Chapter 30 [After realizing it, I broke into a cold sweat]
What Xiao Yu is more curious about now is why the atmospheric environment of Blue Star has become what it is today. After a while, he entered the keyword "Historical Changes of Blue Star's Atmosphere" on the search engine, and many related related information soon appeared. information content.
After sifting out a historical narrative article, Xiao Yu clicked directly to enter the page.
"More than a hundred years ago, an extremely deadly pathogen appeared on Blue Star that specifically attacked chloroplasts and swept away the entire planet's plants, triggering an irreversible ecological collapse?" Xiao Yu read the content of the article with a surprised look on his face. , then read on.
According to the description in the article, this extreme pathogen killed all the plants and algae in the ocean, and then spread to the land, leaving no grass growing wherever it went.
All plants have chloroplasts. Without chloroplasts, photosynthesis cannot occur and the plants will die. Nature is a whole. If one link is destroyed, a serious chain reaction will occur.
Plants are producers in the ecosystem and support the energy flow of the entire ecosystem. The death of plants will cause the animals that feed on the plants to starve to death, and then the populations will gradually die and become extinct. This in turn will cause the carnivorous animals to starve to death because they have nothing to hunt. , the race also gradually apoptotic and extinct, and the entire ecosystem fell into irreversible collapse from bottom to top.
What's even more deadly is that the progression of disaster is exponential.
The death of plants has led to less and less oxygen in Blue Star. Oxygen is actually widely present in Blue Star. Oxygen is contained in carbon dioxide, water and various ores.
But until organic matter is transformed, humans and animals cannot use this oxygen.
Combustion, corrosion, and metabolic activities of life are all consuming the oxygen in the Blue Star's atmosphere. To make matters worse, while the oxygen is only decreasing but not increasing, the carbon dioxide is only increasing.
Oxygen combines with the carbon element in the human body to produce carbon dioxide and releases energy at the same time. When vegetation burns, oxygen combines with the carbon element in the wood to produce carbon dioxide. This reaction also occurs when plants decay, and the scale is extremely large.
The chloroplasts in plants use sunlight to decompose carbon dioxide into carbon elements and oxygen. The oxygen will be returned to the atmosphere, and the carbon elements will be integrated into carbohydrates by plants to provide energy for growth, allowing the entire ecosystem to achieve a cyclic and dynamic balance.
However, as the chloroplasts of plants are destroyed by extreme pathogens, photosynthesis ends with the death of plants. No new oxygen is produced in the nature of Blue Star, but respiration, burning, and decay continue, and the scale continues to expand. As it gets worse, oxygen will continue to be consumed.
Most of the decaying material on land was completed in about half a century. The total oxygen consumed actually only accounts for less than 1% of the oxygen content in the atmosphere of Blue Star. However, the decaying material deposited on the seabed for hundreds of millions of years is more than ten times that of land. times, or even more, and will be brought to the surface of the planet.
The Blue Star and the Flame Star form a binary star system and are tidally locked to each other. The Flame Star, which is larger than the Blue Star, exerts a huge tidal force on the Blue Star. In addition, the tidal force exerted by the stars orbiting it makes the Blue Star's The ocean's currents turn over periodically, and this cycle lasts three times a year.
This causes the seawater on the surface of the Blue Star to sink to the bottom, and the seawater on the seafloor is brought to the surface. It also brings the organic carbon deposited on the seafloor to the surface of the planet.
In the past, terrestrial plants on Blue Star, including algae in the ocean, would consume this carbon dioxide to form a dynamic balance. However, the death of the plants broke the balance, causing the content of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to continue to rise, reaching a maximum concentration of 1.90%.
The current actual concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Blue Star is about 1.89%, but it is still 46 times the carbon dioxide content of the earth's atmosphere.
"I see, this is the reason for the huge change in Blue Star's atmospheric environment..." Xiao Yu nodded as if he suddenly understood, but then he was suddenly startled into a cold sweat. He was so frightened that he quickly closed the webpage and searched for that Information on extreme pathogens. Because he suddenly realized that he had traveled back and forth between Blue Star and Earth several times without doing any isolation and disinfection.
Xiao Yu's heart sank, and he even thought about it in horror. If he accidentally brought Blue Star, an extreme pathogen that specifically attacks plant chloroplasts, to the earth without knowing it, once it spreads on the earth, the consequences would be disastrous.
"It was a near miss, but fortunately, this pathogen has disappeared in Blue Star..." Xiao Yu breathed a sigh of relief after looking through several hours of relevant information.
He was really frightened just now. Xiao Yu decided to take isolation measures when traveling between the two worlds in the future, including disinfection and inactivation of various products from Blue Star to the earth, so as not to destroy some inconvenient products. If you bring unclean things to the earth, don't be afraid of ten thousand, just be afraid of the worst.
Xiao Yu calmed down and then continued to learn more about Blue Star's humanistic history.
As the understanding deepened, Xiao Yu couldn't help but be moved. He didn't expect that the human civilization in the Blue Star world had such a tragic past history.
After the ecological collapse of Blue Star, a global food crisis broke out, which became the last straw that crushed the order of human civilization on Blue Star. Hunger can bring people the most primitive fear, and civilization and order completely collapsed. The duration For thirty years.
Within these thirty years, the global population of the Blue Star world dropped sharply from the peak of 9.7 billion to the lowest estimate of only 2.8 billion, a decrease of 6.9 billion people. In fact, the number of deaths in the past thirty years exceeded 7.2 billion, because The surviving population of 2.8 billion includes newborns in these thirty years.
In the first ten years of the ecological collapse, Blue Star's population decline was actually not that exaggerated, because at this time, the food stock was supporting it, and the order did not collapse.
But in the second decade, it was no longer possible to survive. A complete food crisis broke out, the civilized order completely collapsed, and the global population collapsed in just two decades.
The Blue Star world has entered the "Era of Cannibalism", which is "cannibalism" in the physical sense. Because everything that can be eaten is eaten up, and food cannot be reproduced, it inevitably enters the extreme darkness of cannibalism and cannibalism. stage of terror.
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If you want to survive in that era, you can only survive by completely abandoning humanity and turning into a humanoid beast.
Xiao Yu couldn't help but feel frightened when he saw this piece of humanistic history in the Blue Star world. What a picture of hell on earth it was.
Cannibalism also led to large-scale genetic prion protein gene mutations, triggering widespread death and plague. This series of chain reaction disasters caused the population of the Blue Star world to rise from nearly 10 billion in just 20 to 30 years. reduced to less than three billion.
Today's Blue Star human civilization characterizes those thirty years as the "Dark Wasteland Era", and the turning point that ended this dark era was when Blue Star humans successfully broke through the technology of artificially synthesizing starch using carbon dioxide, and realized Industrial mass production.
It was this technological breakthrough that gradually alleviated the food crisis and gradually ended the dark age of cannibalism.
……
(End of chapter)