How to make Oxygen

I wrote this as a reply to a question on social media, that wasn’t INTENDED to be this long but I got a little carried away with the being an absolute nerd thing. Ran out of time for coming up with a post for here tonight, so figured I’d copy this over with some minor edits for some light nerdy entertainment.

For context, the question that was asked by someone who clearly spends far more time outdoors having a life than I do, was whether or not we’ve discovered a way to create oxygen.

Pretty easily. Run electricity through water, it splits into hydrogen and oxygen. Here's a guide on doing it at home with some pencils and a battery.

Directly creating oxygen or any other molecule is also pretty simple in theory.

Everything is protons and electrons, only difference between one element and another is how many protons are stuck together (the protons then hold electrons in a cloud around them, and the way those electrons group up in different numbers is what gives each element it's unique properties).

Hydrogen is a single proton with a single electron, most basic atom in the universe. Crush 8 hydrogen atoms together, you get oxygen.

The problem is actually doing atomic fusion takes ridiculous amounts of energy.

Try taking too opposing magnets and pushing them into each other - not against each other, but INTO each other. That repulsion gets stronger the closer the two objects are to one another, and protons are pure unadulterated positive magnetic charge. They're more positive than Sarah showing up at the office Monday morning with a round of coffee for everyone, a big grin, and a "can-do" attitude.

Common magnets are only slightly positive, and other forces involved mean even if you flip one magnet so they attract instead of repel the atoms aren't going to get even remotely close to each other, and individual nucleus might as well be in different solar systems for all the space between them relative to their actual size.

But if you CAN get two protons to touch, the strong nuclear force at that range is enough to hold them together. Mostly. Past 80 or so it starts getting unstable which is why things like uranium eventually split on their own (the nuclear bomb effect of splitting the atoms is from setting off a chain reaction, in it's natural state radioactive stuff like uranium just constantly produces heat and was considered an odd curiosity before we figured out the chain reaction thing to amplify it). But on the scale of oxygen, it'll hold reliably.

Getting enough force to get those protons to touch though? It's been done, there's been research and experiments happening for the last century to find a way to achieve nuclear fusion efficiently enough to get more energy out than goes in, so far it's always a net loss on how much energy is required, and that's just fusing hydrogen into helium (which is 2 protons together, 1/4 the way to oxygen). Particle accelerators like the LHC do it regularly but like one particle at a time so again horribly inefficient (and those colliders are more interested in what happens when you crank it up enough to smash the particles apart entirely, not just make them touch. Some of the most advanced scientific research of human history and it's just a sophisticated way of smashing two things together really hard to see what happens, I absolutely love it).

Generally taking an existing molecule that has oxygen in it, and finding a way to break that down to release the oxygen will get better results for far less effort.

But if you REALLY want to see oxygen being formed from scratch, there is one spot you can see it happen naturally.

Get enough raw material together, usually hydrogen gas clouds, for it to collapse under it's own gravity, the extreme pressure squeezes the atoms together tightly enough that quantum tunneling effects can happen. Which is a one in a million chance still, but when you're counting attempts in quintillions per second, those one in a million's get pretty common.

That lets two hydrogen fuse into a helium, two helium fuse into beryllium, two berylium into oxygen, a beryllium and a helium into carbon, a hydrogen and a helium into lithium, all sorts of fun combinations.

All those fusions release a lot of energy which creates an outward pressure that balances out gravity. Basically you wind up with an insane, explosion that simultaneously gets pulled back into itself to explode all over again hundreds of times a second. The amount of material needed to reach that density is large enough that these ongoing nuclear detonations take billions of years to reach a point where there's so many heavy elements up to iron in the mix that things slow down, the constant outward pressure drops off and the outermost parts of the explosion finally gets dragged back in by it's own gravity - only to hit the core with enough force that it bounces outward again in an even bigger explosion that makes what it was doing previously look like nothing, though this time just one big boom with nothing pulling it back in.

This utter insanity of physics is what we call a star, with the closest one commonly known as the sun, and I really don't think people have enough appreciation for just how ridiculous what's happening actually is. Or how ridiculous it is that the light from said explosion sends enough energy through the vacuum of space to warm the entire earth, despite being so far away that it takes that light just over 8 minutes to reach us (next time you're in direct sunlight on a summer day just think how close to a fireplace you'd have to be to feel the same amount of heat from it).