Our lives are a balance between needing oxygen and preventing oxidation damage. We have several enzymes that constantly reduce radicals and chemicals caused by oxidation. So yes oxygen is continuously damaging us. And will eventually win.
Did you see what oxygen did to the Hindenburg? I’m not going to let that happen to me. Say no to big oxygen!
Have you ever seen asbestos catch fire? Me neither. So it’s your choice what you’d prefer breathing in.
Delicious fluorine for me please
I’ve been thinking about neon. Imagine breathing out multicolour bright lights!
pfff, look at this sucker planning on using his lungs ever again like a chump
I’ve currently been reducing my oxygen intake. My wife keeps telling me it’s impossible and my doc says I’ll supposedly die, but they’re just hating on my progress.
Big O lackeys are everywhere. They want to keep you alive so they can sell you more O.
This is a valid athletic technique. Usually achieved by training at altitude.
Doesn’t it only work if you then return to a lower altitude? I wonder how long the benefits last for.
Now that I think about it, I don’t actually know how this even works. Well I know what I’m going to go read about next.
Edit: My findings:
-
At high altitude, cardiac output (the overall rate of blood pumped by the heart) increases, largely due to increased heart rate. This increased heart rate reduces as one acclimatises to high altitude (though I’m unsure of if it returns to baseline. It appears to be complex, and at least somewhat differing person by person. These individual differences may explain why some people experience health problems at high altitude, beyond the initial ill feelings caused from first arriving somewhere that’s high altitude)
-
The stroke volume (volume of blood pumped by each beat of the heart) is lower at high altitudes. This does improve as one acclimatises, but not entirely. This seems to be affected by blood pressure stuff, such as reduced plasma volume at high altitude. It seems to be complex enough that we don’t fully understand how the various regulatory stuff works.
-
Most of the acclimatisation occurs by increasing the number of red blood cells in the blood. The hormone erythropoietin, which usually exists at a low level in non-hypoxic conditions, stimulates the production of new red blood cells. At high altitude, the level of erythropoietin in the blood rises to around 1000 times its baseline level. Increased production of red blood cells happens for a few weeks, by which point, there is enough to make up for lower oxygen levels at high altitude.
-
When returning to low altitude, it appears that the changes back to the baseline happen over a similar timeline.
Tangential fun fact: a red blood cell has a lifetime of around 4 months. A single red blood cell travels around 400 miles before it is old enough to be recycled by the body.
Its also said that smokers are used to having less oxygen intake so if you throw a smoker and a non smoker on a mountain for a night, the smoker is less likely to get altitude sickness. Long term staying at altitude they’ll no longer have the advantage.
-
I got my oxygen intake down to single digits! My family wasn’t supportive however and got me a new pair of lungs, haters
Great now I’m gonna stop breathing.
Statistically speaking, for humans, breathing oxygen does eventually have a 100% fatality rate.
Life is a game of burning but trying to do it slowly.
Anyone else stopped breathing here?
Ever breathe oxygen, son?
Good, don’t start. Me, I’m hooked!-Muddy Mudskipper
I mean, oxygen is the most aggressive oxidator, to the point we named the process after it.
F you.
spoiler
Brought to you by the highest oxidation gang.
And if you meet flourine out on the wild, you will be F’ed. It will bind itself to you without your consent or caring about things like essential biological processes for life.
70-80+ years exposure to this stuff is lethal
Pure oxygen is actually toxic for humans, leading to hyperoxia. People who breath pure oxygen such as scuba divers need specific training.
Oxygen toxicity - Wikipedia - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity
hyper - meaning high,
ox - meaning the animal Ox,
-ia - meaning presence in blood.
High Ox presence in blood. You can imagine how dangerous that is.
That’s why I chainsmoke constantly, I have to protect my lungs from oxidation.
you train your legs and arms and back, but when i train my lungs im told smoking isnt allowed in the restaurant 🙄
Yeah restaurants can de pretty shitty, I have been told the same when I do my prostate cancer prevention exercises.
That’s the exact theme of many stories on r/HFY
There are quite a few sci-fi stories and short stories built on a similar concept. One of my favorites is an alien ship lands on a random farm in the US and (leaving a lot of details out, read the book!) it comes to light that the aliens normally live at insanely hot temperatures like 900F (480C) and consider Earth an “Ice World” (that’s also the name of the book). Anyway, one of the catches in the book is that farmer figures out the alien wants to trade (again skipping a lot of details) but all he has on him that he can give up is a cigarette (the farmer doesn’t know it’s super hot inside the ship). He does the trade and we later find out that most of the galaxy is INSANELY vulnerable to being 100% completely utterly addicted to nicotine. When the alien took in the cigarette it instantly vaporized and sent the nicotine into the air and they breathed it and became instantly addicted worse than any opiod addiction IRL.
You didn’t mention the book name, so how are we to read it?
The ‘Death Breathers’ thing is a primary plot point /story device / world mechanic of the ludicrous, over the top, MARS ATTACKS! from 1996.
Just any case anyone hasn't seen it and wants to avoid spoilers, don't open this
Basically, it barely makes any actual sense, and… thats part of the point, to be a parody of how stupid 50s schlock alien movies were…
The Martians only breathe Nitrogen, and seem to asphyxiate if their helmets and pressure suits are removed or comprimised.
This makes no fucking sense whatsoever for multiple reasons:
Nitrogen is much, much less chemically reactive than Oxygen, and it seems quite unlikely that any kind of Nitrogen based metabolism could evolve basically anywhere, in any organic being, because of this…
Earth’s atmosphere is like… ~70% Nitrogen.
Do… they… need literally 100% Nitrogen?
It… doesn’t seem like the oxygen in the atmosphere is like… causing them to internally combust/melt the way say mustard gas, chlorine gas, makes a human melt from the inside out, by nature of being way way way more chemically reactive than oxygen.
What they do is act like … they’re asphyxiating, they gasp for air, not cough and vomit, eyes watering and burning/melting the way mustard gas fucks up people.
Also, at one point, a ludicrously disguised as a human, martian… is able to go undercover, with no protective pressure suit… because they have… chewing gum, that… releases nitrogen.
Again, if oxygen had a similar effect on them as chlorine gas has on us… this disguised martian should… still be basically burning/melting from being exposed to all the oxygen, and thats overlooking the ludicrousness of… nitrogen releasing chewing gum
Unrelated but the bottom navbar in that screenshot makes me long for the Alien Blue days of Reddit. I also just miss that iOS design (along with the OS X Mavericks design)
Dude, I just had to use an old Mac with OS10.11 on it (I know not that old) to recover a laptop in target disk mode.
It still has the widgets!
I miss the widgets.
Imagine what it can do to software
Those damn electrons!
It can document it!
if you haven’t heard of air, it’s an invisible blend of gases so addictive, we suffer fatal withdrawal symptoms within minutes of our supply being cut off
It makes my blood run blue just thinking about it
