Breathing in Oxygen

[sp1214]

Is there a finite limit to how many people on the planet it will sustain especially with so many impurities being pumped into the atmosphere and the population increasing exponentially?

If the answer is yes what would be the population max?

Where does the oxygen come from and is it easily replenished?

[Loosehead]

did you not go to school? fortunatley most plants use co2 and give off oxygen, animals mostly do the opposite, bio sphere 1!

[R1Geezer]

and can you stop breathing our oxyxgen. Did you come through the education system entirely unscathed?

[honest_joe]

We all know what happens to the balance of oxygen to impurities in the air. Take Los Angeles or Shanghaii where vehicle emissions produce smog and people find it difficult to breathe properly. Thousands of people are being admitted to hospital with chest complaints. Even in Britain which has the highest rates of Asthma in the world shows the problem to be getting worse. But whats a few lives compared to so called progress?

[weggiewabbit]

Is there a finite limit to the number of people the planet can support? Yes, but no one can predict what it will be. I think it has less to do with atmospheric pollution than with population increase, and finding enough food for them.

Asthma is caused by dust mites, not vehicle emissions.

[CovertJellyf]

Pollutants will poison plankton in the oceans, these plant forms account for both oxygen and act as a basis for many food chains, as the plankton is reduced so will the species that live off it. But don't worry chances are global warming will kill us off first.

[wildwood]

The world's population is limited by food, not oxygen.

The present little bit of fuel additive that is produced from corn/rice is already causing the price of that basic commodity to skyrocket. Corn and/or rice is the staple diet of 80% of the world's people.

We're all doomed I tell you, doomed!

Ironically, one of the world's nations that has a reputation for infringing on its population's rights is doing something about it by trying to limit each family to one child.

[sp1214]

I think you may have your facts wrong weggie. Although dust mites may cause problems the cause of Asthma in the western world is also linked to vehicle transmissions. This coupled with the damp climate makes the UK a prime target for respiratory diseases.

[jake-the-peg]

I love all these biologists who think SP has had a poor education.

Perhaps they'd like to tell us about repiration in plants at night and where all the free oxygen got onto the planet in the first place.

Anyway you can't assume that humans have the biggest draw on the planet's oxygen reserves.

For example there is a concept of Biomass in ecology that counts the mass of a species
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_%28ecolog y%29

If you added up all the krill you'd get twice the mass that humans make up.

Additionally the real ecology is underground
http://whyfiles.org/shorties/count_bact.html

you'll find 3,550,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 living organisms there.

All that biology at school with tree's and tomato plants is nice enough but doesn't amount to a hill of beans compared to the life that you can't see swarming all around us.

It's enough to give a Dettol salesman the hee-bee-jee-bees!