Googling DIY oxygen concentration and production reactions. It appears there is no simple method. Electrolysis sounds simple but is apparently not. Industrial oxygen has purity problems. Concentration processes use zeolite which isn’t generally ubiquitous.
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Sheds whole new light on the idea of “spaceship earth”
Something as basic as breathable air is only available free and low-tech in a very narrow band around healthy. Drop below 90% or whatever and the full might of full-stack civilizational technology is necessary.
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Larger hospitals have oxygen generation capacity but most of the supply is done at centralized scale and requires cryogenic distribution. It’s not one of the resilient basic gases that can survive infrastructure failures. At least not at any meaningful scale.
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Zeolites seem like a high-value target for home-scale beyond-kitchen chemistry, something I’ve been thinking about lately. Unlike mechanical and electrical Maker movements, there are no 3D printers or Arduinos in chemistry. The DIY limit is still “baking soda and vinegar.”
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Beyond-kitchen chemistry seems to require more extreme pressures and temperatures and reactor vessels from uncommon materials like nickel (ht ). I hadn’t realized how big the gap between home and industrial chemistry was. It’s not “pressure cookers++”
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But maybe there are hacks? Stuff that goes beyond the baking soda limit without getting into unreasonably tough regimes?
What would be the most bang for the buck in diy chemistry, in terms of adding one extra chemical or device to the typical kitchen or bathroom?
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Very broad knowledge of natural products and different extraction techniques (e.g. liquid-liquid, acid-base) would go further than any individual household chemical
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For instance: you can make soap from whole nutmeg nuts with chemicals you probably already have or could buy at the store, and it smells really good.
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I'm mostly interested in relatively exotic emergency things, not everyday things like soap, but yeah, interesting
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Well there's a ton of natural products that fit that including penicillin, taxonomic, as I'm sure you know. I guess my point is that nature produces these things already so often the extraction and purification is the most important part
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