3mo ago

Oxygen

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This screenshot is an attack made by chemists with the intent to cause aneurysms on unsuspecting biologists.

Sol 3 is a Class-14 Deathworld on what used to be a thirteen-point scale until they found it.
Not only is the planet very geothermally volatile with active volcanic systems AND feature violent and chaotic weather systems...
"Earth" is the deepest gravity well they've ever witnessed chemical rocketry successfully achieve orbit from.
The biosphere is teeming with pathogens, so much so that the sapient population's own bodies rely on symbiotic microbial colonies in order to digest nutrients among other tasks.
And the macroscopic fauna are ALMOST as scary as the microscopic stuff: every biome packed with highly adapted predators.
At the top of this complex carnal carnival of carnivory, the "humans" who live there are unstoppable pursuit and persistence predators highly naturally gifted in ranged combat that historically used to just WALK their prey to death. The animals which ancient humans consumed could sprint to temporary safety, but humans will catch up, ALWAYS catch up, and the prey will still be tired when they have to sprint again. Eventually the fatigue outpaces them, and humans catch up for the last time. Just walk right up and bash them with a rock, they might not even have to throw it: dinner is ready!
Furthermore, it's not just the highly volatile oxygen that all the animals there breathe... Sol 3's atmosphere also even contains a constant background presence of radon. The biosphere is passively resistant to some levels of radiation. One of the cities was consumed in the fallout cloud of an exploding nuclear fission reactor(they STILL use water to cool their municipal fission reactors even now!), and although the humans fled, the animals that stayed there are FLOURISHING. Deformed and mutated, but thriving.
NOBODY SANE CHOOSES TO GO TO SOL 3.
- Sol 3: ~~Harmless~~ Mostly harmless
- More of this please
  
  Over on reddit there's an entire genre of this sort of fiction in /r/hfy
  
  The entire ecosystem is also part plastic.
  
  https://deathworlders.com/books/deathworlders/chapter-00-kevin-jenkins-experience/
- https://youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg
- complex carnal carnival of carnivory
  Beautiful.
- In one of their multitude of inter-nation conflicts; two cities were consumed in nuclear fire. On any sane world; these areas would be abandoned and the area around them a quarantine zone; the humans obviously not being fully sane, rebuilt and flourish.
  This is related to the fact that humans along with most of the inhabitants of Sol3, are highly resilient to damage; of all kinds.
  Humans reproduce slowly; but even though they generally reproduce not far above replacement rate, their resilience means their population still grows at an exponential rate. And on top of that; their advances in medical technology are on the verge of massive life extension. Soon they will have to move out into space; the galaxy better get ready for them.

Thank you mitochondria for allowing us to respirate the death element.
- Truly the powerhouse of the death breathers
  
  We are all the death breathers, my fungi, my bees, we're powered with the miti-c

We're also reliant on water and are mostly made out of it. water is such a "universal solvent", it's quite OP. It dissolves so much, that we don't even think about it
We're death breathers, but also basically have acid blood like xenomorphs

Powerful oxidizers are dangerous stuff!
One I’ve learned about recently (and used) is potassium permanganate. One of its uses is for improving water quality in fish ponds. It oxidizes basically all organic matter. It can simultaneously knock out algae, bacteria, parasites, hormones, and other excess organic waste. And the pathogens it kills can’t build up resistance to it like they would an antibiotic or poison, so it can be used preventively without creating stronger bugs. You can’t really build resistance to BURNING outside video games.
But that also means that if you add too much, you can just as easily sterilize all life in a body of water, including fish and anything else you want to keep.
AND it means you need to be careful when handling it. If you burn your eyes or your lungs, it makes them stop working!
- If you burn your eyes or your lungs, it makes them stop working!
  Top tip right here.
  
  It feels like a loading screen tip, and I'm scraping my head as to for what kind of game it would be the tip.
  
  The more you know! 💫

Aliens would need an oxidizer to metabolize as well, even if that oxidizer isn't oxygen. If they want to actually efficiently get energy out of things, it'll need to be a strong one. Even fermentation is a oxidation-reduction reaction that just doesn't use oxygen.
- If we ever found a species that was made of alcohol we would absolutely dominate, err domestic them as quickly as possible.

Reading this I start to miss r/HFY again
- Humans being the goofy, weird, but kind-hearted cro-magnons of the galaxy/universe is one of my favorite tropes.
  Edit: if you want the exact opposite, try They Are Smol. It's an sci-fi, hfy-parody shitpost. Humans have just as much of a instinct for ultra-violence as the other sapient species of the galaxy, if not moreso. However, humans are about half the size and possess about a quarter of the agility, speed and strength of their Dorarizin (big space wolves), Karnakian (big space raptors) and Jornissian (big XCOM vipers) counterparts.
  This means humans are utterly adorable and basically seen as cats if cats were intelligent apes.
  It also makes everyone else very concerned that humanity's first response is to fuck things, and our second response is to fuck things. They're concerned about our lack of counterbalace (aka a tail) and think we look very wobbly and clumsy. Finally, they're very concerned about the fact that the entirety of the human race falls into the margin of error for the galactic census, which means that, like cats, they baby humans as much as they can without offending people.
  They're also very amused (and sometimes very disturbed) by the fact that humans have a significantly higher penis-to-body ratio (still smaller than the aliens, but an alien-sized human would have a ridiculously large penis in comparison) and have a desire to fuck anything that moves (and yes, there is official interspecies smut on the author's patreon lmao).
  I love this series so much.
  There's also a more serious companion detective series by Frank Leroux (rip :c) called The Smol Detective (he also wrote some other, shorter Smolverse series as well as a standalone series called The Adventures of Iron Hu-man). It's absolutely phenomenal.
  
