Oxygen: A Matter of Life and Death

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

I'm Bretzki, and you're in California.

And I'm here to tell you about SpinQuest.com, my favorite social casino.

With over a thousand slots and table games, absolutely free with the ability to win real cash prizes instantly to your bank account.

There's no better time to hop on our $30 coin package for only a $10 deal.

Head over today.

I love you.

I'll see you there.

SpinQuest is a free-to-play social casino.

Voidwear prohibited.

Visit SpinQuest.com for more details.

Want to stop engine problems before they start?

Pick up a can of C-Foam Motor Treatment.

SeaFoam helps engines start easier, run smoother, and last longer.

Trusted by millions every day, C-Foam is safe and easy to use in any engine.

Just pour it in your fuel tank.

Make the proven choice with C-Foam.

Available everywhere.

Automotive products are sold.

Seafoam!

There are parts, and then there are B-Pro Auto parts.

Parts built for every vehicle.

Parts built to fit and function.

Parts that are refining how we drive and redefining the category.

Because every vehicle is a sum of its parts.

So do yourself a favor and put B-Pro Auto parts on the vehicles you service.

Parts now, parts into the future.

Welcome to the new aftermarket.

This is the BBC.

Hello, I'm Robin Inks.

And I'm Brancox.

And in a moment, you're going to be hearing me saying, hello, I'm Robin Inks.

And I'm Brancox.

Because this is the longer version of the Infinite Monkey Cage.

This is the podcast version, which is normally somewhere between 12 and 17 minutes longer than that that is broadcast on radio 4.

It's got all the bits that we couldn't fit in with Brian over explaining ideas of physics.

I do object to the use of the word longer though because that's obviously a frame specific statement.

Yeah we haven't got time to deal with that because even in the longer version we can't have a longer intro.

Can we just let them listen?

I've got an idea.

Can we just have a podcast version of this intro to the podcast which can be longer than the intro to the podcast?

And then we can have a podcast version of the podcast intro to the podcast.

I don't know what's going on.

And then we can have a podcast, podcast, podcast version of the podcast and then it would do podcast podcast version.

Hello, I'm Brancox.

And I'm Robin Inks.

Last week we did an astronaut special from Trondheim, which means that I've spent the entirety of the last seven days going up to strangers and saying, I met a man who's been on the moon, because I did, and it was amazing.

And today,

as opposed to having a man who's been on the moon, we have one of our guests who said to me, Put your fingers in liquid nitrogen, and I did.

Hence, my nickname, Robin Three Fingers Ince.

Now,

we are moving one proton up the periodic table from nitrogen this week and looking at oxygen.

Actually, oxygen is Brian's favourite molecule, the O2.

He's so keen on that because that is what is pumped into the chamber where in broadcasting house he is kept for the rest of the year to keep him as young looking as possible.

And

the only reason he has a bit of grey hair is because one of the cleaners accidentally unplugged him because they were hoovering around Nicholas Parsons' chamber.

Brian, by the way, is actually even older than Nicholas Parsons.

A lot of people don't know that, but the chamber is very, very effective.

Do you know what?

He's one year younger than me.

It's true.

Don't work out, does it?

For listeners at home who've never actually seen my face, I look very old.

People thought you were my dad, didn't they?

Yeah, in Australia.

Isn't it lovely?

He brings it down on.

Well done, well done for having such a clever daughter.

Anyway, so

let's continue with this show.

Today we are exploring oxygen.

What is oxygen?

Why is it so reactive?

Why is it so essential to complex living things like human beings?

To help us return this programme to something worthy of Radio 4, we have a distinguished panel of guests and they are...

I'm Andrea Sela, I'm professor of chemistry at UCL.

And my favourite use of oxygen is to bring chemistry into disrepute by setting fire to stuff.

I'm Gabrielle Walker.

I'm a former chemist.

I'm also a a writer and I work with businesses on dealing with uh big issues, especially climate change.

And my favourite use of oxygen is love,

because if it wasn't for oxygen, you couldn't have two sexes and it would make life a lot more simple, but I think a lot less interesting.

My name's Sarah Pascoe, I'm a comedian, and my favourite use of oxygen is that it's actually two-thirds of my body weight.

So the only bit that's actually me is three and a half tonne.

That's how much I weigh, really.

