Why is Carbon, the building block of life, safe when eating or drinking (carbonated water), but not when breathing (carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide)?
In: Biology
The key takeaway is that the way a molecule behaves is in no way predictable based only on the properties of the elements that compose it.
Carbon dioxide is what we exhale and it’s what carbonates soda. Take one of the oxygen from it, and it becomes Carbon Monoxide, a poisonous gas. There’s no way to have predicted that removing one oxygen turned a harmless inert gas into a deadly poison, other than having experimented and found out.
So it’s not carbon in particular that’s at the heart of the question, it’s the fact that the elements composing a molecule do not dictate the molecules behavior.
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