do something about it.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

Maybe not.

https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/lack-fungi-did-not-lead-copious-carboniferous-coal

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Oh noooo, the coal existing because of evolutionary lag theory is one of my favourites. Continents colliding and creating wet topical basins is cool too, but it’s not such a good story to tell.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I agree. Total bummer.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

No shrooms?! Shitty year

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

There were shrooms, they just couldn't eat carbon

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Did you learned this from the wheel in that Ukrainian mine article?

[-] Varyk 2 points 1 month ago

Whoa, good fact! Thanks

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this post was submitted on 30 May 2024

319 points (96.2% liked)

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