Surely we can switch off for a little while like a half hour and be fine why does everything just immediately fail if we don’t get oxygen? It’s such a design flaw. What is it actually doing to me that is so necessary I need it constantly?
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Because it is readily available so our evolution was never pressured to become efficient with oxygen unlike sea mammals that have limited access so there was pressure to become very efficient with oxygen use.
That doesn’t mean we can’t adapt to low oxygen environments. There are groups of humans that can function perfectly fine in thin air environments like the Sherpa in the mountains. Their bodies have adapted to running on less oxygen.
There are also tribes located on water fronts that free dive for minutes at a time with bodies that have become very efficient at storing extra oxygenated blood cells.
We can also train our bodies to become better at storing oxygen or running on less as is frequently done with many free divers and some military groups that are specialized to operate in the mountains.
But to gain natural affinity to needing less breathing, that takes millions of years of evolution under reduced oxygen environments to start seeing.
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