Science Memes

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A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

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submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Don't forget the anaerobes, which generated so much oxygen that they poisoned themselves nearly to extinction and made the entire atmosphere a toxic miasma for themselves, without which all multicellular life would not exist!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Didn't the Proterozoic era happen a few billion years, and possibly a couple of snowball periods later than that? I thought the aneribic stuff happened pretty early and made Earth hotter than Venus, at the time.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Absolutely, but aerobic life is more able to harness efficient energy with the use of oxygen's INSANE reactivity, and that change was only possible because the anaerobes turned 20+% of the atmosphere into the elemental molecular form of the second-most electronegative element in the universe. Even plants, which produce oxygen gas during photosynthesis, use oxygen to power ATP synthesis. Oxygenation of the planet was absolutely requisite to allow the evolution of eukaryotic multicellular life.