Bill Cosby asked this WAYYY back, but all he could come up with is: " To blow up basketballs".
That just isn’t gonna cut it. Why is there air, and why do I have to breathe it?
And the ad, what about the ad? “Biggest Cheerleader Embarrassing moments!” ?? really? wtf are they selling?
well, I need it to answer this ques…urk
We feeds the pigs the chicken shit, and we feed the chickens the pig shit.
People’s respiration uses plants’ oxygen which is waste from plants’ photosynthesis, and plants’ photosynthesis uses peoples’ carbon dioxide which is waste from people’s respiration.
if it weren’t for air then things would be slower.
Ever try breathing Cool Whip?
nm (oops)
Crack open a freshman biology text. The two-minute disco version goes something like this—you need oxygen to manufacture ATP from glucose. Oxygen is the second most electronegative element after fluorine. Glucose is broken down into pyruvate, which is further broken down into ATP through a complicated series of reactions which occur in (I think) the phospholipid bilayer of the mitochondrial membrane. If I got that wrong, somebody will be along shortly to call me an ignoramus and ask me if my parents were first cousins or something. Anyway, these reactions can be analogized to a series of cascading waterfalls, with energy being generated at each step. Oxygen acts as the great attractor at the bottom of the final cascade, pulling everything down like a magnet. It’s what drives the whole thing.
And you need to “breathe” it because you’re too big to absorb it through body pores like ants do.
Insert the screaming goat videos NOW.
I asked why, not how it’s used. Unfortunately, or whatever, I was educated in biology… crap, at WWU - where I learned to open beer bottles with a bic. But after all that, I know about the how - it’s the why - why not ammonia, why not hydrocarbons (like my favorite one, ethanol). Wait, that is even a bit off point… why is there air? Just so we can breathe it to make ATP? A non-trade-able commodity?
Why have air at all? it wasn’t our choice as organisms, we just developed to breathe it and such.
Actually I quite like the NOX in whippets…
Well, gases form during regular chemical reactions, and Earth’s gravity keeps them from escaping into space. Multiply that by a few million years, and you got yourself an atmosphere. Multiply by a few billion years, and throw life into the mix, and you got the currently existing atmosphere.
I imagine I could buy that, but only if you throw in a magnetosphere to protect the planet from solar activity blowing the atmosphere away. But again, why 78% nitrogen and 21% o2? WTF?This is totally improbable and totally weird. Actually, this planet has the strangest atmosphere of any planet I have ever been on!
As for oxygen - photosynthesis, by plants and phytoplankton.
Nitrogen came from inside the earth? Like, Jesus came from Mary, right? Just … spontaneously? Malarkey.
I like photosynthesis and phytoplankton, they live because I live… and I live for that.
Somebody I knew once alleged that Cosby was alluding to a Greek philosopher. Poking around the internet, he may have had Anaximenes in mind, who believed that air was the basis of everything.
Hey, you got to start somewhere.
Greek stuff isn’t supposed to be here in this culture. At least not at the level of cretin we’re addressing. This is a gross misstep on your part, citizen.
I am informing your commanding officer of your breach in our well established and culturally sensitive data dissemination policy.
Also, nobody actually answered the why part in complete context. Why is there air? What is the etymology of air anyway?
Because racecar.
broom broom.
I will admit to being fearless. I am now, thanks to my lack of post… peerless. And, even worse, I am now beerless as well.
Alas, I have now lost all contact with my God - the Bic. Therefor my cot awaits, and holds no judgement of me - welcoming me as I am. Those rarified herbs which would otherwise have been set alight are now but wafting memories… (queue the screaming goats)
Perhaps important to note that plants also respire, as well as photosynthesise.
From a purely naive point of view … might it ever be possible for there to be a planet that had no air, and yet had life?
It seems that, practically speaking, living beings require a medium of some sort to live in … doesn’t have to be air, could be water for instance, can’t be vacuum. If that weren’t the case then the quite large amounts of vacuum in the universe would surely have given rise, somehow or other, to life (subsisting on, say, solar radiation).
I can vaguely, just, imagine a world with liquids but no atmosphere (though the tendency of liquids to give off gases is a problem here … perhaps an ice planet with underground volcanoes to generate heat energy for life to live off?)
Is there life on Europa?