• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

What Would Happen To Humanity If All Microbes Suddenly Disappeared?

December 8, 2022 by Deborah Bloomfield

Here’s a fun “what if”: what if all microbial life on Earth was to suddenly disappear? One team of biologists has pondered this question and come up with an answer: we could survive, but only briefly, and during that time life “would become incomprehensibly bad”. 

The team broke down their answer to separate out what happens when bacteria and archaea are removed, and when all microbes (viruses, bacteria, archaea, protists, algae etc) suddenly disappear, leaving us larger lifeforms all alone to fend for ourselves.

Advertisement

What if bacteria and archaea disappeared?

In terms of bacteria in everyday life, you only really ever hear about the bad guys, from strep to chlamydia and urinary tract infections. But, of course, bacteria do so much more than make your throat and genitals sore. In fact, if all bacterial and archaeal life were to be magicked away – according to the 2014 paper – people have claimed that life as we know it would end and society would collapse. The team believe that at first humans would fail to see the signs, at least for a few weeks, and “complete societal collapse” would happen within a year or so, primarily due to collapse of the food supply. 

The first of many main problems would be nitrogen, required by our planet’s plants. More specifically, nitrogen is converted by bacteria into ammonia, needed by the plants for photosynthesis. Without a truly gargantuan intervention by humans in the form of mass-produced fertilizer, most photosynthesis globally would likely end within a year. Anybody smugly thinking “I’ll just eat meat” is of course forgetting cows eat grass, and also that ruminants digest their food through microbial action before digestion. No bacteria, no cows, no sheep and no goats.

Another problem would be decomposition. 

Advertisement

“Biomass would likely begin to accumulate, particularly at the molecular level, creating vast reservoirs of biogeochemical waste that no biological entity could transform,” the team write, “at least initially”. 

Smaller animals fare worse. More than half of all phytoplankton gain vitamin B12 from bacteria, without which they won’t survive. Food chain collapse would be likely.

“Although humans depend on microbial vitamins and amino acids obtained through diet or our gut microorganisms, we might successfully synthesize nutritional compounds through chemical ingenuity or by recombinant biotechnology with yeast as a surrogate host,” they write of our own dependence on bacteria.

Advertisement

While we are dealing with all of that, we would also have to face a vast increase in atmospheric CO2, as animals continue our insistence on breathing out the gas and plants refuse to keep up their end of the bargain of converting it back into oxygen, on account of them being dead.

“Annihilation of most humans and nonmicroscopic life on the planet would follow a prolonged period of starvation, disease, unrest, civil war, anarchy, and global biogeochemical asphyxiation,” they conclude, cheerfully, though they add that small populations (if they can overcome the problems above) of species could endure.

What if all microbes disappeared?

If all microbes disappeared, at first we might celebrate, the paper suggests, as microbial diseases such as Ebola and measles straight up disappear overnight. However, celebrations would not last long, with the effects being similar to when bacteria are removed, but far more acute. 

Advertisement

A pressing problem would be that human and animal waste would cease to break down, and would “accumulate rapidly”, and since nothing is getting recycled, available macronutrients and micronutrients would soon be exhausted.

“Living food sources would be increasingly difficult to find,” they write. “Most ruminant livestock would starve without microbial symbionts, and plants would rapidly deplete nitrogen, cease photosynthesis, and then die.”

Likely overwhelmed by the problems facing us, only pockets of humans would survive. We would share our world largely with insects.

Advertisement

“In short, we argue that humans could get by without microbes just fine,” they conclude. “For a few days.” 

“Although the quality of life on this planet would become incomprehensibly bad, life as an entity would endure.”

The paper was published in PLOS Biology.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Former Germany defender Boateng guilty of bodily harm, fined 1.8 million euros
  2. Soccer-Lukaku a distant memory as free-scoring Inter start in style
  3. Accenture expects strong Q1 as Delta variant delays return-to-work plans
  4. High Alpha opens third venture studio: co-founder calls venture market ‘hot and crazy’

Source Link: What Would Happen To Humanity If All Microbes Suddenly Disappeared?

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version