The one thing that humans have evolved, over and above the other living things, is the ability to abstract solutions to our evolutionary shortcomings.
For example, we can't breathe under water. But we can create the machinery that mines the materials needed to create that machinery (nice pseudo chicken-egg cycle) that creates the scuba gear and processes for filling them with breathable air (diluted with helium or other inert gas to lower the risk of "the bends"), and then using that gear to protect our skin (outerwear), swim faster (flippers) and breathe without gills (tanks and breathing apparatus).
There are other tool-using animals out there. But they are at the first step of tool usage, and lacking the layers of abstraction our tools employ.
We humans are less evolved for certain tasks than groups of other life. But we are more highly evolved in that ability to abstract our knowledge of other animal traits (flight, burrowing, erecting walls or damns, etc) and create things that accomplish those evolved traits for us.
Actually, nitrogen is what causes the bends as well as nitrogen narcosis, making it toxic under pressure. And argon is even more narcotic under pressure.
You are right, however, that ozone was the wrong gas of choice. I meant helium.
The one thing that humans have evolved, over and above the other living things, is the ability to abstract solutions to our evolutionary shortcomings.
For example, we can't breathe under water. But we can create the machinery that mines the materials needed to create that machinery (nice pseudo chicken-egg cycle) that creates the scuba gear and processes for filling them with breathable air (diluted with helium or other inert gas to lower the risk of "the bends"), and then using that gear to protect our skin (outerwear), swim faster (flippers) and breathe without gills (tanks and breathing apparatus).
There are other tool-using animals out there. But they are at the first step of tool usage, and lacking the layers of abstraction our tools employ.
We humans are less evolved for certain tasks than groups of other life. But we are more highly evolved in that ability to abstract our knowledge of other animal traits (flight, burrowing, erecting walls or damns, etc) and create things that accomplish those evolved traits for us.
EDIT: Helium. Not ozone.