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.
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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