Oxygen Is Killing You | Answers With Joe

this video is brought to you by curiosity stream and nebula what is it about fire what is it about the dancing of the flames that you just can't help but get lost in them why do we gather around and stare at them in groups sure we gather around them for warmth but go to any campfire everybody's staring at it we can stare into a fire for hours it can hold our attention as well as any tv show maybe we're just drawn to non-repeating patterns maybe there's something about the color that's especially pleasing to our eyes maybe we're just moths there are some who believe that fire is what made us who we are that once we learned to control fire it not only changed how we ate making it possible to get more nutrition out of food but also that watching fire stimulated our brains gathering around the fire provided opportunities to bond and communicate with others share ideas and all this extra stimulation grew our prefrontal cortex and made us human beings our connection to fire goes way deep in fact the chemical reactions that power our cells and bodies are very similar to the ones that are involved in combustion we are in a very real sense living fire but fires go out [Music] there's a toxic substance that's around you at all times it's in the air you breathe and the water you drink it's in every single cell of your body and it's slowly eating you alive i'm not talking about that feeling of imminent doom although it's there no i'm talking about oxygen which is something you probably never think twice about until you can't breathe so we all know you can't live without oxygen it's essential to life on this planet or at least the life as we understand it but why like what exactly does it do once we breathe it in and why did we evolve this way and where did it come from in the first place yeah i don't know about you i never really thought about it and then i did and i looked it up and it turns out it's it's pretty interesting interesting in a uh oh cool a new existential crisis kind of way so let's start with what you already know the majority of the oxygen on our planet comes from photosynthesis plants breathe in carbon dioxide they breathe out oxygen and then we breathe in oxygen and release carbon dioxide and then they take that turn it back into oxygen it's the great oxygen cycle that powers our world the oxygen cycle that's deeply interconnected with the carbon cycle because co2 is just an oxygen molecule with a carbon atom attached to it also sunlight hitting water vapors can create oxygen by splitting off oxygen from an h2o molecule but the single biggest producer of earth's oxygen comes from one of its tiniest organisms a little bacteria called prochlorococcus this is found in the oceans and it produces up to 20 percent of the oxygen in our atmosphere in fact scientists estimate that nearly 80 percent of the oxygen in our atmosphere was created in the oceans but the world hasn't always been like this before 2.4 billion years ago there was very little oxygen in the atmosphere it was mostly nitrogen carbon dioxide and methane and oceans may have been green and not blue because of all the iron in it and there was single cell life at this time but it was anaerobic life meaning it doesn't need oxygen but then yeah about 2.4 billion years ago some photosynthesizers started to show up specifically cyanobacteria and it was able to take the sun's rays and use that to convert carbon dioxide and water into energy and the waste product of this reaction was oxygen this way of making energy was super efficient and cyanobacteria just immediately won out over everything else it took over the world and its farts filled our atmosphere in what scientists call the great oxygenation event all that oxygen in the atmosphere killed off all the anaerobic microbes and the world changed dramatically there was less carbon dioxide in the air temperatures dropped and yeah most of the existing life on the planet died off which is sad poor little anaerobic bacteria but it did set the world on the path of genetic diversity that led to us being here today so it's probably a big mistake okay so now we know where the oxygen is from but where is it from well oxygen has eight protons so like any element that's bigger than hydrogen and helium it was created in supernova explosions it then got scattered out into gas clouds it eventually coalesced into planets like big blue here and oxygen is actually the third most abundant element in the universe after hydrogen and helium and it's been around for quite a while a team of astronomers published a paper in the astrophysical journal letters in 2020 describing how they detected large amounts of oxygen in an ancient star the star which has the catchy name of j0815 plus 4729 is an elementally depleted star located more than five thousand light years away toward the lynx constellation the astronomers suggest the star's primitive composition shows that it was formed quote during the first hundreds of millions of years after the big bang possibly from the material expelled from the first supernova the milky way so yeah the oxygen you're breathing right now it's old it's ancient it is wise if you listen to your breath you can hear the wisdom of the universe okay so we've got its origin story now what makes it so special like how does it support combustion why does fire need it to burn what makes it so reactive how does it cause rust so concerning combustion there's three things required to make a fire they call it the fire pyramid it requires fuel something that burns it requires some kind of energy put into the system and it requires an oxidizer which is a molecule that accepts electrons okay so this is the best way that i can possibly explain it but just keep in mind that this guy really struggled in chemistry class okay so those of you who follow space stuff are aware that thermal management is a big part of space flight because there's no atmosphere in space so there's nothing for heat to sort of conduct into now this is why the iss has heat exchangers and radiators to keep it from getting too hot well combustion the act of combustion is basically fuel donating electrons and just like the heat on the space station those electrons need some place to go and not all molecules have room for new electrons but oxygen does and here's why oxygen in a neutral state has eight protons and eight electrons with the protons smooshed together in the nucleus and the electrons configured in shells of two and six but it wants to have eight electrons in its outer shell this makes it electronegative so it wants to steal from atoms that give up their electrons so it can complete its outer shell and look i know i'm being really super simplistic with the language but this guy was too busy drawing in chemistry class to pay attention and i never got good at it so fire is the visible effect of combustion a fuel with electrons despair meets a source of energy oxygen takes electrons the fuel is transformed and what's left over is smoke and ash another visible effect of combustion is rust so rust is also known as iron oxide because it is iron that has been oxidized rust is an example of corrosion which is an electrochemical process that involves an anode a piece of metal that gives up electrons an electrolyte and a cathode a piece of metal that accepts electrons as the metal corrodes the electrolyte offers oxygen to the anode when oxygen combines with metal the electrons are freed and as they move through the electrolyte to the cathode the anode's middle transforms and