There are 118 known chemical elements and that’s a lot. So, what if a chemical element disappeared?
Essential Elements
There are a lot of elements that are essential and beneficial for us. Therefore, if you got rid of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, calcium, etc., you’d probably get into trouble. Each of them plays an important role in your body by forming compounds that help you work.
However, other elements such as uranium and radium are present in our body too. Can you remove them? Probably, no. Although they are not beneficial for our bodies and are waiting to go out, it helps the planet’s dynamo work. If Earth weren’t radioactive, life would probably disappear because of being exposed to solar wind. Others like cesium could possibly make the planet less dangerous, but they’d punch a hole in the periodic table.
The Explanation
The ones you shouldn’t remove are hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon and oxygen. These account for most of your mass and form critical substances such as water, which keeps us alive. It is also in our everyday lives. Papers, wood, plastic and a lot of things are also mainly made of these elements. Without them, we’d lose virtually everything, including life on Earth.
Still, you shouldn’t avoid phosphorus, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, iron, etc. They are serving essential functions for us. For example, sodium and chlorine form table salt, which helps us transmit signals throughout our bodies. Also, iron transfers oxygen to all of your organs using blood.
Moreover, being a little radioactive is essential to life on Earth. Without these substances in nature, Earth’s dynamo would be a lot weaker and we’d be in danger due to solar winds.
However, there are still ‘junks’ leftover and we can live without it. For example, cesium is a pretty dangerous element and can catch on fire even in air. It doesn’t show apparent benefits to our body and lives unless you’re a patient who needs this for a medicine.
Physical Hazards
No matter how unharmed you’d be without an element, it’d still break physics if you want it to disappear forever. For example, making cesium disappear is as crazy as skipping a number while counting to 10 as an adult. If you didn’t allow this element to exist, it makes a number disappear either, and there are many unimaginable consequences of this……
Anyway, it is best to keep the periodic table look the way it should and be grateful that every element exist to help us survive and perform experiments.