That makes it sound like you're self-loathing.

Most of it's not my fault, it's the oxygen that's done it all.

Damn oxygen.

And this is our panel.

Right and Joe, we'll start off with you because for the listeners at home, you have an enormous setup here of everything from what appears to be magnets, Hessian, and digestives, which sounds like such a Radio 4 experiment.

Experiment will involve digestive biscuits.

I like biscuits.

Or a John Peel band.

Or a John Peel band, which is Hessian and Digestives.

So

I bet there must have been a point where he gave a session to someone whose main instrument was just the sound of biscuits.

I hope there was.

So let's get back to the show.

Well, we haven't even got there yet.

Let's get back to the show.

What is oxygen?

What is it that makes it such an interesting gas?

to a chemist like you?

Well, oxygen is an amazingly reactive gas, but more importantly, we're talking about an element and one of the sort of most common elements in the universe.

And when you take this element, you can bring it around in liquid form, and I've actually brought myself a little thermos.

I'm not going to have to sit my fingers in it again, are we?

I'm going to put my safety glasses on.

For the listeners,

I'm going to put a little mask of liquid oxygen.

And I'm going to pour it into

this little bowl and you can hear that it boils really quite violently.

What temperature is that?

So this stuff is at minus 185.

Let's just top it up a tiny bit but I think we should get a digestive biscuit in there because I really want to illustrate what this stuff can do.

And so the digestive biscuit goes in.

Let's just give it a little poke so that it goes in nice and nice and deep.

We'll feed it a little bit more oxygen just for good luck.

And

what it's going to do is it's going to soak it all up.

I mean, digestives are quite an absorbent biscuit.

I don't know whether this has tax implications.

But let's just get the biscuit out.

This is now a very cold biscuit.

And what I want to do is to show you that when you actually soak a digestive biscuit in liquid oxygen and you light it with a match, something kind of interesting happens.

And you see, what's really good about it is that what I've done is I've converted it into the ultimate diet digestive.

Because what we've done is we've now deprived it of all nutritional benefit.

And it smokes too, which is kind of nice.

So that's essentially what would happen if you ate the biscuits, but in a rather more controlled manner?

This is what happens when you eat digestive biscuits.

The only thing is that biology has developed a much cleverer system than what I've got here to actually release the energy in a digestive biscuit.

Now remember what the digestive biscuit really represents.

I mean what this is, is actually a bunch of sunbeams.

It's a very romantic object.

And what you're doing is you're essentially taking all of that solar energy that's being harvested.

And then what you do,

and now you can't talk, of course.

Because you're full of sunbeams.

But what you can now do is convert all of that energy, burn it using the oxygen, and use that for physiological processes.

Also, I like that.

I've never, the sunbeam thing is beautiful now because it's like if someone says, I'm not fat, I'm just sunbeam intense.

That's a beautiful

thing.

I'm just more sunbeams, baby.

That's fantastic.

What about the exploding sheep?

All the backstage, all the chat was about, oh, shh.

What is your favorite, right?

If we could have, there was like shields and stuff like that.

If we didn't have the regulations we have,

what would have been your favourite experiment to show the reactive properties of oxygen?

I think the exploding sheep.

And the name exploding sheep comes from something I showed to a small child.

He was about seven at the time.

He's at university now, but he just loved it.

And it involves taking cotton wool.

Can you come and say, Sarah?

Okay, Okay, so we've got the thermos has poured some liquid oxygen into a small cauldron.

There's a handful of cotton wool.

I'd say enough to clean your face twice.

It's gone into the cauldron.

The specs are back on for safety reasons.

The eyelash curlers have gone in and they are

gripping onto the cotton wool.

I can't hear what that is.

Don't do secret bits.

Oh, it's a match.

It's a box of matches.

The cotton wool is on the safety sheet.

It's steaming a little bit.

Ladies and gentlemen, you have been listening to the infinite menu.

Could I just say quickly that no sheep were harmed in the menu?

There's radio perfect.

And what a lovely reaction, because you weren't expecting that.

I was very emotionally attached to that sheep.

No, no.

Can we talk a little bit about the.

You studied the atmosphere.

Yeah.

And when did we first

understand that all that was around us was a lot more complex?

The atmosphere, what is it made of?

