Aliens Dismissed Humans as Weak, Until They Scanned Earth's Atmosphere | Best HFY Stories 

Oxygen is the third most abundant element in the universe. How could any alien life not have familiarity with it?

The ancient Greeks had one single word for both medicine and poison, with the understanding that it was essentially all a question of dosage. That amount cures, but that amount kills.

so they don't even check the being biochemistery before inviting them into their ship? those alien are pretty careless, any alien could be walking poison

“What is there that is not poison? All things are poison and nothing is without poison. Solely the dose determines that a thing is not a poison,” - Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, or Paracelsus, father of Toxicology

Funny how close Earth was to flat-out saying: screw you guys, im taking my toxic flammable gas and going home!

Actually we breath air, but use the O2 for life. Air is 78% nitrogen, 20.9 % oxygen, .005 % carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, ozone, pollution etc.

It's a cool idea, but I would point out that harvesting water from comets and getting oxygen from there is better than going to the Earth for it all.

Do the aliens not have spectrometers?

How did the Aliens not know humans breath oxygen? This Council even has files on how we metabolize it.

Oxygen is fairly common in the universe, draining Earth's atmosphere to give to aliens would be highly detrimental to life here. Since water is very abundant you could split it to get oxygen.

I don’t get why the digital communication was cut for the quarantine. What, am I going to text them a plague?

How can they not survive oxygen dispite having chlorophyll?

Unless an atmosphere is at least 16% oxygen, fire isn’t possible which would make it hard to evolve beyond a Stone Age.

Hard to imagine a suite of advanced species wouldn't have r even a passing familiarity with one of the most abundant elements in the universe. I know it's sci fi but good sci fi extrapolates science, it doesn't ignore it.

Also, salt is made up of two compounds that could kill any living thing if taken by themselves, which is crazy since salt is basically one of the biggest discoveries for nourishment in our history of hunting/cooking.

Wait until the aliens learn what snipe hunting is from a human who is annoyed with them by their questions.

Im sorry, I just have difficulty suspending disbelief when the author does not know the difference between a biohazard/bioweapon and a Chemical hazard/weapon. Oxygen is a chemical, it is not biological.

Ridiculous. You broke my suspension of disbelief. Don’t treat me as if I’m 10 years old.

I can roll with that aliens could be working on different chemistry, but Oxygen is a super common element. Even if they avoided it as dangerous, their science would have had to studied it for all sorts of uses along any other elements.

Thank you. Also: you should Mark your thumbnails as "human read". It's just my taste but I imagine I am not the only one who preferes human narratores over sterile AI voices. ❤

Any molecule that has Oxygen in it can be undone to it's base elements.

Why was that not looked into with the years of planning?

The alien prejudice against oxygen breathers is responsible for the 'disastrous' first contact situation.

kind of a massive plot hole, but how exactly did these human diplomats plan on interacting with the council if the atmosphere in the room isn't breathable for humans

In the process of setting up the database of languages for the Humans' and aliens' translators... both sides somehow missed all the other info such as what gasses each race can tolerate? This set up could work if we were given a reason why both side would know next to nothing about one another while having the language barrier broken for them... Like... What if both the humans and aliens were ALL abductees dropped off into a gameshow-esque interconnected network of habitats.

Humans: "BREATHE AIR" Aliens: *Dies*

This makes no sense... they are in a room where they clearly breath oxygen, which is basically everywhere anyway, but are then quarantined from the room because of ... oxygen contamination. Er.. What?!

13:31 The atmosphere on earth is only 21% oxygen. I don’t think 21% is very high.

how incredibly disgraceful. within 5 seconds of humans walking into the room the council immediately committed an illegal act of war by imprisoning diplomats and trying to kill them in one of the worst ways a being can die.

The quarantine protocol was a bit much. Sealing the air exchange? Fine. Locking comms? What? Then again we on earth had comms lock a while back about certain info. Still stupid but remembered. I hope we don't forget.

Supposedly they had meticulous planning for this meeting but atmospheric needs were never discussed? I get its a story but hard to accept super smart space travel but super dumb basics of life.

