O2 Apocalypse

when you don't know what your fighting, its pretty hard to defend against it...

Nature has a way of healing itself. just keep in mind, like global warming, humans may not be a part of its future.

The world as we know it is mostly made up of oxygen, so a shortage is just not a scenario that seems even remotely possible....

..."Below 19.5 percent oxygen . . . , air is considered oxygen-deficient."...

Oxygen is the most abundant element in the Earth's crust. (None of the "abundance" sites I found clearly explained whether the ocean is part of the crust. I suspect much of that crust oxygen is the oceans' water. I expect that silicon oxide compounds are still the most abundant source of crustal oxygen. The solid crust volume is larger than the ocean volume.) Nitrogen is the most abundant element in the Earth's atmosphere. The most massive part of the Earth is the core. The most abundant element in the core is iron. The mass of the Earth's core dwarfs the crust and atmosphere combined. Iron is the most abundant element in the Earth.

Iron is a key component of hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells that binds to oxygen molecules and carries them throughout the body...without the iron, oxygen would be useless to us...

Of course that is at sea level, as you gain altitude oxygen and other gases decline as a percentage...and humans can adapt to much lower levels of oxygen...at around 18,000 ft you drop to about half that, or 10.5%....on Mt. Everest at 29,000 ft it drops to 6.9%...as you know from watching tv and movies, that at 10,000 ft of altitude you can remove your oxygen mask...haha

Haha just kidding, as you can see we have oxygen on....

https://hypoxico.com/pages/altitude-to-oxygen-chart

Just to say that i think this is a misreading of the chart

Oxygen is always 21% (more or less I think as oxygen is heavier than nitrogen gravity may have a small effect)

The chart you liked to is Effective Oxygen %

At the summit of Everest atmos pressure is 0.35barA (5psia) so approx 1/3 sea level

Your lungs have the same volume (typically 6l) at the top of Everest so for each breath you take in there is only 1/3 the amount of oxygen that there would be in that breath at sea level.

So if you want to train for Everest at sea level you need a chamber that has an oxygen content of only 7%. It wont be a true reflection - I am not sure what impact the low atmos pressure has on gas transfer in the lungs - but it will reflect the difficulty of getting enough oxygen into your lungs and so into the blood stream

I was referring to percentage of comparable volume...thanks for the clarification...

What question did you give ChatGPT? It would be interesting to give that same question to CoPilot and a couple of others to see what they have to say. Something I saw not long ago (here???) said that AI responses may be subject to hallucinations!

I guess the place to start is to ask where the oxygen originally came from. Our planet is the only planet in the solar system with a large percentage of oxygen in its atmosphere.

https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14814/phy2.15214

...."Stromatolites are thought to be 3.5billion years old. They are living rocks and produce oxygen. Only found in a few places in the world, these are in Western Australia. It is thought they produced the oxygen which brings the total on earth up to 20% These rocks are alive and still producing oxygen today."...

..."Stromatolites are layered sedimentary formations that are considered to be the oldest fossils on Earth, dating back over three billion years. They are formed by photosynthetic microorganisms, such as cyanobacteria, that create adhesive compounds that bind sand and other rocky materials together."...

https://phys.org/news/2021-02-stromatolitesfossils-earliest-life-earthmay-viruses.html

Well I guess we would all be wearing these portable oxygen concentrators...