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Chapter 1: What surprising fact about oxygen do we learn at the beginning?
Hey, StarTalkians, Neil here. I've got another Things You Thought You Knew episode coming right up. This time, Chuck and I explain how rocks are light, not heavy, warm blankets, and oxygen. Check it out. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.
I'm excited to know what we've got going today. We're going to just talk about oxygen. Oh, man. What's the matter? Yeah, normally you come to me with some, like, super exciting stuff, like, you know, today we're going to talk about the moon and albedo. Do you know what albedo is? No, man, what is that? That sounds really cool.
I'm sorry oxygen doesn't excite you, but maybe by the end of these 10 minutes it will. That's all I'm saying.
All right. Give it a chance, dude. Well, listen, I give oxygen a chance every day. Okay.
Okay. Many people who have never had atmospheric chemistry, they know that we breathe oxygen to survive. We know this. But not everyone knows how much oxygen is in our atmosphere. Okay, well, already, now I'm interested. Right, so the first guess is, well, it's all oxygen. Of course, we're breathing oxygen. That's not the case. Most of the air we breathe is nitrogen. Nitrogen, okay.
Which has no value in its gaseous form as we inhale it. So we just inhale it and then exhale it. Okay. Nitrogen is 78% of the air we breathe. Wow. It's most. Most. Did not know that. Did not know that. Okay. So now, oxygen is between 20 and 21% of the air we breathe. So it's about a fifth of the air we breathe. Gotcha. All right. Right. So just let me put that out there, first of all.
Second, as you know, trees and other photosynthesizing life makes oxygen. Right.
Right.
One of the delusions of the Star Trek, the early Star Trek series was, They, you ever notice, I've said this in other explainers, they never wear spacesuits when they visit planets.
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Chapter 2: How much nitrogen is in the air we breathe?
All right. But if you think it through the entire source of our oxygen is green plants. If you take away the green plants, oxygen is highly reactive. as a chemical element. And so the oxygen that's in the atmosphere will glom on to other ingredients on Earth's surface, and it will systematically drain out of the Earth's atmosphere, leaving us with none.
So if you find a planet that has sustained oxygen, Right. That is evidence of something generating that oxygen. And in our case, it's plants. It could be some other mechanism. None we have ever dreamt of or divined. But if you find a planet with oxygen, it's going to have plant life. Wow. Right. or something that is generating oxygen in real time.
And in the planets they went to, that was never discussed. Because I think they just believed in the planet lottery, some planets have oxygen and others don't.
And you know what's funny that you say that, many of the planets that they beamed down to were very Mars-like.
Yes.
They're very rocky. Rocky. There's no vegetation at all.
I think the rocks are easier for the prop people to make. than whole trees with plumage. It was very barren. Correct, you remembered this. So that's one little thing about the oxygen I put out there. Also, by the way, on the planets they landed on, they were never sort of bounding the way the astronauts did on the moon. Those planets all had about one G, just like Earth. Yes.
And the atmospheric pressure was about that of Earth. The same as Earth. There are some planets that are the same size as Earth and the same gravity as Earth, but the atmospheric pressure is 100 times that of Earth. So they'd beam down and just get flattened. Flattened like they got hit with a fly swatter. Yeah, basically. Wow. Yeah. Okay, so more about oxygen. There's this belief that...
that oxygen is flammable. Okay. But it's not.
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Chapter 3: Why is oxygen considered a reactive element?
That's actually kind of brilliant.
It's brilliant. It's brilliant. Now we can go much lower pressure, but it's all oxygen. So now you take in a breath. It's less total air, but it's the right amount of oxygen. Right. That your body is expecting. Okay. All right. In that capsule, there was an electrical fire. Oh.
There was a spark that immediately burned all of the insulation, the thing, their suits, and they could not open the hatch in time. All three astronauts were burned to death. Oh, gosh. Yep. That is just awful. Yeah, it's terrible. So... Again, it's accidents like that where we think the oxygen was burning, but that's not what was burning.
The oxygen enabled everything burnable to burn, including the astronauts themselves. Correct. We lost three astronauts.
Damn, that is, oh my God, that's just terrible. Right, right. So now what did they do to, listen, because let me just tell you, let me just say this. First of all, it's a tragedy and I would dare never infringe upon the sanctity of those men and their lives. But I will say this, if I'm the next three astronauts, I just quit the space program.
No, no, watch out. Here's what they did. Instead of saying, okay, let's try Apollo 2, okay? No, what they did was they scrapped six Apollo designs and came up with Apollo 7. I think it was 7 or 8. No, Apollo 7. And so they were nowhere near what that design was by the time they had the next vessel in place. Okay. All right. That would have satisfied you, I think. Yeah.
So that's another thing with oxygen. Here's another one. You ready? In the movie Jaws. Okay.
Yeah.
There's a tank of oxygen. Yes. On deck at the end. Right. And the captain, I think Richard Dreyfuss' character, bumps into it. He says, watch out. That's oxygen. Okay. All that mattered for the movie was that what was in the tank was compressed gas. Right. But they're saying, watch out, it's oxygen. Right. Oxygen. So what happens, how do they finally defeat the great white shark?
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Chapter 4: What happens when there is too much oxygen in the atmosphere?
Is that right? Thank you for telling me. Okay, so they, and so, if you have more oxygen in your air, this is like rocket fuel for them. And they can grow bigger. Because when you're bigger, your surface area to volume is lower, but if you have, we did that in an explainer, you have to dig that one up.
If you're bigger, you have more volume to your surface area, so now you're not gonna get enough oxygen to feed your fat body, but if the oxygen levels are higher, you can. And so that's why you had those huge dragonflies back at the time of the dinosaurs, okay? Oxygen levels were higher back then. You had these huge insects. So oxygen levels have consequences in the biota of Earth. Nice. Wow.
