Oxygen begins to spread across planet Earth. Oxygen is the element that ruins the others, encrusting their pure surface with a layer of chaos and decay. At the same time, it enormously enriches the planet’s abundance and diversity of compounds and minerals, thus greatly increasing life’s diversity. Life, and civilization itself, from a chemical perspective, can be thought of as an organized resistance to oxidation. Here and there, we manage to stem the tide and even turn it back a little, by stripping metals from their ores, planting forests, extinguishing fires, but never for long on a geological scale. Oxidation accompanies the march of time and the inevitable triumph of entropy. Oxygen gives life, but in doing so, it makes death closer and more inevitable. It is the single most important cause of aging and age-related diseases.
