system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
A gas becomes a plasma when there is so much energy that the electrons break away. Does this mean that plasmas cannot react chemically with other substances?

A chemical reaction is determined by the amount of valence electrons on an atom, right? So, if all those valence electrons get pulled away, can no chemical reaction occur? And on that note, wouldn't that mean plasmas can only exist as pure elements?
gpt
Plasmas are actually super reactive in many contexts.  In biological tissues, plasma generation leads to several processes that are very disruptive and used to do things like opthalmic surgery.  We use them in the lab to blast individual brain cells and kill them.  The nice thing about plasmas is you can use lasers to generate them with very high precision, so you can do 'nanosurgery' and cut things on the micron scale -- for example, individual microtubules.

The free electrons are highly unstable and will often produce reactive oxygen species (ROS) which is very nasty and can cause all kinds of damage to biological tissues (disrupts membranes, breaks DNA).  The free electrons will also displace, due to their very high energy, electrons in lower energy states, thereby reacting with and almost certainly altering nearby molecules.

Unless there is an energy source that sustains the plasma, the electrons will quickly want to reduce their energy and to do so they will react like gangbusters because they have so much energy they can easily break other bonds.  And even if there is input energy, reactivity at the edge of the plasma will be very high.

Basically, tons of energy, so tons of potential for reactivity.