what's left over is rust by the way some of that sounds like how a battery works yeah that's kind of the same principle the battery works on and in a similar but different way this is also what's going on inside your body when you eat oxygen oxidizes the food to create energy by combining with sugars so what happens is when we digest food in the gastrointestinal tract those sugar molecules pass into the blood the blood moves the molecules to the cells and mitochondria break out the molecule's chemical bonds to release energy and cells need oxygen to complete this process so at the same time that your guts are breaking down those sugars and passing them through the bloodstream your lungs are breathing in oxygen this oxygen travels through the tubes in your lungs called the bronchi these branch off into smaller tubes called bronchioles tiny air sacs called alveoli are at the end of each bronchiole and tiny blood vessels called capillaries cover the alveoli this is where the oxygen gets passed into the blood this oxygenated blood travels to the heart which pumps it out to the cells in the body and then once in the cells it combines with those sugars in the mitochondria and this is called cellular respiration those sugars in the food get broken down into glucose and then glucose gets into the mitochondria and gets transformed into atp which is adenosine triphosphate so yeah similar to how fire uses oxygen to steal electrons from the fuel to burn in your body your mitochondria uses oxygen to steal electrons from the glucose to turn it into atp and what's left over is carbon dioxide and water the blood then delivers that carbon dioxide into the capillaries which makes its way through your lungs into the alveoli where you exhale it and remove it from your body so our bodies rely on one of the most corrosive elements in the periodic table to live unsurprisingly this does eventually take a toll on our body so we breathe an average of 22 000 times a day and most of the time the oxygen gets into our blood everything's cool everything's great but about two percent of the time things go a little wonky this is when our metabolism produces free radicals you've probably heard that term before a free radical is basically an oxygen atom with an unpaired electron attached to it free radicals are super unstable so they just try to find something to attach themselves to and that could be anything from lipids proteins to nucleic acids and this is what antioxidants are for they're compounds that help to prevent the creation of free radicals in the first place and our body produces this naturally but when it gets out of whack then the cells go into what's called oxidative stress and this is one of the major contributors to aging related diseases like cancer alzheimer's disease chronic fatigue syndrome diabetes inflammatory disorders male infertility and parkinson's disease so yeah according to the free radicals theory superoxides and free radicals can attack and damage a cell's components constant maintenance is required but over time it can get to be too much and a cell can start to lose its function and while studies over the years on antioxidants have been proven somewhat inconclusive there is one waste product from mitochondria that can actually help yeah according to a study published in the journal aging high levels of a peptide called humanin which is produced in the mitochondria has also been tied to longer life spans and better health in fact the researchers discovered that human levels were lower in alzheimer's patients as compared to a control group so that's where oxygen comes from that's how it came to dominate this planet and that's how it keeps you alive while simultaneously rusting you from the inside out it giveth and it taketh away if taketh sure on this planet anyway on another planet who knows another oxidizer might be favored fluorine for example is super electronegative it's very reactive it explodes when exposed to air but maybe in a different environment where there's different pressures and different temperatures and whatnot maybe it would combust in a more measured way like oxygen does here and maybe a form of life could be created around that now regardless when we point our telescopes into the universe looking for habitable planets we look for oxygen because the kind of life that we know of farts out oxygen but that might not be the only way that a planet could wind up with oxygen in its atmosphere you know i mentioned earlier that oxygen is made from photosynthesis it can also be made by solar radiation splitting off oxygen from water molecules so it is possible that a water-based planet if it was too close to its star could be bombarded with enough uv radiation to split a bunch of water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen the hydrogen would escape to space making most of the planet's atmosphere oxygen even though the water has boiled off from below it would still have a thick oxygen atmosphere no life required so yeah in a lot of ways those same forces that create the the campfire that may have transformed humanity as we know it is going on inside of us our entire lives maybe that's why we do have such a connection to fire because we are a kind of fire we are basically just a complicated way to get this to give up its electrons to bacteria farts until the bacteria farts kill us bon appetit but you know what maybe there's more to fire than all that and if this all sounded interesting to you i've got the perfect show for you to watch it's called nigel lata blow stuff up and it's on curiosity stream this show is exactly what it sounds like nigel latta is a psychologist and tv show host from new zealand who explores various topics by you guessed it blowing stuff up there's a particular episode on fire which goes in depth on some of the stuff i've talked about in this video along with episodes on gravity electricity sound and space for all you space nerds out there he's a great presenter and the series is a lot of fun it's definitely worth a watch this of course is just one of thousands of documentary series on curiosity strain from some of the best documentary filmmakers from around the world if you like entertaining and educational content this is the streaming service for you even better with your subscription to curiosity stream you get free access to nebula the streaming service i'm a part of as well as many of your other favorite youtube channels you can watch our videos ad free that means both pre-rolls and these sponsor messages like what you're hearing right now and coming soon on nebula is the final episode of my mysteries of the human body series which will deal with the mystery of aging some of what i talked about in this video is in there along with some other theories on why we age and how we can reverse it and you dear viewer can get both of these streaming services for 26 off of the uh regular annual rate for only 14.79 a year for two streaming services it's insane so if you're curious just go over to curiositystream.com joe scott to get started it's it's seriously the best streaming uh bundle you're gonna find anywhere on the planet i've watched both of them quite a bit it's a lot of fun um if you haven't checked it out just just go check it out curiositystream.com joe scott links downstairs big thanks to curiosity stream for supporting 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 379,312

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: Gv3DqjBojEI

Length: 14min 36sec (876 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021