Microplastics have been found almost everywhere: in blood, placentas, lungs – even the human brain. One study estimated our cerebral organs alone may contain 5g of the stuff, or roughly a teaspoon. If true, plastic isn’t just wrapped around our food or woven into our clothes: it is lodged deep inside us.
Microplastics are shed from packaging, clothes, paints, cosmetics, car tyres and other items. Some are tiny enough to slip through the linings of our lungs and guts into our blood and internal organs – even into our cells. What happens next is still largely unknown.
"Designing a definitive experiment is hard, because we’re constantly being exposed to these particles,” says Dr Jaime Ross, a neuroscientist at the University of Rhode Island in the US. “But we know microplastics are in almost every tissue that has been looked at, and recent studies suggest we’re accumulating far more plastic now than 20 years ago.”
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