“Plants are the prevalent life forms. To them, carbon dioxide is life, and oxygen is nothing more than a dangerous waste product.”
Plants do respire oxygen at night though, so it’s not really a dangerous waste product.
>> Plants do respire oxygen at night though, so it’s not really a dangerous waste product. <<
Well, yes and no:
The plants that SURVIVED the great oxygen poisoning are not poisoned by oxygen, tautologically. But 99.9999999999999% of all the plants which existed at the time went extinct. (By plants, I mean autotrophs, whether procryotic, eucaryotic or multicellular. With 3-, 5- and even 8-kingdom models, some people think you mean “Kingdom Plantae” when you say “plants.” Plantae were not around.)
Also, only a very small portion of plants respire oxygen at night. These are called “C-4” plants, although they are disappointingly not very explosive.