I'm sure there is a relatively simple way to get from liquid nitrogen to nitrogen compounds

These days we do have the means to do it, though I don't know how achievable they are to the home-gamer

But historically this was actually a huge chemistry problem

I'm not a chemist, so I gotta gloss over some stuff I don't fully understand

But nitrogen tends to form bonds with itself and makes an N~2~ molecule. That's what the nitrogen in the air is, that's what liquid nitrogen is.

And unfortunately for us (for chemistry purposes) that molecule is very stable, it doesn't like to react with much, for most practical purposes it can basically be considered inert.

However, nitrogen is of course part of a whole lot of other chemicals as well, very important chemicals that plants and animals need. You probably heard about the nitrogen cycle in middle or high school science class at one point, and how nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil can convert atmospheric nitrogen into stuff that plants can use, and then animals eat the plants, and their waste also contains nitrogen compounds that can feed plants, etc.

But for us to do that through chemical processes isn't easy. We can't just pour some liquid nitrogen into a beaker and mix in some other stuff and it reacts to make ammonia or whatever other nitrogen compound you desire.

Until around 100 years ago, we basically couldn't turn atmospheric nitrogen into anything else, at least not at any kind of scale and not in any commercially viable way. Which was a huge problem as the world's population was growing and growing enough food to feed everyone was hard without being able to make synthetic fertilizers. The US actually has a law saying that they're allowed to just claim uninhabited islands that are covered in bird shit because that guano was rich in ammonia and other nitrogen compounds and so immensely valuable as a fertilizer.

Then along comes Fritz Haber, who comes up with the Haber process to turn atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia. This was a huge deal and he won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for it. I don't think it's a stretch to say that if you've eaten pretty much anything grown on a farm you owe it to the Haber process.

And it's still a huge deal to this day, the haber process is responsible for around 2% of the world's energy consumption, and about the same amount of our greenhouse gas emissions.

If you've got a quick and easy way to turn pure nitrogen into something else, there's probably another Nobel Prize waiting for you.

But the ensuing video will be so pretty!