So the atmosphere is it's a little bit more than twenty percent oxygen and it's a bit little bit less than eighty percent nitrogen.

And then there's a few little bits of things in there which are actually much more important than you think, considering how small the quantities are, especially carbon dioxide and water vapor.

Carbon dioxide is uh I call it like chili powder.

It's a tiny, tiny amount of it in the atmosphere, but it's the thing that that warms up us up.

It's a greenhouse uh gas that uh is is responsible for both keeping us nicely warm and not frozen and also um is getting a little bit too overenthusiastic in its quantity and causing global warming.

However, back to oxygen.

I just think it's really cool.

I mean, imagine looking at the air around you, it's invisible, you can't taste it, you can't smell it, you can't hold it or do anything with it, you're not really aware that it's there.

So, what kind of person would look at the air and think, I wonder what it is?

I wonder what it's made of, I wonder what it's got inside it and how it works.

So, a lot of different people did that, but the people who discovered oxygen in particular,

there were two, possibly three.

There's one extra guy who sort of has a claim, but my two favourites are Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier, and this was both in the 18th century.

And Joseph Priestley, he was this,

you would have loved him, Andrea, honestly.

He was a chemist and experimenter.

And in fact, one of my favorite stories about him was he had all this glassware and stuff, and he was trying to make a gas, and he sort of lit whatever he was lighting and stepped back, and the whole thing exploded in his face.

He ducked out of the way of the flying glass and then set it all up and did it again

just to see what happened.

Anyway, so he was very chaotic and haphazard in what he did.

But he did manage to generate this gas that he could tell was different from anything else because when you put a candle in it, the candle flared up and burned with this kind of intense brightness.

And if you put a little mouse in it and left the mouse in the oxygen, it just kept on and on and on and on going.

The other thing that I love about Joseph Priestley, if you'd made a new gas like that, you could see that it made candles flare up.

and you could see that a mouse sitting in it didn't seem to do the mouse any harm.

But would you breathe it?

If you'd made a brand new gas, would you breathe it?

Hands off, you would.

Sometimes you don't have a choice when there's a new gas in the room.

No one warns you.

So he did.

He was the first human being ever to breathe pure oxygen, and he said it gave him a very lightness of breast.

He said it was very delicious.

So he sort of made it, but he didn't know what it was.

And the guy who figured out what it was was Antoine Lavoisier, a very cool, calculating.

Actually, Brian, you'd have liked him.

I think about it.

I can sort of see a bit of a pattern here.

He liked numbers, he liked weights and measures and being very precise about things and doing equations.

And he's the one who figured out that oxygen is actually a part of air and that it's breathing oxygen is what actually makes us alive.

And he did some very ingenious experiments to do it.

But the story of Lavoisier is a really sad one because after the revolution, he stayed in Paris trying to help.

He was very passionate about sort of helping the poor people, but he came from an aristocratic background.

And the big irony is that he had a wall built around Paris to help with the taxes that were

goods that were coming in and out of Paris and making sure that you could measure them very carefully.

And he was very into precise measurements.

It was his job.

And they actually said about him, the reason in the end he was hauled up before the Revolutionary Council is that they said that the discoverer of oxygen, the first man to understand what it really was, that his wall had blocked off the air from the city of Paris.

And so they executed him.

They actually chopped his head off.

And one person watching said, it took them only a moment to cut off that head, and another hundred years may not see one like it.

That's a really sad story.

He's famous, he's still famous.

Yeah, he's still famous, but he's really dead.

To be fair, he would have been dead anyway.

You're right, there's a happy ending.

We all die.

In terms of, so we've talked about this and seen a violent reaction with oxygen.

But at a deeper level, so we go down to the atomic level and the structure of the atoms themselves, what is happening?

What's the most basic description you could give, or the most fundamental description, let me say, for what's happening in these processes?

Okay, so these are very, very fast reactions, and reactions which, in fact, once you get get them going, they really take off.

And one of the key things is that many of these reactions involve little intermediate molecules, which are referred to as radicals.

In other words, ones which have unpaired electrons.

And chemists,

in one way, sort of simplistically, have long imagined that if you make a molecule that's going to hang together in stable fashion, you always have to pair up the electrons, that the electrons, to say it glibly, you know, they kind of pair up just like the animals in Noah's Arc or something.

