Word: oxygenate
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...planets sound attractive, scientists consider earth's neighborhood rather slummy. But the space planners are optimistic. Colonists on the airless moon, they say. could erect Plexiglas domes and fill them with any atmosphere they liked. They could grow bumper crops in the unfailing sunlight, could extract metals and oxygen from the rocks. Arthur C. Clarke in The Explora, tion of Space argues that man might thrive under such conditions better than he does on earth...
...avert such misadventures, the Air Force uses a "partial pressure suit" made like a skintight union suit of strong, greenish material, with an airtight helmet. When the cabin air pressure falls too low, an automatic valve shoots oxygen into the helmet at about ten Ibs. pressure per square inch. It also inflates rubber bladders along the wearer's limbs and body, making the suit even tighter. This enables the man to breathe and keeps gas bubbles from forming in his blood. He stays conscious longer and has a chance to bring his damaged plane down to inhabitable...
...atmosphere of a pre-life planet, Urey believes, is not like the earth's. It is highly "reducing": i.e., it contains large amounts of methane, ammonia, water vapor and similar compounds, but no free oxygen. The atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn are believed to be like this. As millions of years pass, the sun's light causes chemical reactions among the atmospheric gases. Larger molecules begin to form (e.g., aldehydes, amines, organic acids), and they rain down into the oceans below. There they react with one another and with dissolved salts. All possible chemical compounds are formed eventually...
...last one of them learns to extract energy from the sunlight, releasing oxygen into the air and absorbing carbon compounds. When these living forms-the first plants-have multiplied for a few million years, they create the oxygen-rich atmosphere that the earth now knows. Then oxygen-breathing plant-eaters evolve to devour the plants, and the full stream ot evolution is under...
...cold for life as the earth knows it, but it has an atmosphere containing much methane. Chemist Urey hopes to find that sunlight is slowly making organic compounds out of this simple gas. If Titan were warmer and bigger the process might already have clothed it with oxygen-and life...