this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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I'm probably going to judge you if you say Holocene, without an interesting non-trivial reason.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Very cool!

It reminds me of my fav, The Oxygen Catastrophy, where basically a plant did something new and caused the earth to freeze. In this case, by converting methane to carbon dioxide, a much weaker greenhouse gas.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Ooh, since this is a safe space for dorks, I would like to be pedantic myself. Thank you for the opportunity. The oxygen catastrophe was caused by cyanobacteria-like organisms, which are photosynthetic, but are not plants. But it’s true, all bio-mass matters!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That's interesting. What makes cyanobacteria distinct from plants?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

The first thing that comes to mind is that bacteria are prokaryotes, while plants are eukaryotes. They have internal membranes, called thylakoids, in which they do photosynthesis, but chloroplasts in plants are fully-developed organelles with their own DNA. If I recall correctly, the current thinking is that chloroplasts developed from endosymbiotic cyanobacteria.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Yeah I knew they weren't plants but it made the analogy easier to pretend they were πŸ˜…
They have plant-ey vibes

They were all like "let's get the Calvin cycle up in this house, lets light it up!" And so they did, and the atmosphere caught fire