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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Here’s why you should never, ever drink the rain.
While precipitation has become less acidic, a growing body of evidence suggests that it’s now full of many other pollutants that pose a risk to public health, including microplastics. And unlike the compounds that cause acid rain, these pollutants are almost impossible to get rid of.
Over time, these modern-era substances — which famously take decades to millennia to degrade — have leached into the environment, reaching every corner of the planet, no matter how tall or deep. Microplastics, PFAS, and some other compounds, such as pesticides, are now so widespread
They’re so common, in fact, that they’re even found in the rain.
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When i learned that there is microplastic in the rain a few years ago, i gave up on human future civilization. We will all be increasingly infertile in a few decades.
The only way to eat food that isnt full of microplastics would be indoor growing with a heavily filtered supply of water, filtered or closed loop fertilizer and soil, etc. Its impossible to do that for even a fraction of humanity.
I honestly think that microplastics and CO² are a strange thing to give up over.
Both are a mostly genuine mistake made by a civilization that was (at least at the time it commited to the mistake) largely unaware of the problems it was causing. Much like acid rain or the ozone layer.
We are slowly getting to grips with the problem. And don’t get me wrong: it sucks how a few extremely wealthy individuals can slow the progress that most other people are trying to achieve to an absolute crawl. This absolutely fucking sucks.
But doom scrolling every day and giving up isn’t going to change anything. Neither now nor in the future. It’s okay to be sad. And a lot of things are really sad at the moment. But where sadness paralyzes, anger moves. Be angry. You have every right to be.
Edit: Damn. I just noticed the community I’m posting this in. ._.
I havent given up on humans or society. Just on the longevity of our species as it is today on a planet that is filled with toxic waste that cant ever be removed. If the research on fertility trends due to the relevant chemicals isnt completely flawed, it will be a problem that develops over many generations until natural procreation will become impossible for most people.
Its not really our problem tho so who cares lol /s
I think there are much more time critical and still preventable things to be doomy over. Like genocide and slavery and stuff.
All conditions for handmaids tale are met then
Life in plastic, it’s fantastic!
the dirt would have the microplastics anyway
we’re just not getting rid of it, unless there is success with some of those plastic eating micro bugs and stuff
You can grow hydroponically, no need for dirt. But yeah, we need another solution.
Honestly, infertility is probably one of the best bad things for us rn…
Human population count will almost certainly peak in this century anyways, but i guess moving that point closer isnt so bad lol. Maybe the humans that survive the coming centuries and millennia will just evolve resistance to microplastics by having an adapted gut biome.
We’re in the ai-ren timeline.
We have two daughters. We had the first because we love each other deeply and want to share that with a family. Shortly after she was born the world was rocked by COVID and all the cracks became too apparent even through our lovebird haze. We love our daughter, but feared for her future, feared for her to be alone in this world without us one day. So we made the conscious decision to bring another person into this world just so that the first wouldn’t have to be alone.
It seems a terrible, selfish thing to do to condemn these two incredible, beautiful creatures to such a grim world. They deserve so much more, and my life is made so much happier for their smiles, and so very much worse when I read articles like this knowing what they will have to suffer. These poor babies deserve the lives we had as children, not this crumbling, cooking world.
It seems a terrible, selfish thing to do to condemn these two incredible, beautiful creatures to such a grim world.
I’m hard pressed to point to a moment in human history when anyone could claim otherwise. But bringing people into the world and (much more importantly) raising and caring for and educating and loving them isn’t something you do because utopia already exists. Its a passion project you pursue to make the world a better place.
The vast, vast majority of the modern world is a human project. If your generation fucked it up a bit more than most (and, honestly, Millennials are beating themselves up far too unfairly if they think they’ve done a worse job in the last 30 years than their parents or grandparents did) then fix what you can, remind your children to love their neighbors and one another, and put the world in their hands when you’re done.
These poor babies deserve the lives we had as children, not this crumbling, cooking world.
I think you will be surprised to discover how dire your parents viewed the world when they were your age. And even more surprised to discover how bright and beautiful your children view the world because you’re there to show it to them.
If its in rain, you can bet all your food is loaded with microplastics. Same goes for all animals on earth.
And it accumulates in the brain. Each of us already have a plastic spoon worth of microplastics in our cerebellum.
