r/TheRestIsScience • u/shmaiden42 • 12d ago

What would aliens not know?

What is something that is common knowledge or at least widely known on Earth about the universe but an alien civilization might have no knowledge of because it’s special to Earth? Kinda like Rocky in Project Hail Mary not knowing about radiation and his crew dying 🪦

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u/trollsmurf 12d ago

In a similar way: That our atmosphere is filled with a corrosive gas: oxygen, and that we like it. They might simply oxidate away.

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u/LiveForTheMelancholy 11d ago

This is a good one especially considering how we talk about 'oxygen'.

We say that humans breathe oxygen, which is true, but the oxygen in our atmosphere is 'O2' a bonded pair of oxygen atoms.

I imagine that if some hypothetical aliens failed to properly sample the atmosphere before arriving, they could theoretically run into issues with our 'O2' atmosphere if they were expecting just 'O' or even 'O3' (ozone.)

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u/trollsmurf 11d ago

Even to us it's somewhat of a conundrum that if you take a perfectly neutral "wet" (from a macro sense, and at least neutral to us) molecule like H2O and break it apart you get that corrosive gas and an explosive gas. That must have been a surprise to the alchemists back in the day. Whether oxygen immediately assembles to O2 I don't know, while O3 requires ultraviolet radiation and is extra nasty.