All concrete collapsing, massive drops/increases in pressure that can shatter your eardrums, untreated metals cold welding, full UV rays going through an Ozone layer that no longer exists, planes fall out of the sky… oh and yeah the Earths mantle just fucking collapsing in on itself and essentially dissolving as its composition has an enormous amount of oxygen
Do you mean every atom of oxygen or just the oxygen in the air? The scenario will be very very different.
Only air O2 is missing for 5 seasons: I think the consequences are pretty minor. There will be no difference in air pressure if the gas mixture is the same everywhere which can be assumed. The lack of oxygen is not problematic for humans and all animals if I’m not missing something. The radiation poisoning without atmosphere is unpleasant but five seconds are not enough to cause long term damage. The plains and birds will see a 20% drop in pressure but aerodynamics is not my field of expertise so I don’t know how bad that is.
All Oxygen is gone for five seconds: apocalypse but you won’t notice because your body just lost most of its mass and all of its functions in an instant.
“There will be no difference in air pressure”
This isn’t really true, the atmosphere just got much lighter since O2 is a bit more than 21% of the mass of our atmosphere.
Yeah, I suppose all the water everywhere just be hydrogen. I wonder if this would make us all explode, since H2 is gaseous at room temp. Also get a little heat as it goes from atomic to molecular hydrogen.
I suppose it depends on what happens to the lipids that form our cell membranes, whether we explode or just kinda dissolve and fall apart. I’m thinking dissolve now, kinda like a Thanos snap, just leaving behind something like soot.
Not to mention that in the atomic oxygen case it all comes back 5 seconds later, resulting in the greatest firestorm the Earth has ever seen as it recombines.
Oooh I didn’t think of that.Yeah, those oceans are gonna be back in just a sec. lol
It wouldn’t explode, you need an oxidizer for that. But yeah, we would all dissolve into a pile of goo, since the lipid bilayer of the cells would lose their hydrophile component, probably leading to something similar to soapification, and even if that doesn’t kill us, our DNA would degrade in an instant, since oxygen is the binding element between the phosphor atoms which hold the nucleotides together.
Explode doesn’t imply combustion…
you are right of course, my hollywood damaged brain made the shortcut from explosion to combustion so naturally that i didn’t even realize i added an step lol
Yeah the ozone thing isn’t that important for 5 seconds, we’d still have the magnetosphere.
Jokes on you, it’s secret answer 3, all O3 (ozone) disappeared for five seconds and everyone got wicked sunburns as a result.
Well, maybe not a full sunburn. But you’d get mighty uncomfortable in the sun for those five seconds!
Why? You would not even notice that. You can already hold your hand in front of a UV-C lamp just fine.
I’d assume the intensity of a lamp and the sun is quite different
What makes you think the sun has a massive UV-C output?
I’m thinking a big flaming nuclear fusion reactor creates more power than some lamp
Honestly I have no idea how the intensity compares but I’m just saying without numbers you can’t really compare it to a lamp. Especially if that lamp assumes that some person might put their hand under it.
I am not the one who made the initial claim, but if you want numbers: about 2 % of sunlight is a shorter wavelength than UV-B or about 70 W/m². If you want the same irradiance from a lamp, all you need to do is get closer, unless the lamp is really weak. 5 seconds is simply nothing.
Yeah that does seem fairly unproblematic, I have to concede
I didn’t mean to make any claim, lol, 5 seconds would be nothing and I’m trying to be funny in the vain it no O2 being not a big deal at 5 seconds.
We had an ozone crisis before, although it is serious if it’s something closer to an hour. People got sunburned in 15 minutes quite easily, though, and skin cancer is linked to it.
The atmosphere does block a lot of cosmic ray junk, but that’s a collective effort. I forget the details, but think very high frequency gamma rays. But that’s not ozone alone.
Never thought of that! We’re bags of mostly oxygen.
Even just maybe… gaseous oxygen could be interesting.
How big would the drop in atmospheric pressure actually be at ground level? I don’t know how to calculate that beyond… feels like lower than 20%, but could whatever number still be enough to induce barotrauma? How do we apply that potential change in atmospheric pressure to the ocean and tides, and how bad is that sudden shift, massive tsunamis or just slightly higher tides? I feel like a lot of measuring equipment would be fucked for a bit, how bad could it be if every altimeter/barometer/etc was unreliable for 5 seconds? Effect on contained systems feels more predictable, I know nitrogen inflation is a thing you can get in some places, but most are just air, feels like a 20% drop in tire pressure worldwide for 5 seconds is going to have to cause a spike in road accidents.
Would the increased radiation be enough to create a global sterilizing affect for important bacteria/etc and what’s the worst that could happen there?
What happens if every combustion engine in use stops working for 5 seconds? How much does that affect power plants/our energy infrastructure?
There’s lot of industrial applications, I know that welding and steel production can require pure oxygen. Medical and research applications too. How bad is it if the oxygen supply on all of those worldwide fails suddenly?