as I was told from early education that the air we currently breathe in contains 21% oxygen and 77-ish% of nitrogen and the rest are other particles.
So I have a dumb question on what the body uses nitrogen we breathe in for?
In: 387
Nitrogen gas is inert. It doesn’t easily react under usual conditions and requires chemical processes that we don’t use to break it apart.
There’s a line in the Yes Minister show where they were trying to explain what inert means. The best they could come up with was “not ert”, and “wouldn’t ‘ert’ a fly”. Likewise, nitrogen at regular atmospheric pressure is merely a filler gas for us. We don’t notice it, apart from the volume of air we breathe. It just goes in and out of us, untouched and unchanged. We’d not even notice it if it displaced the oxygen we need – we’d just quietly pass out and die. It’s not the nitrogen that would kill us, but the lack of oxygen.
However, under high pressure differentials such as for deep sea divers, nitrogen in the blood can be a huge problem – accumulating and bubbling in the blood causing decompression sickness. But this is at unusual pressures and pressure differentials beyond usual human operating conditions; for every day concerns, nitrogen is just there, doing very little.
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