Oxygen is very unusual because it doesn't do that.

And perhaps we should just look at it slightly more.

This is perfect for radio, of course.

And I'm going to pour it into this flask.

So what I've got is a thermo flask, but one which is actually clear so that you can see what this very cold liquid looks like.

And

for people at home, you may be able to notice here that it's not colorless.

This is not like water.

This is actually a strange faint blue color.

Yes.

And that faint blue color is very important.

What it tells us is that there's something quite odd about the way the electrons are arranged in this molecule.

Now if we take it and we pour it, and I'll do this twice, once I'll do it so that you guys can see it, and then I'll turn it towards the audience.

If I pour it between the poles of the magnet, watch what happens.

Notice that the liquid actually clings between the poles.

Can you actually see that?

Now just for the audience, I'll rotate it round.

Can you actually see that we've got like a cylinder of oxygen which is hanging between the two?

That is very strange.

So we've got a sort of a horseshoe-shaped or a bit a curved magnet with the poles very close to each other.

And the liquid has formed a cylinder connecting the north and south poles of the magnets.

It hangs in between.

In other words, there is,

when you put this liquid between the poles of the magnet, there's a force between them.

In other words, this material actually becomes magnetized.

And the reason is because oxygen has two unpaired electrons.

It's a stable molecule.

In spite of the fact that those two electrons, in simplistic theory, ought to pair up.

And so this was really a mystery through the sort of first, a good chunk of the 20th century.

No one could work out what it was, and it really comes down to: here we are, this is the moment you've been waiting for.

Quantum mechanics.

Yay!

All roads lead to physics.

So

the interesting thing is that when we start describing the way the electrons sort of sit in these molecules, when you pair them up, you've got to imagine the orbitals, as they're called, in other words, the sort of energy levels, which have particular shapes, that they overlap as you bring the two atoms together.

And once you do that, you get a sequence, a kind of stack of levels into which you can put your electrons.

And the same rules that govern atoms apply to molecules as well.

And so, one rule is the Pauli principle that you can never put more than two electrons into an orbital, so the electrons go two by two.

But then there's a second rule called Hund's rule.

And Hund's rule says that if you have two identical levels, the electrons go in one by one.

And that's the reason.

Essentially, those two electrons, right, have individual levels to stay on, which are independent.

And the result is that this molecule is highly reactive.

But you can see it's kind of stable.

In other words, it doesn't react with itself

until you bring something else in.

Then excitement happens.

So if oxygen is so reactive, Gabrielle, why is the 20% of our atmosphere oxygen?

Because it seems that it would react away very quickly,

certainly on long time scales.

So how did it get there, and why is it there today?

It's from from life.

It's one of the key signals.

If you find a planet with oxygen in the atmosphere, you know that there has to be life there because it's so reactive that it's going to react away from the atmosphere as fast as it's being made.

And it was first made on Earth by tiny creatures,

the first appearance of cyanobacteria, the first creatures to do photosynthesis.

And actually, it's quite funny because when they appeared,

it was quite a while after their first appearance before oxygen showed up in the atmosphere.

And that's because everything was sort of waiting on Earth to be oxidized.

In fact, the oceans rusted out.

They had all this sort of floating iron that rusted out.

If you're using anything made of steel, it probably comes from that big rusting event.

But then eventually, when all that rusting had taken place, the oxygen showed up in the atmosphere.

And that was disaster for most of the creatures on Earth.

Because until that point, there hadn't been any oxygen in the atmosphere.

And oxygen is dangerous.

Oxygen is violent.

And I think of it a bit like like a rampaging thug, right?

It wants to get those electrons and it's going to grab them from whoever it can.

So if it's got that kind of protective security guards around it, when it's being delivered to a cell, all very well, but it's still going to try and rip and grab whatever it can from whoever or whatever it can get.

And there were quite a lot of creatures on Earth that had never seen oxygen, never encountered it, and couldn't take it.

There was mass mortality on Earth.

It was a poison.

And the creatures that did survive survived by burying themselves.

That's why in the bottoms are kind of muddy lakes.

When you kind of, if you dig in there, it's a bit smelly and strange, because all the creatures that can't cope with oxygen actually are there.

And it's also, by the way, why we fart.

