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Sure. Humans introduced something with a negative potential into the world (created out of things that were already in the world). Because of that negative potential, God (IMO, not a "man in the sky" but a form of positively-charged energy) introduced an organic solution as a starting point for humans to fix the problem. Then, scientists (following what I'd argue is a God-given impetus and capacity to do so) iterate on the discovery of the bugs to improve their efficiency.

The central idea being that one of the great mysteries of life is that things tend to work out in one way another, despite all of our thrashing about. The mischaracterization of negative events being inherently "bad" (I view them as lessons or guidestones) ignores the inherent creative potential of those moments. Bugs evolving or coming into existence to compost the plastic is—as far as I see it—a tap on the shoulder saying "it's okay, try this."

A very good encapsulation of this idea is from Carl Jung and is well-explained in this book: https://www.amazon.com/Jungs-Thoughts-God-Religious-Psyches/...

This is a very deep topic and I'm happy to discuss over email: [email protected].

⬐ Waterluvian

Thanks for sharing. This is a fascinating perspective for sure.

I’m very guarded about the idea of “the system can correct to handle whatever we throw at it” because that makes it trivially easy to say “we don’t need to worry because it’ll sort itself out!” That’s dangerous, in my opinion.

God as “positively charged energy” piques my interest. Thanks for the link.

⬐ tkot

What makes plastic something with a negative potential? Was lignin a "thing with negative potential" until some organisms capable of dissolving it appeared? What makes humans a separate thing from "God" - are they not a part of the same nature that created them (and lignin)?

Don't get me wrong - plastic pollution is a serious issue. it just seems to me that the "negativity" of plastic pollution lies in making life more difficult for humans. Appearance of lignin surely influenced whatever forms of life existed at the time, we just don't care that much because we were not around (though carbon deposits from that time were surely useful as a source of easily accessible energy). We are born and we die in a world where lignin is biodegradable and not much of a hassle so we might be inclined not to call it "negative" even though it shares some similarities with plastics.

Things sometimes play out in our favor (like the aforementioned coal deposits providing easily accessible energy) and sometimes they don't (like the CO2 from burning all this coal pushing the chemical composition of our atmosphere outside of favorable range of parameters). I don't really see any advantage of introducing additional beings into the description (I don't think it enables us to make more accurate predictions), though I guess it could be an interesting thought experiment along the lines of the Gaia hypothesis (or the Medea hypothesis for those of more pessimistic inclinations).

I apologize if I made myself unclear or impolite - I tried my best to make this response as understandable as possible while trying to keep it reasonably short.

⬐ rglover

Not unclear or impolite at all. I appreciate the thoughtful response.

> What makes plastic something with a negative potential?

The human perception of it (bad aesthetics and contamination of water being the most concerning).

> I don't really see any advantage of introducing additional beings

I'm not positing God as a being nor a question of what's advantageous. It's an admission that we can't explain everything and the hole is God-shaped (again, IMO). We can observe quite a bit and form hypotheses/conclusions, but we can't go produce a perfect copy of Earth—we don't know how. Our best solution to a "backup Earth" at this point is to terraform Mars which is just manipulating an existing reality we didn't create. My general point being: something of superior intelligence had to produce the reality we're living in (irrespective of the form that intelligence takes).