2mo ago

Bye Bye Existence

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

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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.
- 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?
- 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.
- "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.
  
  I don't think that's that bad, especially because the pressure drops everywhere equally. Most planes would be able to work just fine, they'd just have to fly a bit lower, if even that. Divers would get squashed though.
Is this something that's likely to happen?
- No, it's physically impossible.
  
  Oh good. For a minute I thought the aliens on 3i/atlas had announced their plans, and I'd missed the news.
- One can hope
Well, fingers crossed that never happens.
I think this is one of those everything becomes physics scenarios
Lost oxygen? Sounds pretty careless. "Umm, where did I put that silly oxygen?"
If we're only talking about oxygen as in O₂, you'd probably be mostly fine. Even if we're talking anything that contains an oxygen atom getting destroyed, something like Silicon would be so much worse - most of the Earth's crust would just be gone. Hydrogen would probably also be fun, because it'd turn water and any organic compound into oxidizers.
Chances of all oxygen atoms(in air) suddenly gathering up on some corner of the mediterrian sea is not 0.
- I always harbor a slight panic that all the laws of the universe we observe have, so far, been a massive coincidence. Everything is completely random and right up to this point they just happen to have been doing that.
  At any moment it could all go absolutely Bursar.

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