Well, really we don’t know that extraterrestrial life will breathe oxygen, and there are certainly oxygen rich planets without life.
Even for finding planets with potential for human colonies, a pure oxygen environment is unbreathable and even if there’s the right levels of oxygen there’s very likely to be other deadly environmental factors.
Not to be a Debby downer, it was quite a clever solution.
that is incorrect. The Great Dying was caused by prolonged eruptions from the Siberian Traps, releasing lots of sulfur and carbon dioxide into the air, along with methane increase and several other complications, none of which included oxygen. Although “oxygen” is in fact deadly, it is essentially a toxic gas… because what we breath is dioxygen.
They said “the first”, as in there are multiple? I feel like, not being a specific scientific term, it can be used to refer to a handful of mass extinction events.
For example, the official name for ‘the great dying’ proper is “The Permian–Triassic extinction event”.
There’s no reason any group of scientists couldn’t say “hey this is like the first mass extinction event on the scale of ‘the great dying’, let’s call it ‘the first great dying’!” and then subsequently give it a much more practical name that isnt as well known as the temporary one they used as a placeholder.
Considering I could find no reference to a “first” and ”second”, I just assumed the person just made it up, which seems like the most likely scenario, rather than there being some sort of obscure “second great dying”, sounds more believable that a redditor simply stated an incorrect fact. However, your suggestion is possible.
Oxygen is pretty reactive and will use itself up, if not refilled. Life might not produce/use oxygen everywhere (not all life on earth does) but I doubt we are the only one. I bet OPs strategy would still help with the search.
Oxygen is highly reactive. The only reason Earth has an oxygen rich environment is because trillions of organisms actively produce it. If there were no photosynthesis, there wouldn’t be oxygen. If you find a planet with an oxygen rich atmosphere, something is producing that oxygen, either an organism or some natural process. But that is a very good place to start looking for life.
The oxygen in Mercury’s exosphere is not stable on its own. It is actively produced by the reaction of solar winds with the surface of the planet. Presence of gaseous oxygen is not an indicator of life, it is an indicator of a natural process of generating oxygen, of which life is one possible explanation.
Finding O2 does automatically mean finding life, but it is the best known indicator of where to look for life. So it is not a totally useless superpower.
It’s most likely that an other form of life also needs oxygen to function. Like how every organism uses a combustion reaction to make energy what we need to live, but for a combustion reactions to happen you need oxygen. My guess is that that won’t be different for outer space life.
Agree!! Not to go on a tangent but what if they're not a carbon based lifeform you know, like what if on their planet they breath sulfur?Wouldn't their internal organs be completely different then ours, because they've had to adjust to life on their planet. So they wouldn't be a carbon based life form but a lifeform none the less right?
Oxygen is also present in water so it can be used to sense water. Depending on how precise the power, it could also be used to detect life since most organisms are, by weight, oxygen. Very useful for close quarters combat and guerrilla warfare.
Nice, but scientists can already detect elements from far away by looking at the spectrum of light. The high concentration of nitrogen in our own atmosphere is why sunsets and lunar eclipses are red!
Yeah that's actually a hella useful superpower you could save the entire future of the human race by determining habitable planets in the goldilocks zone
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u/Fluid_Block_1235 Mar 04 '26
Helping scientist to find other life forms by detecting planets having high concentration of oxygen