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!

  • @Dasus
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    1436 months 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.

    • @itsAsin
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      366 months ago

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

      • @[email protected]
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        176 months 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)

    • dumples
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      266 months ago

      Thank God for fungi. They do so much for us and now eating plastics. We really need something to eat it all

    • @[email protected]
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      146 months ago

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

      • @Jarix
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        15 months ago

        What Amazon? Is that one of those sheerwood forest things?

    • @model_tar_gz
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      25 months 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.

      • @Dasus
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        45 months ago

  • @[email protected]
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    656 months 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.

    • zout
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      466 months 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.

    • teft
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      296 months 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]
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        426 months 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]
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        96 months 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.

    • Neato
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      136 months 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.

      • @TexasDrunk
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        156 months 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.

          • @TexasDrunk
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            56 months ago

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

              • @TexasDrunk
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                26 months ago

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

                • @[email protected]
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                  25 months 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 $$

      • @Jarix
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        15 months ago

        There are entire beaches where sand is being stolen from. And the fans in the great deserts are the wrong kinds for glass apparently

          • @Jarix
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            5 months ago

            Sorry wasn’t meant to be an argument against glass, was just a related thing i found out recently.

            I can see what i did now though. Suz mate

  • @[email protected]
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    216 months ago

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

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

  • @Allonzee
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    6 months 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.

    • ferret
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      6 months ago

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

      • MuchPineapples
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        126 months 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.

      • oo1
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        96 months 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]
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          6 months 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

      • @Allonzee
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        6 months 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.

        • ferret
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          116 months ago

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

          • @Allonzee
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            6 months 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?

            • Ech
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              106 months 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.

              • @Allonzee
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                66 months ago

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

          • @Allonzee
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            6 months 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.

      • @laughterlaughter
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        5 months ago

        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.

    • @ricdeh
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      46 months ago

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

  • @yesman
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    85 months 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.

    • @Noodle07
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      25 months ago

      And we definetly won’t be the last either

    • @[email protected]
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      25 months ago

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

    • @ndru
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      46 months 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.

  • @MissJinx
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    56 months ago

    No shrooms?! Shitty year