A new video is making seismic waves across social media, revealing the scary reality of what would happen to the Earth if it lost all its oxygen for just five seconds.
While most humans can hold their breath that long, the disappearance of this vital gaseous element would toss our world into chaos.
Some consequences, like the disappearance of Earth’s protective ozone layer, will come as no surprise to many, but the prolific TikTok user who detailed this hypothetical doomsday scenario did drop a few surprises.
Even with the sun still shining on our planet, for example, you’d be unlikely to see any of these fast-paced catastrophes at all, as the world would flip into total darkness.
A new video is making waves across social media, revealing the scary reality of what would happen to the Earth (above) if it lost all its oxygen for just five seconds. While most humans can hold their breath that long, the disappearance of this vital gas would toss our world into chaos
While most humans can hold their breath that long, you would be unlikely to see any of the fast-paced catastrophies that would befall an Earth without oxygen, as the world would flip into total darkness, according to @mulligan.tv on TikTok
‘Initially, your body probably wouldn’t even notice,’ according to Thomas Mulligan, who goes by @mulligan.tv on the platform.
‘But you would notice it, when the sky goes completely black,’ Mulligan added, ‘due to the atmosphere having no oxygen to scatter the rays of light from the sun.’
Mulligan, who’s originally from Vancouver in Canada, is known mostly for his his videos about outer space, technology, the future, and famous scientific figures like Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan.
As of this writing, the twentysomething has amassed an audience of nearly 963,000 followers on the platform intrigued by his short explanations and scientific trivia.
Any form of transportation that relies on combustion ‘would immediately stop working,’ the TikToker pointed out. And even more fatally, he said, ‘the ozone layer would also be gone causing everyone and everything to start the cooking process’
Mulligan — who has done video on how to really survive a zombie apocalypse, the ‘Kardashev scale’ for advanced alien civilizations and more — teased out the second-order effects of a mass oxygen disappearance on Earth.
‘Any form of transportation that relies on combustion would immediately stop working,’ the TikToker pointed out, ‘causing planes to fall from the sky and millions of cars to stop working.’
And more fatally, he said: ‘The ozone layer would also be gone causing everyone and everything to start the cooking process.’
While humans would be only feeling and hearing these sweeping, Earth-shattering effects in these new pitch black conditions, Mulligan said that soon the entire global population would lose another of their five senses as well.
The human ear drum, he explained, would explode due to the change in atmospheric air pressure created within the vacuum of oxygen’s disappearance.
But, in perhaps this scenario’s biggest surprise, the entire planet itself would begin to swiftly shrink, imploding on itself from the crust down, at least according to Mulligan.
His reasoning involves a little bit of geological chemistry and plate tectonics.
‘Since the Earth’s crust is made out of 45 percent oxygen,’ Mulligan told his TikTok followers, ‘it would also completely collapse.’
‘Everyone and everything would immediately start falling toward the center.’
WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO EARTH WHEN THE SUN DIES?
Five billion years from now, it’s said the Sun will have grown into a red giant star, more than a hundred times larger than its current size.
Eventually, it will eject gas and dust to create an ‘envelope’ accounting for as much as half its mass.
The core will become a tiny white dwarf star. This will shine for thousands of years, illuminating the envelope to create a ring-shaped planetary nebula.
Five billion years from now, it’s said the Sun will have grown into a red giant star, more than a hundred times larger than its current size
While this metamorphosis will change the solar system, scientists are unsure what will happen to the third rock from the Sun.
We already know that our Sun will be bigger and brighter, so that it will probably destroy any form of life on our planet.
But whether the Earth’s rocky core will survive is uncertain.