Oh you, I need in every second

Question

You fill all earths emptiness
The higher I go, you get less

If you go away nobody will stay
The jellyfish might still play

Oh I, representative of all being
Oh I, just you I will keep needing

Oh you, not visible but irreplaceable
Oh you, so essential but untraceable

hexomino · Accepted Answer · 2019-11-01 13:14:22Z

I guess the "you" in the riddle must be

Air

You fill all earths emptiness

The atmosphere of Earth is the layer of gases, commonly known as air, that surrounds the planet Earth.

The higher I go, you get less

The atmosphere becomes thinner and thinner with increasing altitude, with no definite boundary between the atmosphere and outer space.

If you go away nobody will stay

Most animals need oxygen to survive.

The jellyfish might still play.

Jellyfish can absorb the oxygen in water although there is an animal that looks a bit like a jellyfish and can survive without oxygen.

Oh I, representative of all being

The "I" in the riddle must represent life in general or possibly the life that exists on land.

Oh I, just you I will keep needing

All land animals need air to survive

Oh you, not visible but irreplaceable

Air is invisible.

Oh you, so essential but untraceable

The one shortcoming of this answer is that air is not entirely untraceable but at least hard to track and predict.

In terms of traceability, your answer is still on point because: spoilers (no spoiler markdown in comments aye?) >! if we replace air with O2, and look at it from a carbon dating perspective, O2 is not traceable, unlike CO2 which adds carbon making it traceable - which also ties in with the Jellyfish that can survive on high levels of CO2 (as they are better adapted for this) unlike O2 which better favors fish, so I believe if we extend air to O2, it fits perfectly — Liam Daly, Nov 3 at 3:40
Or ozone. Fits for line 2,3,4. For 7,8 it is very good. Unfortunately not good for line 1. — JohnMollis, Nov 3 at 22:59

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