if the world runs out of oxygen, surely we would adapt…am i right?

Question: if the world runs out of oxygen, surely we would adapt...am i right?
- Keywords:
  adapt,
  evolution,
  oxygen
Asked by kapayaewh to David, Helen, Ian, rhysphillips, Sarah on 14 Jun 2011.
- Rhys Phillips answered on 14 Jun 2011:
  
  Um, I don’t know. I think it would take a long time to evolve into organisms that didn’t need oxygen and we’d probably die before we had time to evolve.
- Ian van der Linde answered on 14 Jun 2011:
  
  I’ll assume you mean than Oxygen will fall, rather than completely dissappear. If it happened quickly, the sort of evolutionary mechanisms that would take place would be called a “mass extinction”, rather like what happened to the dinosaurs. There may be some people who can still function – like people who are used to living at high altitudes, but a lot of other people would die. Those remaining people might eventually repopulate the planet. If the Oxygen level dropped slowly then, yes, evolution might favour those who can deal with the different air until they outnumbered the people who struggled, but only if the people who struggled were less likely to survive and have children. Reading this back, it sounds rather grim!
- Helen Fletcher answered on 14 Jun 2011:
  
  I think we would adapt by developing new technology. Maybe we would all live in bio-domes full of trees and plants to make oxygen for us
- David Corne answered on 14 Jun 2011:
  
  See Ian’s answer above.It depends how fast the oxygen runs out. In reality though,if this happened then I think we would adapt technologically rather than evolutionarily. That is, we would build things to extract oxygen from water, or we would build things to make oxygen (by nuclear fusion), to keep us going. We would be able to do this much faster than would happen by evolution.

Question: if the world runs out of oxygen, surely we would adapt...am i right?

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