Because the creatures that actually make the methane inside our guts have buried themselves there to try and get away from oxygen.

So it was a big poison.

It was a big poison.

But here's the really cool thing about it.

As the oxygen began to get build up more and more and more in the atmosphere, eventually, about 600 million years ago, you got the very first animals.

You got the first multi-celled creatures, you got the first eyes, and teeth, and legs, and cells, and brains, and hair, and everything that's vivid and interesting.

The first creatures that could move around, the first creatures that could do stuff.

And that's because they had oxygen.

It has to be something really powerful to be as big and vigorous and inventive as we are.

So, the current thinking, though oxygen is not vital for life, would you say that that current thinking is that oxygen for complex life, with our current theory of perhaps life on other planets and the possibility of that?

Basically, as far as we know, if you want to be bigger than a pinhead.

I do.

You want to be bigger than a pinhead and you don't want to be slime.

That's the answer.

I do.

They're the two things.

They are my two ambitions in life.

Then keep breathing.

Yeah, I will.

Thank you.

This is really good advice, everyone.

I think you should write it down.

I'm going to write it down just in case I forget New Year's resolutions.

Why is it that what has made it so successful?

I suppose, if you want to say successful,

oxygen to be the third most common.

You know, at the point of the Big Bang, we have hydrogen, we have helium, and then you know, things continue in terms of the increase in protons.

What is it about oxygen which means this universe, this system, is

did it have a good PR team?

That's what we look at when you think of Edinburgh.

Well, PR gets you attention, but it doesn't mean that you get more of you, right?

That's true.

So, um, so what happens is oxygen's actually made in the heart of stars.

This is this is this is Brian's thing, right?

So, and it is it wasn't just Brian, by the way.

I can argue with that idea.

I didn't know Brian had invented oxygen, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He stuck it in the middle of the stars to make it more twinkly, and it gave him something to point at as well.

I'm just making the oxygen over there and all them twinkly things.

But it's actually it's actually at the end of the lives, isn't it?

So it's when they're not quite as twinkly, so I think you're you're a bit wrong there.

Sorry about that.

Oh, is it when they're twinkle-less?

They're not twinkle-less, but they're a little bit less on the twinkly side, as far as I understand it.

It's quite a complicated process, actually.

So you start with hydrogen burning to helium, and then when the hydrogen fuel is used up in the core, then you can burn helium through a complex process into primarily carbon and oxygen.

And it often stops there.

So you get white dwarf stars where the nuclear fusion processes have stopped, but they are essentially carbon and oxygen, basically.

And then the very more, the much more massive stars then will go all the way to iron and beyond in the supernova explosions.

But that's why it's so common.

And carbon's the fourth most common element in the universe.

So it's hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon.

I should have remembered that because you told me that before, more than once.

Several times.

Sarah, you've been on the show a few times.

When you hear that some of these kind of ideas of complexity, and you are an autodidact as well, you are someone who I always see with a notebook collating information.

But it's because I'm stupid, like as in I now, like listening to you guys talking about this stuff, which is so so fascinating.

And because I'm having to convert it into my brain, like some of it sounds like poetry when you're talking about kind of oxygen from stars and biscuits made of sunbeams.

I love it.

And then

kind of, I feel like I'm understanding things as an adult.

I think that's the thing about learning, isn't it?

Learning things as an adult.

You know that someone tried to explain this to me when I was 14 and 15, but I had no framework for that information to go into.

I think I'd love to go back to school now.

Like all of the subjects, I'd love to learn.

I have these huge gaps in my knowledge, and I love being told things and trying to remember them.

I think now, though, because also there's been a clever technique from Andrea, where every time you smell a burnt biscuit, you will have magnificent recall now of equations as well.

How often are you going to smell the burnt biscuit?

Never, because I'm a vegan.

There must be some vegan biscuits that are flammable.

I've never asked that before, by the way.

You know, when something comes out of your mouth and you think, why on earth did I say there must be some vegan biscuits that are flammable?

I'm sure, there'll be no ingredients.

I mean, it doesn't require eggs or dairy, does it?

The biscuit to the flames?

It's a secret formula.

Is it a secret formula?

Yeah, I think it's proprietary.

Well, I mean, I think you don't need either the dairy or the

vegan.

So you can just do it with pure flour or

chickpeas.

