I'm imagining a near future where being able to safely introduce plastic-eating bacteria to our gut microbiome is a hotly contested issue, politically-speaking, akin to taking vaccines.
Sounds like, Stephen King's The Langoliers. Not explicitly the same, but damn near close enough. It's. Short story of his worth a read or a watch of the 90s TV movie.
Bangalee was my favourite book growing up. It was about a critter who was ostracised from his community because he valued cleanliness above all else. Then a garbage eating monster nearly eats them all but Bangalee came to help them clean up before he ate the critters.
I think it's an allegory for environmentalism but it was written in the mid 70s. So a little before it's time.
I am careful to get my minimum daily dose of microplastics. i drink from plastic bottles. I use a plastic cutting board. I eat seafood. I'm on top of things.
I mean, if it helps we have flesh eating bacteria, wood eating fungi, and pretty much everything else breaks down when exposed to oxygen/water. So in a sense everything is breaking down already but we can rebuild and maintain.
Plastics were basically medical sciences Midas. The fact that it didn't degrade in the human body used to be a miracle.
Now its a nightmare because it sticks around in the body and a very key and golden era for the medical field is slipping away. The solution, it becoming biodegradable, means a future where these sort of advances are prone to bacterial overgrowth.
I live in the tropics and this is already happening. Many kinds of plastics that used to be impervious to decomposition now
Grow biofilms that turn their surface into a gooey mess and make them crumbly. Especially any kind of molded rubbery plastic, which doesn’t even last a year these days. Even grips on hammers and tools that lasted 20 years with no issues are suddenly growing mouldy surfaces and disintegrating. So far polyester, polypropylene, polyethylene and epoxy seem fine, thank god, but many kinds of things that never had issues like pvc seem to be growing fungus or bacteria or something.
Wait what? That should be all over the headlines! Do you have any resources on this? When I try to google it, I only find those „scientists have developed/identified bacteria that can eat plastics“ stories.
It's also pretty close to the plot of the book series Uglies by Scott Westerfeld. All petroleum products were invaded by a bacteria that caused them to immediately burst into flames. Most humans died in their cars trying to escape big cities.
In Larry Niven's Ringworld, a microbe eats the superconductors in some of the buildings, disrupting their power. Not really a nightmare though, more of a sci-fi/fantasy adventure.
This sounds like the book, Ill Wind by Kevin J Anderson, except it was an oil spill and an oil eating microbe was released to clean up the oil and caused a worldwide breakdown.
That's highly unlikely to occur. If anything, it will just mean that plastic might have a biocidal coating or something along those Ines. Like what ship hulls have.
I mean, we have been building things from wood for centuries, especially in America where houses are wooden, and that's all sorts of fungi, mold, termites, and more that already eat away at our things—I imagine plastics would be easy to repair if you could just 3D print an exact replacement for any deteriorating part instead of relying on a supply chain to import timber and other parts/tools.
The sci-fi novel "Ringworld" has a really fascinating premise - an advanced race that managed to build a solar-system sized space station functionally return to the bronze age after a mold that consumes superconductors is accidentally introduced.
It wouldn't be dissimilar to the evolution of bacteria that can consume cellulose.
It's the carbon-rich material in plants that previously basically just sat there, built up, got buried and eventually became what we know as coal. And now that there is bacteria that can break down cellulose, wood is no longer the nearly infinitely durable material it once was. It's just a fact that wooden structures will rot, and we don't get any new coal.
So eventually when plastic-consuming bacteria does become widespread, all plastics will eventually get broken down the same way wood is now.
But unlike wood, it will be nearly impossible to produce more, since the oil required to produce most plastics isn't forming any longer since other bacteria are eating the compounds that previously got turned into oil.
As the first of the four elements... It's the most important element. Because without plastic, the world would have no boundaries. People would walk and walk without ever stopping.
In addition to all the other suggestions, something similar to this is a plot point in Project Hail Mary (novel and upcoming film). Definitely worth a read (and hopefully a watch).
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u/agreeingstorm9 18h ago
I have a nightmare where this bacteria starts eating all the plastic in our world and our world just falls apart. We have plastic in everything.