“No parenting class would have ever prepared me for having my kid ask me why we don’t need artificial oxygen storage.”
No, but a grade school science class would have…
Yeah this is mindboggling. It wouldn’t have ever crossed her mind to tell her kid that they don’t need oxygen canisters on this planet? I mean, what the dad said is good, as it opened the door to some more learning… but wow.
Never underestimate just how clueless the general population is about how the world works. More than you’d expect would prove to not really grasp even the most basic mechanisms of their environment.
People turn to religion for a reason.
To the majority of people, understanding the world beyond “inexplicable god magic” is difficult to learn good-for-nothing trivia unless it’s needed for a good grade and maybe a job if you’re cut out for it. Only the parts specific to surviving in the wild get a different treatment.
Even the non-religious seem to make a habit of thinking like this. The kind of “not a Christian” alcoholic that is completely disinterested in the actual philosophies that allowed for a world where open disbelief is safe, and vocally in favor of “rights” of some sort for currently relevant minorities, with maybe a rare acknowledgement of some surface-level misunderstanding of humanitarian ethics.
Pump the brakes.
She isn’t saying that she doesn’t know about photosynthesis. She is saying she didn’t understand what the child was actually asking about.
There is a world of difference between knowing the answer and understanding the question, especially if the question was asked by someone who doesn’t even really know what they’re trying to ask either.
Suppose my child asks when she’s going to get fur. If I don’t know what she’s been reading, my first thought might be that she saw one of her friends or a rich old lady wearing a fur coat and wants one for herself, not that she doesn’t know that humans don’t need fur to stay warm like dogs do. If I then begin explaining that raising or (worse) hunting wild animals for their fur is unethical, but I’m happy to buy her a nice synthetic jacket if she wants it, that doesn’t mean I’m an idiot who doesn’t even know humans don’t grow fur and Everything That’s Wrong With Society Today, it means I misunderstood her question.
It’s surprised me once I got out of school and uni how little people know. But what really blew my mind is just how little they actually care.
Like someone will say they don’t know how something works, I’ll explain and they will stare at me blankly and I really realise they didn’t want me to explain and they were actually happy not knowing. Whereas I will look at something, whether it’s a kettle or pasteurisation or grass and wonder how it works. But for people actually to prefer not to know and live in ignorance really messed with me for a while.
I’ve largely given up now. My boss said he was getting all the heating changed in his house to have electric. I asked why he doesn’t get a heat pump and he told me it’s because they don’t work they just blow air our like a fan so it’s colder than an electric radiator. I just said okay and moved on.
There’s a lot of people who claim to be science lovers who think this way too. They liked watching Bill Nye and participating in science class as a kid. But now that they’re adults, they expect to already know everything and aren’t interested in learning more. Even Einstein thought this way. That’s why he said “God does not play dice with the universe”.
These anti science reactions are especially common if you tell people about fringe or advanced science or occultism. Like if you discuss how consensus reality is a social construct and our beliefs are highly influential of our perceptions, thus permitting control of perception through belief, a lot of people’s eyes will glaze over and then they’ll yell about how science is exactly what they learned in school and not an inch more.
My first thought, when I heard that question, would be “do we have a backup in case the naturally produced oxygen for some reason goes away?” like some families have an emergency supply of food or water, not that the child did not know that Earth’s atmosphere naturally contains oxygen thanks to plants.
I mean… I know perfectly well that plants produce oxygen, but it never would’ve occurred to me that that was waht a child asking about oxygen tanks wanted to know.
It wasn’t about wanting to know about photosynthesis, the original question was really about the oxygen tanks. Kids very often are looking for a simple answer. Even though the real answer is far more complex.
As a Dad who helped raise 4 Daughters, (a CPA, a Triage Nurse, PHD Mech Engineer, and a Computer Forensic Expert for the FBI), teaching at home is a crucial part of parenting. Beyond offering a wide variety of materials to learn from, (we built a library of books that filled my office), and being ready to answer those oxygen tank questions, you need to show and make asking those questions and learning from them fun.
Right? This seems like a…strange problem to have. “Why don’t we need gas masks when we go outside?” “Why don’t we need to worry about rivers of lava?”
…because those aren’t problems on this planet. Lava stays underground unless there is an active eruption and the air outside isn’t toxic. Pretty simple.
