Sol 3: ~~Harmless~~ Mostly harmless

More of this please

https://youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg

complex carnal carnival of carnivory

Beautiful.

Truly the powerhouse of the death breathers

If you burn your eyes or your lungs, it makes them stop working!

Top tip right here.

Humans being the goofy, weird, but kind-hearted cro-magnons of the galaxy/universe is one of my favorite tropes.

Edit: if you want the exact opposite, try They Are Smol. It's an sci-fi, hfy-parody shitpost. Humans have just as much of a instinct for ultra-violence as the other sapient species of the galaxy, if not moreso. However, humans are about half the size and possess about a quarter of the agility, speed and strength of their Dorarizin (big space wolves), Karnakian (big space raptors) and Jornissian (big XCOM vipers) counterparts.

This means humans are utterly adorable and basically seen as cats if cats were intelligent apes.

It also makes everyone else very concerned that humanity's first response is to fuck things, and our second response is to fuck things. They're concerned about our lack of counterbalace (aka a tail) and think we look very wobbly and clumsy. Finally, they're very concerned about the fact that the entirety of the human race falls into the margin of error for the galactic census, which means that, like cats, they baby humans as much as they can without offending people.

They're also very amused (and sometimes very disturbed) by the fact that humans have a significantly higher penis-to-body ratio (still smaller than the aliens, but an alien-sized human would have a ridiculously large penis in comparison) and have a desire to fuck anything that moves (and yes, there is official interspecies smut on the author's patreon lmao).

I love this series so much.

There's also a more serious companion detective series by Frank Leroux (rip :c) called The Smol Detective (he also wrote some other, shorter Smolverse series as well as a standalone series called The Adventures of Iron Hu-man). It's absolutely phenomenal.

Technically true, yes

And also go in without knowing anything about it

Cellular respiration is sugar + oxygen -> water + CO2

Combustion reactions are often characterized as anything that is something + oxygen -> water + optionally something else.

At high concentrations, its still fucking awful for us. Easy to forget that the atmosphere is still only 21% Oxygen and 78% Nitrogen. Even setting aside the risks of fire and explosion at higher concentrations, this highly reactive substance degrades the nervous and musculature system.

You wouldn't want to wander around in a fully oxygenated environment for the same reason you wouldn't want to drive your car through a lake of gasoline.

Same reason an alcoholic needs alcohol to keep from shaking, you're addicted. Go ahead, try to stop. You'll shake just like they do.

The short version is that life needs something that's at least a little unstable in order to extract chemical energy from things.

The post is correct when viewed in a particular light, on a technicality, if you squint. By that same technicality iron rusting is also burning very slowly. They're ignoring the rapidity which is implied by "burning". But yes, oxygen is unstable, oxygen helps burn things, and oxygen is toxic if you get too much at once. Though you'd need to be breathing pure oxygen pressurized to about 1.4 atmospheres, or regular air pressurized to about 7 atmospheres, for that last one to happen. It's a legitimate concern for deep SCUBA divers.

But why does life need instability? Chemical instability is, in basic terms, just stored chemical energy, and that energy wants to be released. The more reactive something is the easier it is to get energy from reactions involving it. There's a balancing act here where more reactive means easier energy, but also more dangerous. Oxygen is in a kind of sweet spot where it's stable enough that it's not generally going to explode or catch fire on its own, but can be coaxed into doing those things in controlled ways with other chemicals to extract energy when needed.

There are anaerobic bacteria that don't need oxygen to survive. That was the norm before The Great Oxidation Event when cyanobacteria started releasing oxygen into the atmosphere during photosynthesis. Prior to that there was very little oxygen in the atmosphere, and anaerobic bacteria ruled the world.

After the GOE the high concentration of oxygen killed off most of the anaerobic bacteria, and what was left were organisms that made a blood truce with oxygen. Aerobic organisms gained incredible power from utilizing oxygen for metabolism, but eventually die from the accumulated damage the oxygen does to them.

Because we evolved on the Death Planet, and life, uh, finds a way

talking out my ass, I'm guessing its because oxygen is an energetic and highly reactive element, and therefore it can do lots of things and it does them really well (or at least strongly), or in general was just the best most direct means to accomplish the energy intensive tasks that were required given the biosphere we evolved in? I'm not sure how common/ vital oxygen consumption was before that one mass extinction where algae became overabundant and oxygenated the atmosphere and caused a mass extinction, it could have been a result of adaptation to that new condition- though I doubt this is the case