could we ever run out of breathable oxygen within the time humans are alive (the next billion years)?
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answers:
quantumclaustrophobe say: We've only been around for about 200,000 years; my guess is in the next million (and certainly within the next billion) years, we'll have evolved into something else - or have simply gone extinct... My guess is, as long as there's no gamma ray burst stripping our atmosphere away in a few minutes, that the oxygen will out-last us...
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Jeffrey K say: Oxygen is very reactive. It combines with iron and copper and carbon and many other elements. It would be gone in a few million years if it wasn't constantly made by plants by photosynthesis. If all plants dies, our oxygen would be gone in a million years. (But we would starve long before that.)
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Bill-M say: Yes we could. If we cut down all the Trees. Plants breath CO2 and give off Oxygen.
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Atheist Dude say: There will be no surface on the Earth in 1 Billion or so years.
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CarolOklaNola say: Probably not, but it is not impossible. If the majority of plants die, there goes the oxygen Photosynthesis produces both oxygen and carbon dioxide. We have been going through he sixth great extinction for the last million years. Earth has been through magnetic polarity reversals before and did NOT lose the oxygen in the atmosphere. Many species of birds survived.
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Acetek say: there will be no surface life on Earth in about 1 billion years. The Sun is getting hotter and will eventually cook Earth and boil away all the surface water.
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Jake No Chat say: Although I doubt humans will be alive in 1 billion years, I do think that there are several scenarios where there will not be enough breathable oxygen in that time period. Volcanic activity, massive asteroid impact, etc The Earth could be stripped of its entire atmosphere with giant Sun flares and a loss of our magnetic shield from the poles.
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Morningfox say: Don't know about humans lasting for a billion years, but we should never run out of breathable oxygen. There is a cycle involving animals, plants, water, and the sun. So the oxygen doesn't get used up, it just cycles around and around.
One of the long-term problems will the loss of usable carbon dioxide, as it gets locked up into carbonate rocks. In less than 600 million years, this loss will kill most plants, but *maybe* new types of plants could evolve to live with the lower CO2 levels. Once the plants die out, the CO2 <--> O2 cycle stops, resulting in the death of most all animals above the level of bacteria.
But millions of years is a LONG long time. I hope that human descendant's technology will solve the problem.
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Mark say: Not likely. And humans probably won't be around in 1 billion years.
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