It would have no nutritional value at all, then, because you wouldn't be able to digest it.

You wouldn't be able to burn it.

You mean it would be made of cement, for example.

Well, yes, exactly.

It must be a bit of a clean.

Cement biscuit would be extremely safe, non-flammable,

but at the same time have, yes, as you say, very little nutritional value.

Why doesn't cement react with oxygen?

Cement has already reacted with oxygen, right?

Because what you're talking about is mainly aluminium and silicon oxides.

On the other hand, you might be able to run a life form of taking oxygen with aluminium and silicon and burning that gently.

To make cement.

To make cement, yes.

And you would get beautiful structures.

Can I ask when it comes to.

I'm fascinated by this.

This life form that Andrea is imagining,

the end process of its digestive system is cement.

I mean, you know,

it would leave a permanent trail, but I mean, you know, uncomfortable.

Well,

what it's bumping.

Let me put it to you another way.

In other words, we are doing exactly the same thing, because of course what we do is we leave a trail of CO2 and water, right?

In other words, we're combining oxygen with carbon, hydrogen with oxygen, and we leave that trail plus a few additional novel gases, right, that Sarah's into.

But, or maybe not.

Whereas, you know, these other life forms, I mean, you're just moving down or slightly across in the periodic table.

You're combining oxygen with other elements, say aluminium and silicon, and you might be able to generate life forms that way.

I'm intrigued when you just see, I still, I know we've been dealing with, you know, before it's about the electrons, but those things where you go, this is highly reactive, and this, therefore, you know, when you have what appears to be a planet which is quite rich in chemical reactions, and that is not obviously what we see across the whole universe, from what we know so far, and the limited knowledge we have.

Well, the thing is, we know that chemistry is completely universal.

I mean, that was something that was really established in about 1859.

In fact, interestingly, the same year as the origin of species, when Bunsen and Kirchhoff first suddenly realized that the lines in the spectrum of the sun matched up exactly with the lines in the spectra from flames.

You know, Bunsen had made his Bunsen burner, and there were certain particular lines, colors in the spectrum.

When those two matched up, suddenly chemistry moved from being something that you did in the lab or out on Earth somehow to being universal.

So we know that the chemistry kind of happens everywhere.

We haven't actually managed to really see it beyond anywhere.

you know, than the solar system in a sense.

And one of the exciting things is, for example, the James Webb Space Telescope, which might allow us to actually observe, you know, chemistry in atmospheres elsewhere.

One of the key things, of course, for those missions is to go and look at what the chemical composition is.

Because the really special thing about Earth's atmosphere is the fact that it's not at equilibrium.

And so here I'm really thinking about the kind of grand unified theory of the world that was developed in the 19th century, not about particles, but about thermodynamics.

And you look at the composition of the atmosphere, and the composition of the atmosphere is wrong.

It should all burn to CO2 and to water.

There shouldn't be oxygen there.

We shouldn't have hydrocarbons lying around.

And that might be a telltale sign of life.

In fact, it was James Lovelock who first started suggesting that that would be the way

to test other worlds.

And so now we're actually close to the jumping off point.

And if you were to see oxygen,

the spectral characteristics of oxygen out

in the atmospheres of some exoplanet, that might be an indication that there's something very strange going on there.

Because you have a chemically unstable, as you said, out-of-equilibrium atmosphere, then something needs to be keeping it like that.

And in our case,

something which is pushing it away.

For me,

equilibrium, we all learn about it in school, in a sense, but it's the most boring situation to be in, right?

It's death.

It's chemical death.

What you want to be well away from that, in that exciting place where fires happen.

And would it work the same way, vice versa?

If you introduced lots and lots of oxygen into an atmosphere, could that then lead, if you put enough in, could that then lead to creating life?

If I was writing like a sci-fi novel.

I would say no, because life began without oxygen.

It began in the

complex life, so you'd have to have life already to then kind of translate.

One of the real problems is that oxygen is so reactive that some of the fundamental building blocks from which you might want to construct life would actually, if you had oxygen there, might well be quite fragile, right?

And you might lose them as quickly as you can.

Oh no, I've killed my babies.

But you know, if you could do it, I mean, from the experiment on Earth, if you could put oxygen in the atmosphere and keep on doing it for tens, hundreds, thousands, millions of years, and sit and have the patience, then you might well then find that.

