Why does life require oxygen and not some other gas like nitrogen for example.
Is there something specific in oxygen that life needs to survive?
In: 14
Life existed before Oxygen was abundant, so no.
About 2.4 billion years ago, some bacteria figured out how to photosynthesise to get energy from sunlight. Photosynthesis produces Oxygen gas, which they didn’t need, so they burped it out. Over hundreds of millions of years, the oxygen built up. Oxygen is quite toxic to life forms not used to it, so that led a mass extinction.
More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
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