  That sounds great, thank you!
- Me too :(
  Is there an active one on the fediverse? Id contribute but I can barely write my name.
  
  There seems to be one but it's still a bit empty
- Yeah, if one is so inclined,the Jenkinsverse is well worth the read.
  https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/wiki/ref/universes/jenkinsverse/

So you're telling me if I stop breathing I'll never get older? I'm in!
- Technically true, yes
  
  will I still have to work?

Everybody in this thread needs to read Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.
- And also go in without knowing anything about it
  
  That's what I did. Right after reading Artemis. PHM is way better.
  
  Yes! No spoilers!
  It doesn't matter for some books.
  It's well worth it for this.
- Came here for this comment. Also the great oxidation event.
- I'd add that the audiobook is amazing also.
- Really good book, one of my favorites.

Oxygen is so crazy that once microbiology in the ancient oceans started producing it, all life on earth nearly died. Like very nearly sterilized the earth.
- At high concentrations, its still fucking awful for us. Easy to forget that the atmosphere is still only 21% Oxygen and 78% Nitrogen. Even setting aside the risks of fire and explosion at higher concentrations, this highly reactive substance degrades the nervous and musculature system.
  You wouldn't want to wander around in a fully oxygenated environment for the same reason you wouldn't want to drive your car through a lake of gasoline.

This reminds me of an excellent short story over on r/writingprompts. It's about how humans evolved in the harshest conditions as a forgotten experiment. They emerge and are basically gods.
- Wait, this is not in hfy?
- That was a good read!

Explains why we tend to spontaneously combust at times

Death breathers are made of electric thinking meat. Life is fucking rad.
- Reminds me of the short story podcast 'The Truth' episode - "They're Made out of Meat". In fact I think it may have been a short story I once read online beforehand, that they may just have dramatized. (?)

does lemmy have an equivalent to/r/hfy ? This has big /r/hfy energy.

In Becky Chambers' Wayfarer series, there is a species who actually breathes methane. The focus though is less on how that actually happens and more on how they navigate as the only species for whom oxygen is toxic. It's a great series, btw. It's a not-quite-as-optimistic as star trek future, but still optimistic and with a vast range of species who are all intermingling as learning how to get along.
- Added this to my reading list, looks good. Thanks!

So if this is true, why do we need it to live?
- Same reason an alcoholic needs alcohol to keep from shaking, you're addicted. Go ahead, try to stop. You'll shake just like they do.
- There are anaerobic bacteria that don't need oxygen to survive. That was the norm before The Great Oxidation Event when cyanobacteria started releasing oxygen into the atmosphere during photosynthesis. Prior to that there was very little oxygen in the atmosphere, and anaerobic bacteria ruled the world.
  After the GOE the high concentration of oxygen killed off most of the anaerobic bacteria, and what was left were organisms that made a blood truce with oxygen. Aerobic organisms gained incredible power from utilizing oxygen for metabolism, but eventually die from the accumulated damage the oxygen does to them.
  
  So it's theoretically possible that some of those anaerobic bacteria survived for 4 billion years and are plotting revenge against us right now?
  
  Wow, I know so little about this topic and I'm learning all kinds of cool things. Thanks for the comment. I'd never thought about aerobic being the opposite of anaerobic before either.
  
  There were even some found in uran mine pockets, that live off radiation. Others again by reducing metals. It only really needs that sweet electron difference.
- The short version is that life needs something that's at least a little unstable in order to extract chemical energy from things.
  The post is correct when viewed in a particular light, on a technicality, if you squint. By that same technicality iron rusting is also burning very slowly. They're ignoring the rapidity which is implied by "burning". But yes, oxygen is unstable, oxygen helps burn things, and oxygen is toxic if you get too much at once. Though you'd need to be breathing pure oxygen pressurized to about 1.4 atmospheres, or regular air pressurized to about 7 atmospheres, for that last one to happen. It's a legitimate concern for deep SCUBA divers.
  But why does life need instability? Chemical instability is, in basic terms, just stored chemical energy, and that energy wants to be released. The more reactive something is the easier it is to get energy from reactions involving it. There's a balancing act here where more reactive means easier energy, but also more dangerous. Oxygen is in a kind of sweet spot where it's stable enough that it's not generally going to explode or catch fire on its own, but can be coaxed into doing those things in controlled ways with other chemicals to extract energy when needed.
  