A time traveler’s survival guide. The vertical green bars are the only times in Earth’s history with enough oxygen to breathe (hypoxia) and low enough to avoid oxygen toxicity (hyperoxia):
That blue bar is extremely pessimistic. Humans can survive pretty well with 15% oxygen, and do so in several places in the Andes mountains, China and India. I wouldn’t recommend doing it without lengthy acclimatizing, especially not considering my last paragraph, but it’s completely survivable by itself.
Humans also don’t really have a problem with 25% oxygen, although that will definitely bring down the life expectancy.
On the other hand, note how those pointers talk about giant insects, megafauna and other scary things. Those are a much bigger problem than the air you’re breathing.
Dumb question, but in a very oxygen rich environment, can you just breathe through a paper bag or something? Mostly just breathe your own exhaled CO2 with a bit of O2 leaking in?
Mosquitos are kind of modern, being only 45 million years old, way after the megafauna bugs died.
but think 40cm long, meter wide “dragonflies”, half-meter long “scorpions”, 60cm “spiders” with knifelike front legs and 250cm long millipedes (technically not an insect, but eh)
But if you’re looking for giant mosquitoes, you’re in luck: the very much not-extinct elephant mosquito can grow over 1.5cm long.
Oxygen is really rough on the DNA due to making the cells “rust” which hampers cell division and/or increases risks of mutations or cancers
I’m super skeptical of this.
You don’t get oxygen toxicity, even breathing pure oxygen, unless you’re under significantly more pressure than atmospheric pressure…
So either this graphic is wrong/misleading, or the atmosphere was more than double current pressure for most of earth’s history… Which I’m pretty skeptical of.
My grandfather would tell stories of how the planet used to be covered in plants and you could breathe the air outside. Back when the sky was blue.
It is (I hope) an original. Though the form “my grandfather would tell stories” might be bordering on cliché.
I have a feeling that I read this before somewhere
Especially the “Back when the sky was blue” part
Sounds to me like Dad needs a little credit here.
Even if you arent good at improv “Thats a good question! I’m not sure, we should look that up!” Is an easy go-to.
Then after shower and get into bed we look up todays questions.
First off, weird to point out that they’re “age appropriate”
If your kid reads above the age level and understands it that’s generally a good thing
Number two I don’t get why this is such a weird concept on how to explain things to a child. Seems pretty normal and “age appropriate”
Yep. I was reading at a 6th grade level in 1st grade, and had advanced to university level comprehension by 5th grade. WTF was an “age appropriate book?”
I’m pretty sure that those people would have been incensed, if they knew that I chose TLotR as my 1st grade book report. (This was in 1985, so while there was an animated movie, it didn’t cover the entire three books, so I had to read them.)
I assumed age appropriate was regarding content not difficulty. It is still a weird thing to emphasize though.
It always strikes me regarding the mental gymnastics people engage in regarding consumption of entertainment. Violent video games*, even if it’s cartoon violence, tv and movies are everywhere. But people clutch their pearls if it’s in a book format. The world is ending if it’s sexual. Hell, Utah just banned Judy Blume books.
*I’m not condemning video games, study after study has proven that violence in games doesn’t lead to violent behavior, just that we find violence in games acceptable vs people losing their shit over a girl getting her period in a book for YA’s.
They undoubtedly wouldn’t approve of the content of some of the books I was reading back then either. I had already learned the extremely broad strokes around sex and reproduction by the first grade. My parents have a farm with livestock. I was also reading computer manuals learning how to be a greyhat, before the term even existed.
I’m extremely impressed that you were able to read and understand LotR at 7 years old. i read them at 15 and loved them, but definitely had trouble at the council of the elves etc
For me it’s just all the funny words for highly specific descriptors of particular types of terrain. But also, you can somehow still get such a vivid picture and follow the gist, even as you filter through all that, even if you don’t bother to look it up.
“Along the left was an eylet flanked by a hithertop which flattened as they proceeded north through the shallow wolly, which rose into semi-steep clifftons…”
(Yes I made all that up lol)
Somehow even with my ADHD I’m having such a good time with it…because it’s so vivid, like Tolkien was actually there.
There’s some old sci fi that I read as a kid that I wouldn’t give to mine at the same age. Too much sexism, racism, incorrect astronomy