So who knew that all of this, who knew all this about O2? Exactly. Exactly. And oxygen wants to combine, and so it combines with itself best. So you have an O2, two oxygen. And one last thing. People talk about humans wrecking the Earth, you know, the only species ever to change the ecosystem of the Earth. That is just false.
The creature that had the greatest effect on the climate and conditions of the Earth were the cyanobacteria. When was this? Three and a half billion years ago, something like that. At that time, Earth's atmosphere was mostly carbon dioxide. Hardly any oxygen at all. They take in carbon dioxide and spew out oxygen. Wow.
And they built the oxygen supply of our atmosphere to levels that were caustic to animals that don't like oxygen. Right. So this killed off entire branches of the tree of life. who were doing just fine in their carbon dioxide atmosphere, but it enabled other forms of life to rise up that would exploit the oxygen for their own benefit.
Wow. Wow. So why can't we just use cyanobacteria as a carbon scrubber for our current situation where we have to mitigate the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
Yeah, that's a good, okay, so sure. You have to watch out for unintended consequences.
Right, because guess what? We already saw one unintended consequence of cyanobacteria. Thanks, cyanobacteria.
You know, I mean, it's, who knows? We should probably get people to look into that, to have biological CO2 scrubbers, which is what plants are, right? But again, they're putting more oxygen in the air, and that also has consequences. So, yeah. Wow, that was great.
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Chapter 5: How does oxygen promote combustion in various environments?
No, what he did was it transformed naval warfare. You didn't have to make a ship out of wood anymore. You can make it out of steel. Just put enough hull in there and you're good. God, that would have been cool to be on the first steel battleship going up against wooden dudes. Yeah, you would just plow through. That's called asymmetric advantage in warfare. Nice. Okay. I like that.
Yeah, so the first person with a gun when all you have is a bow and arrow, asymmetric advantage, okay? Yeah. That's how that works.
Also called winner.
Winner. You won that battle, okay? If you're there with a bow and arrow and somebody's shooting you down, you say, okay, we're good. We good. That's like aliens with ray guns and you're up there with a pistol shooting at it. It's like, no, can you just see the situation here?
I am so glad you said that because I hate when they do that. In the movies. In the movies. When the earthlings go up against the aliens and the earthlings are shooting bullets and the aliens are shooting like laser beams.
Laser beams that vaporize their homes, right? And I'm like, really?
Come on. And we win?
Come on.
Come on. All right. Bought a pistol to a laser fight. Get out. All right, back to rocks.
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Chapter 6: What role do plants play in generating oxygen on Earth?
Yeah.
That was the obnoxious kid in the classroom.
How do you know, Mr. Astrophysicist? You've never been there.
So we have geophysicists who, anytime there's an earthquake, they can time the passage of the earthquake signals through the different layers of the earth. And depending on where and when they receive them at other stations, they can map the density profile of the entire earth. Holy crap. Because the wave moves through dense materials differently from light materials.
And once you know that, you can figure that out, and bada-bing, we've got an iron core.
That's amazing.
So we think we're about the density of water. All right, approximately, some people float, some people sink. Humans are about the density of water. So we think of rocks as heavy, and relative to us they're heavy, relative to water they're heavy, relative to air, but not relative to the rest of the Earth. That's why you don't have to have a mining operation to find rocks.
They're sticking out of the side of the mountain. They have floated to the top of the Earth. They've floated to the top, and they're there for the taking. And by the way, that's why it's so hard to find meteorites on Earth's surface. Because most meteorites are rocky. And so it'll land, and it just looks like any other rock. So you've got to go to places where they would stand out.
And there are two kinds of places where that happens. One is the desert, sandy desert. Sand and rocks. One problem is that sand will cover it over often. However, sand will also blow away. And if you see a rock sitting in the middle, because you can scan many square miles at a pop. So you say, oh, there's something sticking out of the sand over there that just got revealed. Go over it.
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Chapter 7: Why do rocks float, and what is their density compared to water?
You are warmer than the blanket. And right now, you are radiating heat to the air.
Yes, I am.
Losing heat.
Because I am hot, baby.
No, you're radiant.
I am coming in hot.
Coming in hot. That's what I am. So you come on in. And so you feel cold because you're losing heat to the air. Okay? And then you say, oh, there's a warm blanket. Let me go get it. So now you bring the blanket in. Now the blanket doesn't let you lose the heat to the air. You keep that heat and you interpret what's going on as the blanket being warm.
When all that's happening is that you are no longer losing the heat you were a minute before you put on the blanket. Now, you might say that's just semantic. No. Okay. Because let's say you brought in some cold beer. Okay. You don't have any ice yet, but you got it out of the refrigerator cabinet and it's cold beer and it's sitting on the floor. And you say, I don't want the beer to warm up.
Let's get a warm blanket to put on it, okay? Okay? Because how does a beer get warm? It's taking heat from the air, okay? Because the air is warmer than the beer. So what you need is super blanket that does not transmit heat energy across its thickness. So you take a blanket, put it on the beer. It'll keep the beer cold.
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Chapter 8: How do warm blankets actually function in terms of heat transfer?
Don't give a blanket to a snake because it's a snake.
What kind of reasoning is that? I don't like snakes. That's where that reasoning comes from. It's that simple. All right. That's cool, man. There you go. And what I learned is this. If you are using a blanket to keep your beer warm, I invite you to a little place called Walmart or Target to buy a cooler.
You wouldn't use the blanket to keep your beer warm. You use the blanket to keep.
I'm sorry. I said it wrong. Damn it.
Damn.
I messed it up.
Damn. Anyway. Oh, well. All right. Be good, Chuck. This is great. Star Talk. Explainers. Over and out. Keep looking up.
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