will there ever be a time when as a species we charge each person for oxygen consumption, I'm sure we have the technology to know how much someone is using but is there technology to enforce it?
I don't want to speculate about oxygen consumption on Earth, but in outerspace and on other planets, possibly. Most likely oxygen would be public. So it would be paid for with taxes or taken out of paychecks. In private installations, the company would have to supply it. Again, you would pay indirectly. Here on Earth, if you have a compressor and scuba tanks, stock up!!
It would probably be started by the Democrats and Liberals as a front for a big government power grab. On earth, CO2 is part of the life cycle of all life on the earth and is necessary for photosynthesis; natural solar energy collection molecule. But now it is a poison that they are trying to regulate, based on doom and gloom that never materializes. All you need a fear and suckers. With oxygen, since it is needed for fire, I can see a hazardous chemical fire angle. The government will try to protect us from ourselves for our own good. Oxygen is dangerous stuff and it needs to be regulated. If we don't all the earth could catch fire and it will get so hot the ice will melt and cause floods that will pit out the fire but it will be too late for humans. Please regulate it for the sake of the children. If you complain you are a racist and a hater of life on earth. Did I use all the propaganda tools correctly?
LOL. Sure, global warming is just a liberal plot to unfairly hurt our poor corporations. That must mean that the overwhelming number of climatologists are liberals bent on destroying the american way of life, doesn't it? I guess colleges must vet students for their political views before they are allowed to go into climatology. Or maybe one of the courses is a actually a brain washing process that turns them into evil liberals. You really are a hoot. I bet you think there are liberals lurking behind every ill in this world. Is Fox News too liberal for you? I bet in your deluded mind you actually see this as a possibility.
On moon and colonies outside Earth, yes. On moon ilmenite (FeTiO3) and Anorthite (CaAl2Si2O8) can be used to extract oxygen. The cost of oxygen on the moon would be quite high...unless many people would live there in the future. http://www.lpi.usra.edu/publications/books/lunar_bases/LSBchapter08.pdf
Life as a Privilege At what point do we call it all off and start charging people a "life tax"? No, really, since we're going to inject politics into it, the reality is that it won't be "liberals" or "leftists" trying to make living necessity a commodity. Remember, we're the ones trying to break that cycle. To the other, if we set the politics aside, we might suggest that technologically and economically, it is easier to simply boost oxygen production. For interplanetary travel, oxygen supply will be figured into the costs; for planetary colonization, it must be figured into nearly every developmental calculation. Of course, the question is hardly new; there is an old anti-Jewish joke about the stereotypical size of a Jew's nose and the fact that "air is free". Or, as George Carlin once joked of the Vikings, if they can't steal it they'll fuck it, and if they can't fuck it they'll burn it. And remember, "oxygen bars" in polluted cities already exist. Stop by and pay for a few breaths of fresh air that isn't going to contribute to your cancer risk. Oxygen consumption won't be regulated per the topic post until a pretense of necessity, valid or otherwise, is established, and the marketplace figures out how to profit from it. Right now, it's kind of a novelty in polluted cities. And therein lies the key; O[sub]2[/sub] consumption control, as suggested in the topic post, would further stratify the human species, and in a capitalistic implementation qualify as social engineering much the way privatization of potable water has resulted in even more of the deprivation we were told it would alleviate. And, yes, as long as some would inject politics into it, there are plenty of us who saw the disaster of water privatization coming. There are two ways to look at the distributive processes of a commodity. One is scientific under the proposition that the goal is to distribute, say, water, as a living necessity. The other is to distribute that water as a business proposition in which profit margins mean more than life itself.
