Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted, clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts: 1

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Wouldn't it be funny if there ended up being a plastic-based life form and they wondered how they came to be... (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/showerthoughts

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...and they COULD NOT think of a natural process that could produce plastics in the environment in the amounts required to produce life?

Their science would never dream of how it happened.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

There are pretty much inert because they're ignored by most proteins and are largely stable enought to resist chemical damage (oxydation is the big one). This is the reason we make so much of them, they're useful as containers and it's cheaper to make new containers rather than reuse the old ones.

That being said, it could happen that some biological processes start using plastic as an energy source and/or process it for parts. This is already done in labs with plastic eating bacteria today, where the bacteria produces enzymes capable of breaking the molecular bonds in some plastics.

The main factor is that there is considerably less plastic readily available than there is carbon dioxide, because the carbon dioxide is just there, but in a hypothetical future where the earth is covered in several inches of plastic, chances are that single cell organisms that thrive off of plastic could realistically evolve.