So I would be God now.

I've just invented God.

You have invented God, well done.

And he's obviously very patient.

Yeah, we're just

running out of time.

To summarise, though, we've been talking about the atmosphere, but this thing, oxygen, for a chemist, is it one of the ultimate building blocks, the ultimate element, in terms of its reactivity and

the role it plays, I suppose, the profound role it plays?

I mean, oxygen plays a hugely profound role in chemistry because

not only does it form such incredibly sort of stable molecules, but one of the things that it does is when you put it into a molecule, one thing that it often does is it distorts the charges.

In other words, it leaves more positive on one side and it tends to be more negative.

And the moment you do that with molecules, what they do is they start to kind of stick together.

You start to build in a kind of chemical stickiness, a kind of chemical bias, which A

makes things condense, makes them into liquids, into solids.

I mean, one of the key things about water, for example, is that you have oxygen attached to hydrogen.

The hydrogens are positive, the oxygen is negative.

That makes those water molecules stick together.

It gives ice its weird structure and its properties.

And it's all driven by the real fundamental difference between hydrogen and oxygen, right?

That charge difference.

So oxygen is one of these kind of, in a way, really iconic elements in the periodic table.

One that is such an important contributor to our world.

And yeah, if we didn't have oxygen, I mean, my God, what would we have to play with?

Fluorine!

Even better!

Can I just say?

Ministers at home, mad scientist face was suddenly seen there.

That's what I wonder.

I have to ask, when I stuck my finger in the liquid nitrogen a couple of series ago, I was worried that I would just go, oh, don't take it out again.

You know that bit where your brain makes you back.

Do you ever pour out liquid oxygen and think, I know I shouldn't drink it.

Why is my brain going, go on, drink it?

Because that's one of the reasons I never became a chemist.

I just didn't, I know I shouldn't drink the mercury, but go on.

Drinking oxygen is not something I've ever been tempted to do.

But, you know, unlike Bill Clinton, I certainly like to inhale.

It just, Sandy, describing oxygen.

So we discussed, you could imagine a universe that where where life can exist without oxygen in an atmosphere, obviously, because that's the that was the state of the Earth when life began.

But as you mentioned there, water, the properties are unique and profoundly dependent on the chemistry of oxygen.

Could you imagine a universe with no oxygen but life?

Well, look.

I think that's a a very, very difficult question on one level.

I mean, we know that there are life forms on Earth that have nothing to do with molecular oxygen.

In other words, down at those kind of volcanic vents down in the depths of the sea, you have all kinds of chemistry and life which is sort of driven by chemistry involving other elements.

And remember, it's always this business of being able to transfer electrons around in order to be able to split bonds, in order to make bonds, to build structures, and so on.

But if in fact you didn't have oxygen, I mean, that would change things very, very profoundly.

Because one of the wonderful things about having oxygen is water and the fact that it has such a high boiling point compared to any other molecule of its size, right?

There's nothing comparable to that.

And it's got this nice liquid range.

It will dissolve, you know, water will dissolve such a wide range of things, particularly salts, but also molecules which don't sort of ionize, which aren't as charged like that.

And so I think without oxygen, you really struggle to imagine.

And yet, I mean, to quote the great geneticist, it was from UCL, JBS Haldane, the universe is not queerer than we suppose.

It's queerer than we can suppose.

And almost certainly, there may be places where oxygen is much less available.

And yet, perhaps this self-replicating energy capture and processing, which is what life is all about, is taking place.

Can I saus on a different practical thing near the end?

I mean, obviously, breathing's very practical as well, and the use of oxygen and living stuff.

But

breathing's very practical.

It is.

I tried stopping it for a while, but I'm just addicted.

But I wondered about

oxygen, like everything that anyone has any rough knowledge of, we then also find there are ways of people selling you tat.

Oxygen bars, for instance, right?

Is there any that that was a hip thing?

Did you ever go to that?

No, I never went, but that's what I was interested.

And also, quite often with

things that I've worked with like beauty products and stuff, there's always things about kind of oxygenating your skin and all that kind of thing.

So, what is it all rubbish?

It's not all rubbish, actually, but some of it's rubbish.

Okay, as usual, a bit of both.

Yeah.

Antioxidants.