A few discrepancies: - In the beginning it's stated they have a day (roughly speaking) of breathable air, and yet they behave like they have minutes - Humans breathe out carbon dioxide, not oxygen - Earth's atmopshere is mostly nitrogen - Water is 2-parts oxygen. Am I to believe these aliens have also never encountered solid or liquid water?

Very entertaining thank you,keep them coming!

Sorrry, I tried to llisten the story fully but the first couple of inutes of the narraitive turn me off. First why the ove rreaction to oxygen from the council... even if every member bology tcosider O2 as poisonus, as space faring species ttheir tec should be prepared for that type of environments. And secondly, the council despite Having 'FIrst conact' protocols, those protocols don:t cosider environmental analisys and biological requrements of the memeber spicies to be welcomed??? that is plainly stupid

This is about as credible as Spaceballs 😂 exporting the planets atmosphere, are these aliens all water free? Who waters the plants

Why export atmosphere instead of seeds?

Always love stories like these where super simple things that we don't ever think much about, end up being extreme deciding factors.

First video of this channel I've watched and already know I'm gonna love it here!

"The lungs of the galaxy" That's so badass.

“Yes, but we exhale Carbon.”

Thank you for being a human and reading this nice story. 👍

i tried to listen to this one but it was just bad story telling by the author, not the narrator, just to be clear

why would they not have more oxygen then just a short duration of a few hours for talks that could take weeks?

This story doesn't work for me, sorry. Too much fiction, not enough science. Quite illogical.

Love the voice of the Varix. Is it the same voice of the triceratops in The Good Dinosaur? DEBBIE !!

Pls make another one that was really cool

Technically we are nitrogen breathers who consume oxygen...

I so want to find out what happens when the humans 'adjust' their exports.

Not only do they breathe Oxygen but they also drink H2O ! 😲😨😱 The Horror, The HORROR ! 😱☠💀👻

I enjoyed this alot

imagine when we join an intergalactic organization like that, we gain acess to an intergalactic internet how much our tecnology will improve

As someone named Alex: I feel like RU-vid is threatening me by recommending this rn

I like the story. I think it has interesting ideas.

"...Years of meticulous preparations... " and no one checked who breathes what?

For your information, Starbound is the name of a video game by Chucklefish. (Funny thing is, im playing it rn while listening to different storries like this)

the first shot is always free

*in one other universe:This chanell but alien* Humans tought aliens were weak,until one of the aliens ate a nuclear bomb for breakfast!

All aliens would have to do is scan our atmosphere and see our crazy radioactive isotopes and then they would fly away "😳cesium? hell na"

Is there more to this story somewhere? I would love to find out what happens next.

Aliens:they breathe oxygen? Eminem:aint me

Give it away and what do we breath?

The issue wasnt really the o2 levels in the pod, it was the co2 that would poison us faster

that actually sound like a fun job. a scientist who test oxygen on Foren plants

The premiss of this story doesn't make much sense when Oxygen is the third most abundant element in the universe. Shoot, there are whole gas nebulas of the stuff in our galaxy. A perfect example of this in another story is Larry Niven's The Integral Trees.

If we export oxygen in this story then how we make new one? We also need oxygen to live. Maybe by fusion?

Finally i found a human doing these

How is it that they made plans for decades yet nobody thought to ask what kind of atmosphere was available? Imagine traveling lightyears across space without knowing this basic fact.

5:27 I wonder what human biochemistry is classified? Oh wait ...

Remember: earth is also a "death world"

So is there a 2nd part to the story?? You kinda left us hanging

1 human with a leafblower:

One thing i can say i may not like some of the stories you're still one hell of a story teller

If the pod vented into space, how did it get into the council chamber? How would an advanced group of civilizations that were able to meet from different star systems NOT have known about oxygen prior to first contact? Even we, right now, can use spectroscopy to tell what's in the atmospheres of other planets, plus it could have been communicated in advance. Even for fiction, this is farfetched, considering the attempt to be realistic

The person who wrote this must have just learned the term "begrudgingly" and decided to use it at every single possible moment 😂

Yep. We breath a caustic gas and drink a solvenic fluid. We bad ass...

