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!
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.
that’s what i was thinkin… surely single-cell eukaryote (fungi) is earlier than complex eukaryote (shark)?
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)
Thank God for fungi. They do so much for us and now eating plastics. We really need something to eat it all
There’s also fungi which can use radiation as a source of energy, radiotrophic fungi, and we’ve been thinking about using them as radiation shields in spacecraft.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus#Use_in_human_spaceflight
The reputation cordyceps gave fungi is really unfair IMO, they mostly chill shroomy buddies that poop food and eat poop
cordyceps are to fungi what barnacles are to arthropods, horrifying twisted versions of the clade
Of all the arthropods you could have singled out as the scary one, you picked Barnacles?
I think these fit the idea.
What the fuck?!
you have seen how they look on the inside, yes? They bring about existential dread with how they’ve been twisted from the arthropod baseline, they’re like the creatures in Man After Man.
They are great for human ingestion, I take cordyceps medicinally regularly.
Is this a good thing? Consuming plastic means releasing all the carbon that they’re made of.
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.
…
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.
if trees survived their self-inflected apocalypse, why can’t we?
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.
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.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.
I don’t understand why you believe there is a difference between choosing to continue destroying the world and just “destroying the world”
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?
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.
Completely fair and correct criticism. I mistook their how query as a why query. I was wrong.
lol@we know what we’re doing
ho boy
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.
Saying “trees” is like saying “mammals.”
Those trees from back then were different species of trees.
So, sure, mammals will survive, just like they survived the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs. But we humans were not those mammals. And we won’t be the mammals that survive our self-inflicted apocalypse.
We will be long gone.
Nah we can just blow up the planet, take that mother nature
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.
And we definetly won’t be the last either
No shrooms?! Shitty year
Did you learned this from the wheel in that Ukrainian mine article?
Whoa, good fact! Thanks
