When my kids were little they were rather fond of making misty clouds of condensation with their warm breath on wintery mornings. They called it “dragon breath”. Though not quite on par with Daenerys Targaryn’s scaley pups, it was impressive to visually witness a volume of air that had moments before inhabited every cell in your body. Besides being an odd thought, there’s something rather unexpected and conspiratorial in the story of our breath, if you’ll allow me.
Where ever you are right now, take a deep breath. You just snorted in some 25 sextillions individual molecules of air, mostly nitrogen and oxygen. BTW, with numbers like ‘sextillions’ you have to wonder about how much fun mathematicians have behind closed doors. But seriously, 25 sextillion actually means 25,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. It’s what scientists call an absolute shitload of molecules. And all of them were just inside you. And before that they were in clouds, trees, under the ocean and in the lungs of walruses and Clive Palmer (same-same).
So, if you’re anywhere near a plant of some description, and the sun is shining, the green leaves of this plant have almost certainly been hooking you up with freshly-minted oxygen in real-time. This might seem at first sniff to be a rather magnanimous vegetative gesture, but on closer inspection it turns out to be merely a handy way for plants to get rid of their toxic exhaust waste. You see, oxygen is dangerous, super-reactive stuff. So, this apparent plant-friend is chugging out horrid oxygen which you are hoovering up by the lungful. Sucker!
Think for a moment. What did you have for breakfast? No matter, whatever it was it came from a plant, in one form or another. Tuna for example, are really just very cool, very fast, very tasty, plant-made aquatic lifeforms. Everything you eat is a carbon-based, plant offering. Everything. Even fossil-fuel-fertilised foods, upon which more than half the human flesh on Earth is currently made of, are just ancient plant-stuff. And it’s all one huge conspiracy.
Plants offer us their tasty morsels because in every red blood cell in our body we have tiny little organic furnaces where carbon-plant-stuff gets cooked up with oxygen, releasing enough energy to allow me to think what to type next (barely). But it also releases most of the carbon from your breakfast to be emptied back out through your nostrils as new CO2 plant food.
Do you see now?? Long ago, an ancient Illuminati of Plants invented animals to slavishly recycle their carbon and deal with their waste oxygen gas. It’s the original evolutionary ‘Scamdemic’. Autonomous free will? Pffft.
So, the next time your children decide to fool around with dragon breath, gather them up quickly and hustle them inside. Somewhere a conniving plant is watching them, and they want their carbon back, one way or another.