 A few decades ago, I had this conversation with someone where I said something to the effect of, you know, if we keep throwing plastic out into nature, eventually something's gonna start eating it. And then we're screwed. And the person said, ah, I don't know what you're talking about. Well, fast forward to the other day where I saw a news report, a video, where some people were very excited that plastic-eating bacteria has been discovered. Yay, it's gonna eat all the garbage! We're saved! Humanity is saved! All our garbage is gonna be taken care of for us! Yay! And they're going on and on, and scientists are taking this stuff into the lab, and they're gonna genetically engineer the greatest plastic-eating bacteria ever, and it's gonna eat up all the garbage. All that plastic that's in the ocean, don't worry about it, it's all gonna be taken care of. Those landfills, it's all gonna be gone, replaced by this plastic-eating goo! I'm just gonna call it the blob from now on. So they're going on and on about how this is gonna save everyone. And I'm thinking, okay, first, that doesn't actually solve a problem. The problem is that humans are acting like irresponsible morons, just throwing away valuable resources. So this makes it so we can do it more. It enables us to do it more, this stupid thing. So that's not valuable at all. It actually just takes away the guilt that we already don't have for doing this stupid stuff. The other problem is, how do you convince this bacteria to eat the plastic that we designated as garbage, but not the other plastic? So like, okay, blob, just eat this pile of plastic garbage here, but don't eat any of the components out of my car, because my car won't work with all the plastic removed, and don't eat any of my kitchen appliance parts, or don't eat the circuit board out of my computer, or you know how much stuff we have that requires plastic? Like everything we do now requires plastic. Like, yeah, computers won't work. All that stuff is gone. Well, I guess the upside of that is, if the blob wipes out computers fast enough, we won't have to worry about the AI singularity wiping us out, so there's an upside there. But like, okay, all computers are gone. All the appliances in your house, all tools, electric motors, electric motors have coils of wire, and the coils of wire have a plastic coating that prevents the coil of wire from just being a clump of copper. None of that stuff works, but it doesn't matter because electricity won't work, because all the wires in the world, all the wires in your house, all the wires everywhere are coated with plastic that insulates them from touching each other, and without that plastic coating none of it works, so electricity is gone, fiberglass is gone, Kevlar, any of those materials that are plastic based, you know, composite materials, all gone. Polyester clothing, people will be like walking around, oh no, I got some of the blob on my shirt, and it's disintegrating now, ah, your glasses, they're gone, like all this stuff, like look around at your life, you're plumbing, vinyl siding on your house, like so much plastic, you take the plastic out of your life, civilization is sent back to the dark ages, now you might say oh, but plastic's only been around for like, you know, 100-ish years or whatever, yeah, but how many people have machines from 100 years ago, do you have a steam engine just hanging around, waiting to be used as a backup for when your car stops working, no, no one has that stuff anymore, we don't have brass stuff, we have no backups, we've relied completely on plastic and we've treated it like a disposable thing, and now karma's coming back to bite us, so anyway, maybe I'm totally insane, but that's what I think of this whole plastic eating bacteria thing, I do not think we want plastic eating bacteria in the world at all, what we need is for people to start behaving responsibly and stop making and buying and using disposable plastic stuff, some morality problem, alright, I gotta go do stuff, I don't want to think about this anymore, it's depressing, like I feel like I'm the only one who thinks this, like I'm in the twilight zone, like either I'm completely insane or everyone else's.