Questions about "oxygen"?

Question

How was oxygen created from the big bang?

And what does the oxygen do to the living creatures?

Why the oxygen is important element to the living creatures?

Answer 1

pretty much all elements are created in stars, the actual process is very confusing thankfully wikipedia is a better expaliner than i ----> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion
O2 is important because it helps us create lots of energy from glucose

Answer 2

The short answer is that it was created like everything else in the Big Bang, and is an important factor in the metabolic processes of nearly every living creature.

The even *shorter* answer is: stay away from science.

Answer 3

Oxygen is a chemical element with the chemical symbol O and atomic number 8. On Earth, it is usually covalently or ionically bonded to other elements.

Unbound oxygen (also called molecular dioxygen, O2, a diatomic molecule) first appeared in significant quantities on Earth during the Paleoproterozoic era (between 2.5 billion years ago and 1.6 billion years ago) as a product of the metabolic action of early anaerobes (archaea and bacteria). The presence of large amounts of free oxygen may have driven most of the organisms then living to extinction. The atmospheric abundance of free oxygen in later geological epochs and up to the present has been largely driven by photosynthetic organisms; roughly three quarters of the free element being produced by algae in the oceans, and one quarter from terrestrial plants.

Scientific history---
Oxygen was first described by Michał Sędziwój, a Polish alchemist and philosopher in the late 16th century. Sędziwój thought of the gas given off by warm nitre (saltpeter) as "the elixir of life".[citation needed]

Oxygen was more quantitatively discovered by the Swedish pharmacist Carl Wilhelm Scheele some time before 1773, but the discovery was not published until after the independent discovery by Joseph Priestley on August 1, 1774, who called the gas dephlogisticated air (see phlogiston theory). Priestley published discoveries in 1775 and Scheele in 1777; consequently Priestley is usually given the credit. Both Scheele and Priestley produced oxygen by heating mercuric oxide.

Scheele called the gas 'fire air' because it was the only known supporter of combustion. It was later called 'vital air' because it was and is vital for the existence of animal life.

The gas was named by Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, after Priestley's publication in 1775, from Greek roots meaning "acid-former". As noted, the name reflects the then-common incorrect belief that acids contain oxygen.

Oxygen is essential to respiration, so oxygen supplementation has found use in medicine (as oxygen therapy). People who climb mountains or fly in depressurized aeroplanes sometimes have supplemental oxygen supplies; the reason is that increasing the proportion of oxygen in the breathing gas at low pressure acts to increase the inspired oxygen partial pressure nearer to that found at sea-level.

Toxicity of O2---
Oxygen can be toxic at elevated partial pressures. Since oxygen partial pressure is the fraction of oxygen times the total pressure, elevated partial pressures can occur either from high oxygen fraction in breathing gas, or from high breathing gas pressure, or a combination of both. Oxygen toxicity usually begins to occur at partial pressures more than 0.5 atmospheres, or 2.5 times the normal sea-level oxygen partial pressure of about 0.2 atmospheres or bars. This means that at sea-level pressures, mixtures containing less than 50% oxygen are essentially non-toxic. However in medical applications (such as in ventilation gas mixtures in hospital applications) mixtures containing more than 50% oxygen can be expected to show lung toxicity, causing slow damage to the lungs over periods of days, with the rate of damage rising rapidly from mixtures between 50% and 100% oxygen. On the other hand, breathing 100% oxygen in space applications (such as in some modern spacesuits, or in early spacecraft such as the Apollo spacecraft), causes no damage due to the low total pressures (30% to 33% sea-level) used [1]. In the case of spacesuits, oxygen partial pressure in the breathing gas is typically about 0.30 bar (1.4 times normal), and oxygen partial pressure in the astronaut's blood (due to downward adjustments due to water vapor and CO2 in the alveoli) is close to sea-level normal of 0.14 bar.

In deep scuba diving and surface supplied diving and when using equipment which can provide high partial pressures of oxygen, such as rebreathers, oxygen toxicity to the lungs can occur, just as in medical applications. Due to the higher total pressures in these applications, the fraction of oxygen which produces lung damage may be considerably less than 50%. More importantly, under pressures higher than normal sea-level, a far more serious form of oxygen toxicity in the central nervous system may lead to generalized seizures. This form of oxygen toxicity usually occurs after several hours exposure to oxygen partial pressures over about 1.4 atmospheres (bars) (i.e. 7 times normal), with the time decreasing for higher pressures above this, and with great variation from person to person. At over three bars of oxygen partial pressure (15 times normal), seizures typically occur within minutes.