Over time, this could lead to lung damage, poor eyesight and cells not being able to reproduce. Having too much oxygen in your body creates free radicals. These atoms look for other electrons to pair up with. When this happens it can cause damage to your body and your DNA. Oh yeah, and what about those crazy fires we mentioned? Well with more oxygen in the atmosphere everything would catch on fire more easily. With there being even more O2 the atmosphere think of how easy everything would catch fire.
Think California forest fires are bad? Expect those to happen all around the world. Even wet vegetation would have a chance at burning. And with more oxygen the crust would be heavier, making the lithosphere heavier than our atmosphere. This would cause things to oxidize, including large bodies of water, turning into hydrogen peroxide. But imagine if we had no oxygen? Scroll down for the quiz! There is an invisible force protecting us, keeping our atmosphere in place. Without it, life on Earth would be over very quickly.
Would you ever venture into the ocean if you knew this creature could be lurking beneath you? By: Marshall Brain Updated: May 4, We breathe air that is 21 percent oxygen , and we require oxygen to live.
So you might think that breathing percent oxygen would be good for us -- but actually it can be harmful. So, the short answer is, pure oxygen is generally bad, and sometimes toxic. To understand why, you need to go into some detail …. Your lungs are basically a long series of tubes that branch out from your nose and mouth from trachea to bronchi to bronchioles and end in little thin-walled air sacs called alveoli.
Think of soap bubbles on the end of a straw, and you'll understand alveoli. Surrounding each alveolus are small, thin-walled blood vessels, called pulmonary capillaries. Between the capillaries and the alveolus is a thin wall about 0. When you inhale, the alveoli fill with this air. Because the oxygen concentration is high in the alveoli and low in the blood entering the pulmonary capillaries, oxygen diffuses from the air into the blood.
Likewise, because the concentration of carbon dioxide is higher in the blood that's entering the capillaries than it is in the alveolar air, carbon dioxide passes from the blood to the alveoli. The nitrogen concentration in the blood and the alveolar air is about the same. Nitrogen slows down the burning process so you get enough energy through the day, bit by bit. If you breathed pure oxygen, the energy from your food would be released all at once. So forget candles. This is more like a firework exploding.
But you would damage your body. Read more: Curious Kids: when I swipe a matchstick how does it make fire? Breathing pure oxygen sets off a series of runaway chemical reactions.
For insects, it might be a different story. Around million years ago, giant insects roamed the Earth. Researchers suspect the increased oxygen was responsible for those giant insects.
But what about those crazy fires mentioned before? As soon as you brought your flame to something, anything, it would instantly catch fire in a massive explosion.
Oxygen is a key ingredient to what makes a fire spread and expand. If we only had oxygen in our atmosphere, our fires would become massive.
What used to be a small campfire, would now be a fiery explosion. So if you could breathe when there was only oxygen, the giant insects and the Earth burning all around you would make life pretty tough—even impossible.
The only way to survive would be to adapt and to make sure fires never happened. And what would your life be like without fire? Season 2 of "What If" takes you to an imaginary world where the laws of nature have been altered People on Earth talk a lot about colonizing Mars.
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