How does the lungs know which is O2 and CO2? We breathe a ton of different gasses daily but what happens to the other gases other than O2 and CO2 when inhaled?
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The lungs don’t know anything.
If you put a drop of food color in a glass of water, it starts concentrated in one place but spreads out. Gases work the same way, they’ll move from where they are concentrated and spread out to the areas with lower concentration.
In the lungs, the blood entering the lungs has a lot of CO2 in it but the air in the lungs has a lot less, so the CO2 moves out of the cells into the air in the lungs. But the air in the lungs has more oxygen than the blood, so at the same time the oxygen goes into the blood.
The lungs just suck air in and out, and blood rushes through them. The movement of the gases in and out of the blood there is just how gases naturally behave – spreading our from high concentration to low concentration.
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