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Becoming reliant on additional external resources to survive is objectively backwards evolution.

You brought up oxygen reliance as a silly point but you're actually right. Humans relying on oxygen actually isn't that great, we can't go into space or underwater (without external support) and we get out of breath when exercising. A group of humans that evolved to not need oxygen at all would be a great genetic improvement.

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What anaerobic organisms have you been outcompeted by recently?

I believe the main evolutionary advantage of your anaerobic humans is that they're imaginary, so they don't have tradeoffs, which definitely helps if you want to add features.

I think I'd prefer to be able to detect low O2 instead of instantly passing out; that'd probably be good enough.

But human evolution is basically a story where bigger brains coevolved with increased reliance on more diverse and higher quality food sources. Otherwise, for example, we would have much lower requirements for exogenous Vitamin C, like many other mammals.

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