Hypothetically, if we were alive during that time period. We would have microwood in our balls and not microplastic?
You wouldn’t survive very long. The oxygen level was insanely high back then, and for some reason very high oxygen levels can make you go blind if you breathe the air for too long. Also it would have got unimaginably cold at night even in the tropics (virtually no greenhouse gases) so you’d probably freeze to death.
But also you’d starve to death because there would be nothing to eat since fruit and vegetables wouldn’t have yet evolved.
You would probably have better luck surviving on an alien planet than Earth several hundred million years ago.
If you actually look up ancient trees they were basically just giant ferns. Versions of them are still around today although they do now rot of course when they die. They’re super creepy looking.
I would really like some for my fern garden but unfortunately it is literally cheaper to buy a top of the range smartphone than it is to buy those things. It’s really weird going to a garden centre with everything costing single digit prices and then suddenly there is this tree thingy with commas in its price.
Every species started out as an invasive species.
There is a huge diversity of plastics being produced today and each one will require a unique evolutionary adaptation to be biodegraded. We’re also continuously developing new plastics and new combinations of plastics such as core-shell polymers. You also had much more wood available than you have plastic scattered across the earth, meaning much more energy available for any microorganisms that evolved to degrade wood and thus a greater evolutionary advantage. I don’t think microbes are going to save us from the plastic scourge anytime soon.
I remember in the early days of Ultima Online the game would allow persistence of things dropped, and it got so bad people were asking each other to help pick up and destroy “trash” because it lagged the servers. I can’t recall why that couldn’t be quickly patched or how long it lasted.
old lady from the Titanic -meme
It’s been 60 million years
60
More like three hundred (unless you mean how long it lasted).
I meant how long it lasted
Is chemical energy more readily available from plastics than from wood? You’d have to imagine it is if evolution is adapting these timescales.
