An Increased Oxygen Concentration Level Causes Insects To Grow In Size

I was watching the 9th episode for the new Cosmos: A Space Odyssey series when the Astronomer/Physicist Neil Degrasse Tyson explained a principle on why insects that was alive on Earth 300 Million years ago (called the Carboniferous Period) could be able to grow to incredible sizes.

The way I understood his idea was that insects are basically animals, in the animal kingdom. That means that they will need like all animals Oxygen to be able to get to all of their tissue. Flora Organisms, aka within the Plant Kingdom, need the other type Carbon Dioxide.

It turns out that insects don’t have lungs. The insects that were living back then was able to bring the O2 into their bodies through outside their bodies by some type of opening (I suspect that he means like any orifice, like a mouth) by transporting the oxygen through a network of tubes.

If the insect was too large, the outer reaches of the tubes, closest to the orifice’s opening adjacent to the opening to the outside of the body, would be absorb all that oxygen before the oxygen reaches the internal organs. Imagine your skin getting all the O2 but the O2 never reaches your heart. However, the carboniferous period’s atmosphere supposedly had twice the level of oxygen as current day.

This means that insects could grow much bigger and still get enough oxygen in their bodies. The result is that the dragonflies would grow to the size of eagles and the millipedes can grow to the size of alligators.

So I started to think about the consequences of what would happen to the evolution of humans if the atmosphere of Earth increased in O2 levels.

Would an increased oxygen concentration level in the earth’s atmosphere cause mammals, specifically humans to get larger in size over time too?

I have before asked the theoretical question and did some calculations to guess whether there is a limit to how large humans can get. What we could come up with were three main constraints which would limit the size of humans.

• The natural material strength of articular cartilage, the collagen in joints, and fluids like those found in the synovial joint of the knees and the nucleus pulposus. – Too much mass on top of the body would crush the tissue below it, like the IVDs would be crushed. (Remember that humans is one of the few animals which walk completely upright. Most mammals have 4 legs, not two arms and two legs. That means their entire body weight is equally distributed into quarters. We put so much emphasize on our heights because we walk on two legs and are upright aka erect! If we had 4 legs on the ground, we would not care about height, but length instead, like how one measures a fish.)
• The surface area over volume/mass ratio of a the person would decrease to a point where the mass could burst out of the person. (Remember that as a person increases vertically, their weight/mass increases at a cubic rate (^3) while the surface area increases at a squared rate (^2). This is why a person 5 feet tall can weight 100 lbs, 6 feet at 200 lbs, and at 7 feet tall at 400 lbs. With every feet we go up, our weight goes up at a faster rate than our skin (and maybe also skeletal structure) can handle)
• The corollary to the 2nd point is that the heat transfer limitations of a thick enough skin to hold all that volume/mass in the body means that the body would hold all the heat inside. The result is the internal organs turned into liquid from being heated to an insane level.

This new point that DeGrasse Tyson makes shows that we forgot at least one more critical point, which is that as a person’s body increases, the amount of length of blood vessels the blood would have to be pumped through increases dramatically. It may not seem like a lot of distance to cover but it was said that all the blood vessels in one person lined together on a straight line is supposed to reach from one coast of North America to the other coast.

I remember watching a documentary where it was revealed that current Indiana Pacer’s Center Roy Hibbert, standing at 7′ 2″ has a heart size that is twice as big as the average human. Obviously his heart has to do a much higher level of output of blood pumping to get the nutrients in the blood to all the places in his body. There is only so far a biological instrument like the heart can grow up to before the 4 chamber system can not contract and relax fast enough to pump the necessary flow of blood around the entire body.

(On a side note, primatologist have confirmed the existence of a distance relative the gigantopithecus, which is believed to be up to 10 feet tall. Assuming that the legends of the Bigfoot and Yeti is not true, but fabrications of the human mind, we still have one scientific claim that shows that theoretically, humans can reach the 10 feet mark in height.)

However, it may not just be the heart/blood/nutrient transport problem, which the increase in O2 would fix. It might also be a neuro-chemical problem, where the nerve fiber bundles are so long that the electrical signals from the dentrite-axon-threshhold electrical mechanism to just not work well enough and never reach the brain.

Remember again how Robert Wadlow died. His lower legs supposedly did not have the nerve endings working properly. I am guessing that the incredible length of his legs mean that the distance for the electrical signals from pain or stimuli to reach his brain became a constraint. When his lower leg got a small scratch, he did not feel the scratch. The result is that an infection started without him feeling anything, until he noticed it and by then it was too late.

Of course, Wadlow’s case suggest that there could be a 5th limitation placed on the human body, which is that once you get too tall/large, the nerve responses decrease since there is a much longer distance for the electrical signals to travel to reach the brain.