You get people who go, yeah, I always take antioxidants, right?

So, antioxidants, right?

My big jar of antioxidants, I don't have one, but what is that meant to be doing to my oxygen?

Okay, so here's the story.

I mean, the oxygen bars, when Joseph Priestley first breathed oxygen, he said, oh, it makes me feel really nice.

So it's light, it's a different kind of feeling.

You probably don't want to breathe pure oxygen for too long, although astronauts have done it.

And also, people who are sick in oxygen tents, you know, it does actually really help.

So, oxygenating your skin, it's already pretty oxygenated, I would have thought.

Breathing oxygen

feels nice.

Antioxidants, we've got plenty of them in our bodies already.

If you eat enough fruit and vegetables, you've got plenty of them.

And there's even some theories that if you eat antioxidant pills, then you might disrupt your own system.

It's like bringing in a load of unruly mercenaries, where you've already got a well-trained army, so you don't necessarily want to do that.

But also, there's something very profound about the fact that oxygen is the reason we're not pinheads, it's the reason we're not slime.

It's how we can be big and vigorous and creative and solve problems and be interesting.

But it's actually also what kills us.

Oxygen is responsible for all the diseases of old age and dementia and cancer and so on, and ultimately death by the rampaging it does with all these free radicals in your body.

So the thing that you you are breathing, there was one estimate that breathing for a year is the equivalent of having 10,000 chest x-rays.

That's how much damage it's doing to you.

And our bodies are very impressive that they can resist it, but eventually you won't.

So, oxygen is the thing, it is the reason that we will all grow old and die.

And yet, it's the reason that we can all live.

So, Sarah, you've heard both sides of the argument, and you've smelt the biscuit.

So, if you're not.

How do you feel?

Oxygen, good thing, bad thing?

I feel like this is a remake with science of it's a beautiful life, where you get to find out about the past and what would have been like without oxygen, there's kind of nothing, and then the future, what happens if we don't kind of protect the things that we've got.

And then I wake up and it was all a dream.

It's all okay, and we've got some oxygen, but we have to be careful now, guys.

Is that the right thing?

Have I taken?

I also like the fact that that breathing thing, there's going to be a Fitbit that says hold your breath for a little bit, we'll keep you younger.

You're so young.

Some people do go up to high altitudes for that exact reason.

So there's a new thing about going to a high altitude to have less oxygen.

That's why you're so young.

They're mountains, aren't you?

I'm a little bit nearer the stars now.

Look at me, young skin.

Robin lives in a cellar, that's why he's all old.

So we asked the audience a question about about oxygen, which we found very hard actually.

What did we want to ask them?

So eventually what we came up with was: Jean-Michel Jarre wrote an album all about oxygen.

Which gas would you like there to be some kind of concept stroke prog album about?

And these were our audience's answers.

Helium, because it will be uplifting.

I'm awfully sorry, Joan.

I thought you did very well, Jamie.

Freon, it's cool.

It'd be a great chill-out ambient concept album.

Number one, album title, All I Want Some Peace and Quiet.

Number two, All the Songs Are Gone.

See!

Are gone.

Not hydrogen.

G-O-N-E.

For the listeners.

A Poolside Summer Hit single by Dolly Parton.

Chlorine.

Chlorine Selenium.

Next week we'll be asking, are insects taking over the world?

We're not really asking that.

We're asking, why are insects more resilient than human beings and why are they so successful?

Why have they been around for so long?

Yeah, but if we ask, are insects taking over the world?

we get pick of the day for the Daily Express.

So we'll also then be asking, will the sun explode on Thursday?

No.

Are Martian superbugs about to destroy the Earth through disease?

No.

Okay, that's, we don't know what we're going to be doing next week then.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

In the infinite monkey cage,

in the infinite monkey cage

again,

podcast podcast version of the podcast podcast.

Brian doesn't even know that you have actually now listened to the whole of the show, and this is all he's been doing for the last 47 minutes.

And it's not going to end for a while either.

It's a nested infinity of podcasts, so then you could probably sum it up like like a child.

This is my life.

You just end up with the podcast.

This is the BBC.

For life with pets, there's Chewie delivering everything.

From food to fun

to fashion.

All at great prices.

If a pet's part of your family, Chewy should be too, with everything you need for life with pets.