Why can bacteria adapt to antibiotics, but not adapt to environmental things like heat or acids/soaps (Salmonella as an example)?

Question

Edit: I’ve had a lot of fun reading all of your analogies

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Answer 1

Antibiotics resistance is easy. It usually takes one single gene to get resistant, and that gene is already out there. Most bacteria becomes resistant by picking up the already existing resistance genes from the environment. So it can happen within the life time of a bacterium.

Becoming heat resistant is difficult. It requires that all genes of the bacteria become heat resistant. There are heat resistant bacteria that live in 70-75°C but they evolved to be like that over long long time, not in one life time. The same is true for every extreme environment such as high salt or acidic. Also note that living in extreme environments is a shift. Bacteria that can live there, cannot live in “normal” conditions anymore.

And chemicals that are destructive to life and don’t exist in nature (such as soap or chlorine), they are virtually impossible to adapt to.