However, I am going to make a guess that it might be reasonable to suspect that if we increased the level of O2 in the atmosphere, the overall human race over time would increase in height at a higher rate than what is expected of it with average levels of O2. It is already guessed by some futuristic thinkers that the human race would increase in height over time anyway on average as the ability to have access to good nutrients would improve over the coming centuries. I am just saying that a O2 increase might make our whole race just slightly bigger.

At least with the increased O2 levels, the 4th major limitation would be remove which would prevent the human mammal from getting bigger.

(Something I didn’t even consider is that like insects with their exoskeletons, humans have more than just two orifices to take in oxygen. We know about our mouth and nose, which sucks in the air, which is around 20-21% O2. However, most people don’t realize that we also breathe through our skin, at around 1% of our total intake. If O2 is increased, there should be a slight increase in the rate of cellular chemical activity at least in the epidermal cells close to the outside of the body. This could stimulate an increase in proliferation of cell mitosis, specifcally chondrocytes when the organism is still growing.)

Of course, as mammals, we are warm blooded animals. Maybe O2 increased would cause biochemical reactions in our bodies which make the internal temperature increased. We would obviously need more food caloric intake to sustain a homeostatic state of temperature balance. It could have the opposite effect, and decrease the rate of human evolutionary growth if the body just became too hot internally.

If You Can Solve This Medical Problem, You Will Become The World’s First Trillionaire

In a recent article I read on the website Business Insider, Rob Wile wrote the article “Want To Become A Billionaire? Just Solve One Of These 10 Problems“ which revealed a list of ideas on how you can become ultra-rich by solving what I would call a Major Problem. As an engineer, I look at some of these problems as challenges to human innovation and creativity. The list was sort of interesting but I found one problem which was a little surprising, which led me to this interesting insight.

Here are the 10 problems….

1. Wireless Power – I’ve heard about this for the last decade or so, ever since I was still an undergraduate.
2. Rural, Remote Internet – Google is planning on launching a network of balloons into the stratosphere so that even a tribesmen in the Amazon can use their cell phones.
3. Cheap, Scalable Solar – Reduce cost per cell & possibly increase energy efficiency. Everyone is racing to the bottom.
4. Clean Coal – Can be make coal clean? Maybe the best option is the simplest, most obvious choice. Think Occam’s Razor.
5. Super Low Cost International Payments – That is something I want to have since I have become a semi-expat creating micro-businesses around the world
6. A Pill That Really Makes You Lose Weight – We’ll get to that in a second.
7. Cheap Desalination – California has a drought problem. So does Nevada and Las Vegas. Water is running out. We are going to have a huge food shortage problem in the coming decades. California produces 50% of all the fruits and product that is grown in the USA.
8. Detecting Or Predicting Major Weather Or Natural Events – Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we became modern day shamans and could predict the future like Nate Silver?
9. Unhackable Passwords – No comment. I am not a securities guy although I have been to the annual Defcon Convention held at the Riviera in Las Vegas twice before.
10. Death – This one could be another trillion dollar medical problem awaiting a potential future trillionaire to come along, but are we trying too hard to become gods?

It was Problem #6 which surprised me. Can You (or I) really become a billionaire just from solving a much, MUCH easier problem like weight loss?? 

I’ve always said that the science and biomedical problem of height increase, especially after full epiphyseal growth plate ossification is a thousand times harder than weight loss.

• Losing weight is easy.
• Altering our height is hard.

• Eating less and exercising is free, and could even save you money.
• Intentionally paying 100,000 Euros ($138,000 USD at today’s exchange rate) for someone to break our bones, and then having metal wires put through them so that we can brutally stretch our bones and muscles until we cry for more than a year of painful agony just for maybe 4 extra inches while risking become a total cripple our whole lives is hard.

I am not saying that loss weight is easy, but it sure is much easier than trying to grow taller.

So I have full confidence in saying this….

If we can become a billionaire just by creating a pill to help us loss weight, an analogous treatment for height increase would make us a trillionaire, or a multi-trillionaire.

I personally don’t believe that a magic pill to grow taller will ever exist for people with closed growth plate, although Glucosamine Sulphate comes damn close. (Refer to the post “This Non-Prescription Supplement Has Been Scientifically Proven To Make You Grow Taller Even With Closed Growth Plates“). Many people have tried, and all have failed.

Similarly, on a related subject, based on Problem #10 on that list, The age old desire for immortality which the death-fearing emperors of Ancient China wished for swallowing too much mercury eventually turned them crazy. These rulers of men ordered their legions of men to look high and low across the world and in the deepest reaches of the ocean for a “cure”, and grind up every bone of every animal, brew the leaves of every single plant and fruit in their land, to try to find the “elixir to immortality”. However, even the ruler of all men in the world will be subjected to the laws of nature and the universe. We struggle most of our lives against other men, trying to overcome them and dominate them, because we believe that we are not strong enough, not smart enough to try to overcome the limitations set for us by nature and our existence.

