I’m not even sure what to do with this argument. It’s irrelevant. An exercise in extraneous thought. No, we wouldn’t have millions of years - unless you’re referring to molecular oxygen vs higher life form sustaining oxygen, and it certainly would stabilize once all life was gone. There’d be nothing left to care. Maybe a few thousand years. Estimates are all over the place, from 1,500 to 2 million years.
Photosynthesizing plants remove carbon dioxide in addition to producing oxygen. We’d feel the effects of depleted oxygen long before it “ran out.” We’d also be killed by the excess CO2 before the oxygen disappeared. And of course, all higher life on this planet would be dead in a month or so if plants disappeared seeing as plant life is pretty much the base of the food chain for most everything.
I just thought it was an interesting video that challenges what I previously understood about one specific thing 😅 I’m not advocating against the environment, neither is the video, that’d be terrible for many reasons. It’s just that the video is from PBS and seems pretty evidence based in why photosynthesis is quite terrible at converting CO2 to oxygen due to the shortcomings of the enzyme Rubisco and how we could improve that. Nothing more than that. Give it a watch, it’s not some anti-environment conspiracy video
I’m not even sure what to do with this argument. It’s irrelevant. An exercise in extraneous thought. No, we wouldn’t have millions of years - unless you’re referring to molecular oxygen vs higher life form sustaining oxygen, and it certainly would stabilize once all life was gone. There’d be nothing left to care. Maybe a few thousand years. Estimates are all over the place, from 1,500 to 2 million years.
Photosynthesizing plants remove carbon dioxide in addition to producing oxygen. We’d feel the effects of depleted oxygen long before it “ran out.” We’d also be killed by the excess CO2 before the oxygen disappeared. And of course, all higher life on this planet would be dead in a month or so if plants disappeared seeing as plant life is pretty much the base of the food chain for most everything.
I just thought it was an interesting video that challenges what I previously understood about one specific thing 😅 I’m not advocating against the environment, neither is the video, that’d be terrible for many reasons. It’s just that the video is from PBS and seems pretty evidence based in why photosynthesis is quite terrible at converting CO2 to oxygen due to the shortcomings of the enzyme Rubisco and how we could improve that. Nothing more than that. Give it a watch, it’s not some anti-environment conspiracy video