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The Next Big Idea · 2025-03-13 · 57 min · 9,519 words

CARL ZIMMER: The Untold Story of the Air We Breathe

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LinkedIn I'm Rufus Griskam and this is the next big idea. Today. The hidden story of the life we breathe. If you look out at the empty space in front of you

What do you see? Nothing. The absence of stuff. Early philosophers, including Aristotle and Plato, imagined a pure divine essence being Permeating all space, weaving silently through planets and stars.

It wasn't until the eighteenth century that we began to discover oxygen and other gases in the air. Vital substances for life combustion and respiration. By the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Aerobiology emerged, uncovering a new unseen world. That empty space around us turns out to be teeming with invisible microbial life carrying pollen.

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