I personally think that each of our lives would be worth much more if we dedicated it towards solving large problems (ie colonizing mars, finding a HIV vaccine, removing radioactive waste dumps, regrowing the forests back, etc.), instead of trying to fight and bicker with our fellow brothers and sisters in the human race. At the end of the day, even if we did win in our struggle against our fellow neighbor and proved that somehow we are better than them because there is more “zeros” in our bank account or that our kids went to a higher ranked university than their kids, our egotistical desires to try to “one-up” each other gets us no where closer to solving the real problems in life. The problems we have with other humans, we created it ourselves, and it is all a fabrication of our own minds. That is not real. Those problems are not real. When we pass away & our body lies in the ground to rot, all those arguments, fights, bickering and lawsuits we filed & spent years in, just to try to screw over someone we became too emotionally fixated on, goes away.

If you really believe that there is some miraculous special compound which can be ingested to give you the body you want, then you are most likely wrong. Maybe something can be found for weight loss, but height increase? I don’t think so.

So here is my challenge for anyone who wants to try to figure it out. I am not asking for the person to come up with a pill, because that type of technology could be centuries away, assuming that it can ever be achieved at all. However, there is a middle path, a compromise towards what we secret wish for (which is a easy button) and what the rules of nature has set as our physiological constraints and limitations and what our bodies are capable of doing.

I propose some ideas on how to solve the problem half way, partially to give an alternative to limb lengthening surgery, as a simpler, less painful, cheaper, and less time consuming technique …

• Lab grown growth plate implantation which will restart the bone longitudinal growth process
• Intra-articular injection of mesenchymal stem cells and a growth plate formulation
• Inducing microfractures using ultrasonic extracorporeal shockwaves into the cortical bone layer to let the bone marrow seep into the cracks & periosteum stem cells to generate into the chondrogenic lineage.
• Reverse the senescence of the cells in the human body to a progenitor cell state to decalcify aka chelate the calcium crystals out.

I’ve already given away almost all of the best ideas on how to make your trillion dollars already. The question is, who is willing to put down their millions (Initial Guess: $30-$60 Mil) to start the initial capital funding to get the biomedical endeavor running to gain some momentum?

Of course, I am mainly directing this to certain people in the world, and I know who you are.

(I know for a fact personally due to past work experience from a very credible source that there are some families in the world, specifically the Middle East, which have a combined family net worth of up to $1 Trillion dollars! This is not a joke. The hidden areas of the world economy, of the international underground market, which is never reported to the IRS or any large established financial institutions is probably 90% of the real amount of transactions going on. There are hundreds of rich billion dollar Chinese families which create shell companies in tax haven countries to funnel their cash & buy real estate properties around the world in developing countries and western countries with easy immigration policies. There are dozens of billionaires in the UAE (Dubai and Dhabi) which have for decades tried to hide their real assets in Swiss bank accounts, only be blocked due to changes implemented in recent years. There are dozens of billionaires based in Russia which have been monopolizing the precious metal mines in Russia and other developing countries for the last 30 years. As for the nations that are still ruled by dictators, the dictator owns all the assets of their country (Remember that Gaddafi supposedly had $200 Bil claimed by Forbes Magazine). The United States Department of Treasury at the Bureau of Engraving & Printing prints out about $60 Bil dollars worth of paper reserve notes every month. Refer to their monthly reports here. You can see how much cash is “created” by the Bureau of Engraving & Printing in their Annual Product Report Available Here (The thing is in a excel MACROS file for god-sake.)

(My point is that there is more money (in the form of paper cash aka fiat currency) flowing through the economic system than ever before! There is so much money that the people at the top (Bankers, Goldman Sachs, Federal Reserve (who can trade their own money in the stock market) don’t even know what to do with all the rest of the money anymore. When the goal of money is just to invest the money into some asset to get a higher interest rate using compounding effect to make more money, then money no longer becomes the means to an end, but it is the end in and of itself. That becomes a problem, since money is no longer used to improve the quality of the nation’s people.)

It takes someone to become the first cause, someone to be the first person to step up and walk the talk, and put down some of their own money. I know there are millions of people out there who can support this cause. There is already about 1,200 Billionaires already in the world.

I am willing to put in $100,000 of my own money to the cause, but that won’t even be enough to get through 1 day of the entire process. I believe in it, but I am not a martyr. There are other problems I want to tackle in my life. This is just one of them.

Biotech is insanely hard to get started. There is a gauntlet of regulations to deal with, taking years and millions of dollars. However, if you are willing to get into the game, and double down like Elon Musk did with his own money believing in the cause of his SpaceX company, believing in our cause, you might be written up in the history books.

Can you solve this problem?

If you can, you will be rewarded on a level which will put Bill Gates and John Rockefeller to shame. Millions of people around the world will be eternally grateful to you for how much you have helped improve their life.

I am reminded of a commonly referenced quote to give inspiration to young kids to be stupid, and try to accomplish the impossible, and change the world. –>