U.S.A.
Everyone Else
Health
Science
Business
Technology
Sports
Video Games
Entertainment
Future
Humour
NEWS > SCIENCE > EARTH ON THE VERGE OF RUNNING OUT OF OXYGEN
EARTH ON THE VERGE OF RUNNING OUT OF OXYGEN
July 23 2010
Washington, D.C. – For centuries seers and scientists have predicted the end of the world. Most of those stories are merely that, stories, designed to incite religious devotees or borne out of a grand social paranoia. It wasn’t until the end of World War
II that the possibility of the end of the world seemed real. The development of nuclear weapons brought a new kind of fear to millions because for the first time we did not just have the fear of the end of everything, we had the tools to bring it about.
Of course that has not happened. Neither have global earthquakes, or unstoppable Tsunamis, or some dread disease carrying itself around the world. While our planet has undergone mass extinction before, even in the time of humans, and likely will again, the doom saying over such events is still wasted breath. The apocalypse won’t come with decades of warning. History has shown that mass extinctions occur with a massive thunderclap, an instantaneous and unstoppable event that will kill us before we know anything is happening. Of course unlike any other species on the planet we have a strong chance of surviving. Our modern tools and our presence on all corners of the globe more or less ensure that some humans will survive the apocalypse, provided the earth doesn’t run out of essential elements such as water and oxygen, something many scientists fear is already happening.
“I'd be very surprised if there was any widespread medical effect - although I'd expect
patients who already have low blood oxygen levels due to severe cardiac or respiratory conditions to be at greater risk of complications. Everest is already on the threshold of what's possible without supplemental oxygen. It might become impossible for most people,” Physiologist Mike Grocott told New Scientist. “Human activity is causing a measurable decline in the oxygen content in the air. Right now the loss is negligible but we are only increasing the pace of the activities that cause such reductions and that will cause it to accelerate going forward.”
The principle culprit in the declining oxygen levels is the increase in CO2 levels throughout the world.
“Right now we are safe but that may not be the case forever. Oxygen, as you may or may not know, is essential for sustaining the vast majority of life on the planet. That includes humans and the animals and plants that we eat. Losing oxygen would be more than a catastrophe, it would be the end,” said Scrape TV Science analyst Dr. Howard Poe. “Even if we were able to find some way to process CO2 in our circulatory system every other usable life form on the planet requires oxygen to survive meaning they would die off, which would leave us with no food. Food is also necessary to survive so without that it would be the end of pretty much everything.”
Some micro organisms survive exclusively on carbon dioxide but they are not large enough to sustain human life.
“We are still many years away from depleting the supply of oxygen but like anything if
we don’t start to take action we will regret it later on. Well, our descendents won’t. Once we are dead things like oxygen really don’t matter all that much. It’s next to impossible to breathe six feet under dirt anyway,” continued Poe. “Unfortunately once we lose oxygen we will be stuck. In the movie ‘Spaceballs’ they created a giant ship to steal the oxygen from another planet but we are very far from that kind of technology even if we had a nearby planet with oxygen. Frankly, that wouldn’t happen and we would be screwed and that’s that.”
Most scientist do not recommend people stop breathing in an effort to conserve.
Anna Phillips, Science Correspondent
NEWS > SCIENCE > EARTH ON THE VERGE OF RUNNING OUT OF OXYGEN
LINK IT! http://scrapetv.com/News/News%20Pages/Science/pages-3/Earth-on-the-verge-of-running-out-of-oxygen-Scrape-TV-The-World-on-your-side.html |
TWEET IT! http://bit.ly/cZr25Y |
BOOKMARK IT!  
|
|---|
Scrape Store
