Eighty percent of the air you breathe is nitrogen. It is the most abundant element in the atmosphere and it is vital to our existence, but it doesn’t interact with other elements. When you take a breath, the nitrogen in the air goes into your lungs and straight back out again, like an absentminded shopper who has wandered into the wrong store. For nitrogen to be useful to us, it must be converted into more sociable forms, like ammonia, and it is bacteria that do that job for us. Without their help, we would die. Indeed, we could never have existed. It is time to say thank you to your microbes.
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