  Nice explanation , thank you.
- Because we evolved on the Death Planet, and life, uh, finds a way
- talking out my ass, I'm guessing its because oxygen is an energetic and highly reactive element, and therefore it can do lots of things and it does them really well (or at least strongly), or in general was just the best most direct means to accomplish the energy intensive tasks that were required given the biosphere we evolved in? I'm not sure how common/ vital oxygen consumption was before that one mass extinction where algae became overabundant and oxygenated the atmosphere and caused a mass extinction, it could have been a result of adaptation to that new condition- though I doubt this is the case
- Organisms need some oxidizing agent to respire. We use oxygen because it's very highly reactive and thanks to photosynthesis is goddamn everywhere.
  
  Can you explain that first part in more detail? I really know nothing about this and I'm curious to hear more.
  
  Some use radiation tho.
  https://www.sciencealert.com/bacterium-lives-off-nuclear-energy-alien-life-europa
  And maybe related https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus
  Would be rad if we could live off space radiation.
- Because our atmosphere is full of oxygen and nitrogen. Oxygen happened to be the chosen option for some reason, probably because nitrogen might not be reactive enough, idk I'm not a biologist or a chemist forget what i said
- When we and other known organisms take energy from food we are actually taking molecules with higher-energy electrons, converting them into the high-energy molecules our cellular processes can use to do make cell things happen, and producing very similar molecules with lower-energy electrons. Rather than infinitely accumulating these molecules, our cells dump low-energy electrons onto another molecule that is amenable and thereby convert into a molecule ready to accept high-energy molecules from food (with a bunch of steps in between).
  For us, as aerobes, the electron acceptor at the end of respiration is oxygen.
  Oxygen as an electron receptor is newer than several others. Anaerobes came first. It was only after photosynthesis had produced a ton of atmospheric oxygen that it became a viable option, really. But it O2 is a comparatively good electron acceptor because the process in which it accepts those electrons allows cells to grab quite a bit of energy from that last step. It is fairly "electron needy" compared to earlier electron acceptors.
  So, basically, aerobes get more energy per food unit (sugar molecule) than the vast majority of other creatures. You need it to live because it is an essential part of how your cells get food, namely, how it can recycle molecules at the last step of the respiration cycle.
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenosine_triphosphate
- In physics being finite is actually a good thing, there is a quantifiable answer to living and to dying as part of our identity.

I wonder if you could something like a magnesium atomosphere where if a human it got a hole in their suit it would cause them to burst into flames as the outside pressure forced it's way in then reacted with the oxygen and water in our suit and body

If aliens exist they would probably have many things just as strange. They would also need a way to harvest energy via some cycle. It is possible they would require even more reactive substances to live.
- Since oxygen is quite reactive.

I'm just going to ask because I think this is true but I'm not certain and nobody's talking about it. Antioxidants are BS right?
- A bit Overblown, but not really bs, from what I researched a bit ago
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxidative_stress#Diseases
  Antioxidants may help with some of those conditions, but others are based on such underlying dysfunction that it would be like trying to bailing out a boat with big hole in the side. They're just not gonna do anything for you.
- The dietary antioxidant fad is mostly BS. They're supposedly meant to counteract oxidative stress and specifically free radicals. Both of those things are part of a healthy life and you would die without them. So any real impact is not so simple as "just counteract those bad things". Dietary antioxidants don't always lead to higher intracellular antioxidant levels, either.
  Some dietary antioxidants so lead to higher intracellular levels and may help buffer oxidative stress (like from exercise) but there isn't much evidence that it doesn't just boil down to "eating your vegetables is good for you".
  
  Sleeping more (and in tact with your circadial rhytm) and drinking more water keeps the radicals at a lower level tho, keeping you healthier in age. That or fasting like a fakir your whole life, keeping your cells in an "safe energy and clean up" mode.
  Edit: radicals, not oxidants
  
  It’s not that free radicals are good (they are necessary, but excess free radicals are definitely bad), but more so that there is no solid research to suggest that dietary antioxidants have any effect whatsoever. All the studies that show any beneficial effect have been shown to have major flaws or have not been able to be reproduced consistently.

Chemical damage to our bodies mostly consists of both oxidation and Maillard-like reactions. So we're both slowly burning and getting cooked!
- Welp, we're cooked guys

Obligatory burialgoods voiceover

New loyalist chapter name

Rusting your insides

They say a planet like earth I'd very rare. Rarer still to find life on one. I believe life is as abundant in the universe as it is here. Which means to me, in our neck of the universe we are an oddity.

I guess this is why rich ghouls and professional athletes are into cryotherapy for anti-aging. Like that weird billionaire who also stole blood from his son. What's the consensus on that, is it a grift or do serious scientists think you can really extend your life by regularly locking yourself in a cold chamber or dunking yourself in an ice bath for a few minutes every day?
- Grift. Same for blood boys. The meritocracy is just a lie, the rich are dumb as shit like everyone else.
  Something I learned recently on another topic: The human body is 67% oxygen by atomic mass.
  You don't breath poison. You are poison.
- I have no serious knowledge about it, but for the thermic aspect I can't imagine it working in any way.
  Your body will try its best to keep its core temperature constant. So you won't really cool your cells down.
  \ In this process it will burn even more fuel to produce heat, so quite the opposide they want to archive.

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