We had an ozone alert here yesterday.

[mykpart]

And I was wondering: Why can't they adapt an oxygen concentrator to concentrate ozone instead? Then they could load up ozone cylinders into the space shuttle and go use it to mend the hole in the ozone layer. I know this sounds silly, but why is ozone bad down here, but good up there?

[jeff30997]

1. We had a methane alert here yesterday...

The neighbor had to much beans for supper.

[babylonsister]

2. Hey, buster, save that oxygen for

the hurricanes or aftermaths.

[Dogmudgeon]

3. Ozone Bright And Dark

Well, Ozone absorbs UV light, which is why it's good in the upper atmosphere.

It is also toxic to living cells, which is why it's bad where humans are.

Any kind of gas concentrator you can find will be very inefficient. When there is an ozone alert, the ozone in the atmosphere is so spread out that you'd need a thousand or more ozone concentrators per square mile, just to make a dent in the problem.

Ozone, by the way, is "triplet oxygen" -- normally, oxygen atoms travel around in molecule pairs (or O2) but with a higher energy input (like from sunlight or lightning), three oxygens are able to "stick together". That's ozone.

O4 and even O5 have been shown to exist in nature, but in extremely minute quantities. It takes much more energy to get them to stick together as a molecule, but it happens.

--p!