re: #260 wheat-dogghazi

There was a bad SF story or novel I recall reading ages ago about a bacterium that had evolved (or was made, I forget which) to eat plastic. It got into the wild and started eating the insulation off electrical wires, bringing civilization to a crashing halt.

That’s part of Michael Crichton’s ‘Andromeda Strain’, where the mutating plague eats the rubber in a military jet plane, causing it to crash.

Stephen Gould’s ‘7th Sigma’ flips the idea, with self-replicating nano-bots that are eating all of the planet’s metal objects.