A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Not breathing oxygen is way more toxic, though. That will kill you in a few minutes.
Sure, I imagine off-world lifeforms having entirely different metabolism. Like when we hear “this planet has a methane atmosphere” it’s like holy cow, sounds rough, but alien entities would possibly think the same thing about our planet of water and nitrogen. Imagine how horrible it would sound to someone who was water-soluble. “H2O rains down from the sky!!”
You live on a world where the temperature is only on average 288K? It's so cold there that H2O exists in its solid form on the surface in places!!! How can you people even move let alone have any active biological processes?
Sent from LTT9779b
Probably more like 'slowly corroding' from the inside.
Combustion is rapid oxidation, corrosion is slow oxidation, therefore corrosion is slow fire.
Are the aliens fusion-based lifeforms? They have to get their energy somewhere.
Eating hydrogen and letting out high-pitched helium farts?
Suddenly the Wow! Signal makes sense. Just aliens helium-farting into the mic to troll humans.
Aliens view earth like the rest of us view Australia
How do aliens view Australia then?
Oh yah, the DEATH BREEDERS
Oxygen eat ya baby?
See: Humans Are Space Orcs
Not only is our atmosphere made of rocket fuel, but our planet's crust is made up of the most oxidizing substances in the universe.
Our whole planet is a massive bomb waiting for the right trigger to set it off.
Plănts: We will make our own food and output a poisonous gas, that way nobody will bother us.
Animals: Allow us to introduce ourselves.
At first I thought this was going to be about Scuba diving as the deaths caused by oxygen is a factor that needs considering.
Central Nervous System toxicity. Also, oxygen at over 160% starts to get deadly on its own.
See also: premature babies and adults with COPD. Oxygen toxicity is a thing.
When humans go out on space walks, they bring their death environment with them in bags.
This reminds me of the Deathworlders series.
Is that the one where humans are consensually employed by all the comparatively more advanced alien species of our galaxy as their warriors or executives because even our weakest human is significantly more powerful to any of the nearest alien due to the nature of us all having been evolved from an ancient ape species that were prone to violence?
https://deathworlders.com/ - Dunno if it goes into that detail of us evolving from violent apes, but at least from chapter zero, seems to be mostly due to us being from a "high gravity" world and having "builtin combat drugs" (adrenalin)
Considering the amount of things that can kill us, both micro and macro, and the fact that we ingest poison (alcohol, drugs and even actual frog poison) for fun, it's pretty easy for any alien life to look at us and think "holy shit, those creatures are fucking hardcore!"
I second the recommendation, it's a great story. The writing isn't perfect, but it's absorbing and there's plenty of good world building and characters.
There's another series like that, the Human Chronicles Saga by T.R. Harris. Humans are super strong because the gravity on Earth is much higher than on other planets. Materials on the other planets are weaker too, simply because they don't need to be as strong, so the humans can break through walls easily.
We are a species that came to prominence by literally throwing ourselves at monsters until we won. Injuries (such as a giant beast's foot crashing at you at 80KmH) that would kill any other species 100 times over is basically a little medical treatment and a month of rest away.
Fun (and also not fun) Fact is that the reason why bullet caliber exists is because when settlers were doing their genocide they would often unload their entire magazine into warriors to no avail, they would just rush up unimpeded and chop the settlers to ribbons. The concept of stopping power was literally invented because of the sheer resilience of humans and the amount of damage we can take and survive.
The only lifeform on this plant which can take anywhere near the level of punishment we can are insects, and in those cases even one injury is often enough to permanently disfigure and condemn them to a crapshoot of maybe being able to reproduce before they eventually die, because for as resilient as they are, nature didn't really build them for long distance survival like we did through our monster-hunting exploits.
Regarding bullets in ye olde times, I suppose a significant portion of immediate survivors had a hellish time dealing with chronic pain and lead poisoning. Also worth nothing: it was common for pre industrial ammo to shatter on impact due to imperfections, acting much like current day hollow point, which shreds tissue in a nasty way.
So we’re like smart Klingons to them? Sweet.
Pretty sure there's some worms or something that live by deep sea vents which breathe sulfur not oxygen and are believed to live forever because of this.
Core takeaway: huff sulfur, live forever
There's a bunch of creatures that don't use oxygen but they're mostly all prokaryotes, since oxygen metabolism unlocks a shitload of energy you can use for being large and complex.
We also have to regularly eat metal to live.
Why do we need to eat metals but cannot do allomancy with it? SMH we're living in the worst timeline.
Making new food chain: fluorine-oxidizer lifeforms > oxygen-oxidizer lifeforms > nitrogen-oxidizer lifeforms > BN based lifeforms > silicon based lifeforms > germanium lifeforms