I read a book called "Project Ave Maria" and it has a similar plot point. very interesting book by the way

5:07 "revolutionized by exposure to oxygen" ok, this could be in fact, a brilliant idea especially as someone in the comments said that o2 is highly reactive and therefore good for high energy systems. If they are running off of something else (which should make their air unbreathable to humans but we'll ignore that for now) then it is possible that their systems are running at a low energy. It might adapt to running off oxygen in the same way that some blue-green bacteria can switch from sulphur compounds in the depths of the ocean to running off carbon di-oxide if exposed to sunlight. Maybe if they ran off oxygen, they would have a little more imagination and could have prevented this atmosphere muddle in the first place. Except of course, how would they know o2 is toxic to them if they hadn't watched someone die in an industrial accident from o2 exposure? Logic please!!! It would be one thing if o2 was unknown to them at all. Like if they arrived at a low tech planet struggling on sulphur and all you do is add some blue green bacteria to get o2 in the atmosphere and the people become geniuses and it kicks off a technological revolution with tool-making etc. lol. 8:42 Ok, to be fair to the aliens, o2 is actually toxic in that in our own biochemistry, it can generate something called Reactive Oxygen Species which can be damaging to DNA and other cellular components if left floating around unchecked. So I am going to revise what I said earlier. Their systems may very well be able to run off o2 but it is possible they never evolved the biochemical systems to process the toxic byproducts. If that is the case, then some serious genetic engineering has to happen for them to have those systems too

Its really hard to find this story fun when it reuses the same words i see in most chatgpt writings

This would be a great story if Oxygen wasn't one of the most abundant elements in the universe. That makes this story kind of dumb.

chlorophyll rich skin? they know what chlorophyll does dont they?

A sapient plant species that uses chlorophyll like in this story wouldn't be frightened by oxygen. It's what their farts would be made of, after all.

where is the co2 coming from to be converted into all that o2?

we were born to inherit the stars

The question is, how did the humans expect to breath? Like if Oxygen, or at least the concentration we have in our atmosphere, is deadly to any other species, then they'd need to be wearing spacesuits.

Harvesting ice asteroids would be more practical. You wouldn't want to remove oxygen from Earth's atmosphere in the amounts that would be needed. But you could certainly harvest interplanetary ice and produce vast Oxygen and Hydrogen quantities as needed.

So, the implication I'm getting here is that enough research was done to identify that humanity carried no dangerous microorganisms, and yet, somehow, one of the most basic facts of human biology was missed entirely. That, or nobody even bothered to check that there was no fungal, viral, or any other potentially dangerous stuff by either side before skipping straight to full exposure... either way, that's a pretty huge plot hole.

Hold on - We are told to eat blueberries because they are anti-oxidants??

Is there another part of this? I want to know what’s going on

Imagine aliens wouldn't come because oxygen was toxic for them. I remember grunts from halo wearing these airtanks on their back because oxygen was toxic for them.

Why not mine the gas giants or oort cloud?

1:41 Chlorophyll inherently produces oxygen in the presence of light and water. Chlorophyll is the specific word we use for the plant origin chemicals that do photosynthesis. This makes no sense in less than two minutes L. Ron Hubbard would be proud. Also: O2 the molecular form of oxygen we breathe is very rare in nature outside of photosynthesis and caused an extinction event when it evolved on earth.

you make said like we breath in 100% oxygen , we mainly inhale nitrogen at 78% oxygen 21% 0.9percent is argon, and 0.1 other gasses like carbon dioxide ,methane water vapers and neon . one quick gogle search i knew about nitrogen and methane but not the others water vaper is a given since like hang on google searching since we have 71% water on land and the ocean holds 96.5 %? fwell thats confusing

A very hard to believe story

Are any of these stories in any kind of order I can't seem to figure this out

A response to the end of the video. Let them fear the properties of Florine

4Great story.

great story, fun idea. but the story just kept getting more and more unbelievable when it went from a deadly poison to some scientific breakthrough. 😂

oxygen is still slightly toxic to us we just slowly get the effects of oxygen like when you reach 50 it gets noticeable 100 really noticeable

The AI slop art is a little bit over the top but it is such a breath of fresh air to hear a real person read these stories instead of that same narrator voice model every channel uses.

This story was written by chatgpt and it shows