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The plastic inside us: how microplastics may be reshaping our bodies and minds
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2025
302 points (98.1% liked)
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This is how the human extinction will happen and it won't be epic.
It'll be because of plastic.
No, it will be because internet education will cause people to ignore actually preventative medicine like Pasteurization, hygiene, and vaccines.
Vaccine and hygene, sure. But pasteurization is not something that prevents an extinction, at least not currently. It prevents unnecessary death and illness for many.
We can take milk for example. If everyone drank unpasteurized milk, most people would be fine. But every now and then, you'd get nasty e-coli outbreaks here and there. Most would survive it after a really really shitty time, but some would die. This is really why some people are lead to believe pasteurization is unnecessary, because you don't realize how important it actually is through anecdotes - you need statistics.
But of course, skepticism towards health science in general is a huge problem and most antipasteurizationers are antivaxxers as well.
Probably no extinction, but our current way of living will come to an end.
Since microplastics disrupts small blood vessels in the brain it probably causes cognitive decline.
Idiocracy?
I'm already feeling it bro
Yup. Climate change will get us close, but this will push us over the edge. Can't survive a genetic bottleneck if you can't make babies.
Can we think positive pls. What if our cells learn to process plastics and we slowly mechanically become immortal instead of carbon lifeforms we evolve into living silicon.
imagine future paleontologists a million years from now, being supercondused by the sedimentary layer full of WTF shit. why are all the fossils from that era contain strange polymers found nowhere in nature followed by a mass extinction.
A plastic asteroid must have hit the Earth!
except no asteroid crater was found, and while space research has discovered some organic compounds on some comets, they weren't a match.
Also, hopefully we used all fossil fuels, so. they don't have crude oil, therefore they might not develop plastics and have no idea how that happened.
although eventually a chemist will figure out plastics, and when they start using them, some will find that they are a match, and beg politicians to ban plastics, as they are the thing that ended a previous civilisation. but they will be ignored...
wait a few million years and then a new civilization will discover two distinct layers of micro plastics both with an ancient extinct civilization
I hope they write stories about how a mysterious giant asteroid made of strange synthesized polymers must have smashed our planet. It was probably a devastating mass driver attack by a technologically superior enemy capable of alchemy.
they would look for asteroids with similar polymers, and spend way too much time studying carboniferous asteroids.
i find that concept fascinating. because it's "it's never aliens" except this time it practically is but also unprovable.
I'm a few million years, i doubt there's even human traces on the moon. although I imagine them finding some human dead satellite in geostationary orbit would blow their fucking minds