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this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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You can absolutely breathe higher partial oxygen pressure unaided for a long time. Hyperoxia isn't all that lethal and definitely not quickly, if you're only visiting, there's no problem.
And if you want to live there, you should be much more worried about all the brand new diseases you don't have immunity to, or the bugs that are bigger than you.
The low oxygen is definitely a problem, especially if you need to run away from the stuff mentioned above.
Also someone like a proper Sherpa sherpa from the Himalayas can function with oxygen that's comparable to 7% sea level oxygen.
And there are towns with elevation so high the oxygen is equivalent to 15% sea level oxygen.
So this chart has pretty narrow limits. Sure, the legend does specify "breathe forever unaided", but someone like a well accustomed sherpa who regularly climbs Mt Everest would have a much wider range than 20-25%
There are 850k people living in La Paz, Bolivia with the equivalent of 13.2% sea level oxygen and they seem to be doing just fine.
No, no. I’ve seen the chart. They’re definitely dead by now.
kagis
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/thj9zj/could_a_human_survive_on_a_planet_with_a_thinner/
I don't think that that's authoritative as a lower limit -- the guy is just saying that what matters is the partial pressure of oxygen. Assuming that that is right...
These aren't gonna be hard limits, though, just maximums on what you'd subject a person to intentionally.
https://www.checkyourmath.com/convert/pressure/atmospheres_bars.php
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_zone
So "normal" at sea level is 1 atmosphere, with 20.9% of that being oxygen.
If WP is correct, we can get down to 46% of that partial pressure of oxygen at normal atmospheric mix at sea level (though we couldn't be climbing mountains then, would cut into our survivable altitude range). So we could get down to 9.614% atmospheric oxygen and be okay at sea level.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity
So that'd be 50.7% oxygen, or about 2.42 times the partial pressure of oxygen at sea level.
Going off that range -- 9.614% to 50.7% oxygen at sea level -- we could handle all of the oxygen levels on the chart. But two important caveats:
That's only at sea level. The "dead zone" altitude on mountains and such would drop when the oxygen level is lower than it is in the current atmosphere.
We probably wouldn't perform as well as we do today towards the extremes. It might be survivable, but "survivable" can be a long way from "biologically optimal".
I often wonder about this. Is the increase in CO2 making us dumber?
I'm certain the micro plastics and forever chemicals are messing with us majorly. It's causing more than just higher cancer rates, but all these things are hard to tease out, especially since global we're all being exposed to so many new poisons over the same time periods. It's in the rain, the soil, the oceans, and everywhere else
It all just makes me think - how much potential are we each losing to subtle effects of pollution?
I'd think that the aerosolized lead from leaded gasoline did far worse than any plastic or change in CO₂. There's still lots of volatile pollutants, like CO and hexavalent-anything out there.
Yea this was my takeaway. I think I'll only travel to times after insect megafauna go extinct.
The diseases of amphibians, who are likely similiar to something you inherited from your mother already?
If my immunity works on diseases from the early Devonian period, I’m just gonna skip my next covid booster
We are merely the space ships of the microbes. Being caught between their war of the worlds would likely be unpleasant. However, I have a feeling we would be the true harbinger of death in that world of far more simple food webs than our present reality.
Our deaths would be miserable upon return, due to the evolutionary life of our passengers having many millions of years to plot our deaths when we return to find a completely different world and the little ones waiting to say hello.
I do not believe the table is intended for individual timescales, like how I tried to make the title more relatable. It is intended on geological timescales of species survival.
IIRC the person on YT also mentioned there were times when there was not enough oxygen to sustain fire, which is another fascinating thought and helps make sense of things like hydrocarbon deposits like oil and coal in some instances.