A new video is sending seismic waves across social media, revealing the terrifying reality of what would happen to Earth if it lost all its oxygen for just five seconds.
Although most people can hold their breath for that long, the disappearance of this vital gaseous element would plunge our world into chaos.
Some consequences, like the disappearance of Earth’s protective ozone layer, won’t come as a surprise to many, but the prolific TikTok user who detailed this hypothetical doomsday scenario did drop a few surprises.
For example, even if the sun still shines on our planet, you are unlikely to experience these rapid catastrophes at all, as the world would then plunge into total darkness.
A new video is making waves on social media, revealing the scary reality of what would happen to Earth (above) if it lost all its oxygen for just five seconds. While most people can hold their breath for that long, the disappearance of this vital gas would plunge our world into chaos
While most people can hold their breath for that long, it’s unlikely you’ll experience any of the rapid catastrophes that would befall an Earth without oxygen as the world would fall into total darkness, according to @mulligan.tv on TikTok
“At first your body probably wouldn’t even notice,” said Thomas Mulligan, who passes by @mulligan.tv on the platform.
“But you would notice if the sky turns completely black,” Mulligan added, “because the atmosphere runs out of oxygen to scatter the sun’s light rays.”
Mulligan, originally from Vancouver, Canada, is best known for his videos about space, technology, the future and famous scientific figures such as Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan.
At the time of writing, the twenty-something has amassed an audience of nearly 963,000 followers on the platform, intrigued by his short explanations and scientific tidbits.
Any form of transportation that relies on combustion “would immediately stop working,” the TikToker pointed out. And even more deadly, he said, “the ozone layer would also be gone, causing everyone and everything to start the cooking process.”
Mulligan – who has made a video on how to actually survive a zombie apocalypse, the ‘Kardashev scale’ for advanced alien civilizations and more – exposed the second-order effects of a mass disappearance of oxygen on Earth.
“Any form of transportation that relies on combustion would immediately stop working,” the TikToker pointed out, “causing planes to fall out of the sky and millions of cars to stop working.”
And even more fatally, he said: ‘The ozone layer would also have disappeared, causing everything and everyone to start the cooking process.’
While humans would only feel and hear these dramatic, earth-shattering effects in these new pitch-black conditions, Mulligan said the entire world’s population would soon lose one of their five senses as well.
The human eardrum, he explained, would explode due to the change in atmospheric air pressure created in the vacuum of oxygen’s disappearance.
But perhaps the biggest surprise of this scenario would be the entire planet itself rapidly starting to shrink and imploding into itself from the Earth’s crust, at least according to Mulligan.
His reasoning involves a little bit of geological chemistry and plate tectonics.
“Since the Earth’s crust is 45 percent oxygen,” Mulligan told his TikTok followers, “it would also completely collapse.”
“Everything and everyone would immediately fall to the center.”