> It took 60 million years after trees evolved for microbes to evolve that could digest them Go back further in time, and you'll discover that from the moment

> It took 60 million years after trees evolved for microbes to evolve that could digest them Go back further in time, and you'll discover that from the moment photosynthesis arrived on the scene and took over as an energy source, until a life-form evolved that could make use of the poisonous oxygen that was a byproduct of it, it took roughly 0.7 billion years[0]. Resulting in many, many cyanobacterial apocalypses in that time. We may have to come up with new (old) material solutions to many things, but on the whole I think that plastic-eating microbes are probably more of an apocalypse-averting scenario than an apocalypse-causing one. EDIT: to put that 0.7 billion years number into perspective, let's look at the age of life on Earth: > The earliest time that life forms first appeared on Earth is unknown. They may have lived earlier than 3.77 billion years ago, possibly as early as 4.28 billion years ago, not long after the oceans formed 4.41 billion years ago, and not long after the formation of the Earth 4.54 billion years ago. The earliest direct evidence of life on Earth are fossils of microorganisms permineralized in 3.465-billion-year-old Australian Apex chert rocks. Sticking to the confirmed existence of life, 0.7 billion years represents 20% of life's history on this planet. With conservative estimates 18%, and assuming it was there from very early on, 16%. Even if life has existed on this planet for as long as Earth itself has, then this still accounts for 15% of the history of life on this planet. Meanwhile, we likely split off from Chimpanzees around 12 million years ago, with modern humans not evolving until about 300-200 thousand years ago (which I still find mind-bogglingly recent), which is somewhere between 0.006 to 0.008%[3]. EDIT2: This makes me wonder if modern bacterial life-forms, if not all modern life-forms that we may consider simple and primitive, may not in fact be incredibly sophisticated compared to their ancestors of billions of years ago. I can imagine that they appear similar due to a particular solution already being stuck in a local optimum (say, shark body plans, or certain leaf shapes) but that on the genetic level the more recent life-forms might have evolved complicated systems of evolvability itself that lets them adapt much faster than before[4]. [0] http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2009/02/bands-of-iron/ http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2009/02/bands-o... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earliest_known_life_forms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earliest_known_life_forms [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee%E2%80%93human_last_common_ancestor#Current_estimates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee%E2%80%93human_last_... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_human_evolution#Homo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_human_evolution#Ho... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolvability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolvability