scientists: charming and disarming.

I've spent the last few years having an on and off obsession with scientists (also mathematicians.) Primarily because I don't actually know many (if any) scientists or mathematicians. They seems very different from my life and I imagine them to have great stories of banal things that encourage my mind to drift in wonder about tiny details of monstrous proportions.

As I meet these folks, they rarely are able to live up to my very high expectation of personality and charm.

However, ones I read about in books often make me crush out in a serious way.

The book "The World Without Us" introduced me to Dr. Tony Andrady, apparently known as the oracle of plastic's life in our world. He writes 800 page books on the subject of plastic and strikes me as the kind of guy that makes obscure jokes about hydrocarbons in that very endearing way. I think of him dreaming of a bacteria that one day will be able to ingest plastic, pooping out an entirely new substance.

Anyway, I like Tony. I enjoy that he is described as having a "reasonably persuasive voice."

Tony lays it out like this.


The vast majority of plastic that has ever been created -- this primarily means since the 1950's when the whole sha-bang really took off -- is still here. None of it has broken down entirely, none of it has been made into something other than plastic. It's all hanging around, waiting. Waiting for what? Well, he says, there are a couple of answers. It's waiting to be broken down into smaller and smaller pieces for animals to eat or to become more and more clear for animals to get tangled in and die. While, probably all plastic will biodegrate on some level and every permutation of plastic has a different life span --- no plastic has ever died a natural death.

I appreciate Tony's cynicism. It's quite charming.

But the beauty of this scientist -- is his belief in the absolute truth of nature. That everything that comes from it will eventually be taken back to it. Nature will take no defectors.

Tony comes back with the science for us.

Give it 100,000 years -- Earth will either hustle some microbes to evolve so that they can eat plastic. They have, apparently, recently learned to eat oil -- very exciting. Go team. Or if biologic time can not meet plastic where it is at then geologic time will be the victor. Tony hypothesizes that something will happen and the Earth will take in the 1 billion tons of plastic we've made so far (no hyperbole, serious number) and it will turn the plastic into magic. Just like dinosaur bones and petrified trees of the past -- the plastic particles, the polymers and hydrocarbons, will emerge to our distant homo-sapien relatives as some new and clever resource.

Tony says, "Change is the hallmark of nature. Nothing remains the same."

Until the next geologic era?

Well, the science is fuzzy.