A novel threat to high technology

[stevebowers]

Diesel engines suffer from bacterial infections, that sometimes cause severe degradation to performance. I wouldn't be surprised if microbes do evolve sufficiently to eat some oil-based plastics. Antibiotics are getting more and more difficult to develop at the current time, but there should be other forms of microbicides available at some point, hopefully in the relatively near future. The problem might be that artificial tech-eating microbes would be developed on purpose, or even by accident (genegeneers are already working on garbage eating microbes that eat plastics and extract metals).