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Autisonm t1_j1btk9k wrote

Reply to comment by allegedly-insane in Mars' ancient atmosphere may not have had much oxygen after all by pecika

So basically we're those aliens that breath in toxins through respirators to survive in sci-fi movies?

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allegedly-insane t1_j1bvvqr wrote

Meh, complex life as far as we can tell is because of oxygen. If there are aliens out there, they're most likely susceptible to oxygen toxicity but they're also brainless anaerobic single-cellular life forms.

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Underhill42 t1_j1fac9w wrote

Define complex life. The Earth was teeming with multicellular plants and animals long before the Great Oxygenation Event. The Cambrian Explosion didn't happen until much later, but there's not really any evidence that there was any sort of causal connection between the two. Not with hundreds of thousands of years of near-steady ocean oxygen levels between the two.

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