3 ms·

Don't feel bad -- it's very possible some of the CO2 that you breathe out every day will still be in the same configuration a hundred billion years from now as

Don't feel bad -- it's very possible some of the CO2 that you breathe out every day will still be in the same configuration a hundred billion years from now as well.

robotresearcher 8y ago
If those darn green plants don’t wreck all my hard metabolic work.
Symmetry 8y ago
Nah, CO2 is absorbed by rock weathering and released by vulcanism. There are currently 740 gigatons of CO2 in the atmosphere and 1 of those is absorbed every year by rocks. you should expect that most of the molecules he exhales are going to be gone in just a millennium.
- tylerhou 8y ago
  The average human exhales around 2.3 pounds of CO2 per day [0]. That means that in a lifetime (70 years), a human breathes out around 59,000 pounds of CO2, which is 608,000 moles of CO2 or 3.7 * 10^29 atoms of CO2 [2]. By your gigaton number then there will be on average less than one atom of his CO2 production in 50,000 years [3]. What happens if we consider total carbon footprint instead? Various sources cite around 20 metric tons per year as the average carbon footprint for someone living in the US. That's about 120 times higher than the amount exhaled, and since log(a*b) = log(a) + log(b) we can just add 3540 years [4] to our above calculation ~= 54,000 years. So above a millennium, but much less than a billion years. [0] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2009/08/are-you-heating-the-planet-when-you-breathe.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2009/08/are-you-heating-... [1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=59000+pounds+%2F+mass+of+carbon+dioxide https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=59000+pounds+%2F+mass+... [2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=608,000+moles+to+atoms https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=608,000+moles+to+atoms [3] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=-log_(739%2F740)(3.6614616%C3%9710%5E29) https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=-log_(739%2F740)(3.661... [4] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=-log_(739%2F740)(120) https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=-log_(739%2F740)(120)

Don't feel bad -- it's very possible some of the CO2 that you breathe out every day will still be in the same configuration a hundred billion years from now as well.

robotresearcher 8y ago

If those darn green plants don’t wreck all my hard metabolic work.

Symmetry 8y ago

Nah, CO2 is absorbed by rock weathering and released by vulcanism. There are currently 740 gigatons of CO2 in the atmosphere and 1 of those is absorbed every year by rocks. you should expect that most of the molecules he exhales are going to be gone in just a millennium.

tylerhou 8y ago
The average human exhales around 2.3 pounds of CO2 per day [0]. That means that in a lifetime (70 years), a human breathes out around 59,000 pounds of CO2, which is 608,000 moles of CO2 or 3.7 * 10^29 atoms of CO2 [2]. By your gigaton number then there will be on average less than one atom of his CO2 production in 50,000 years [3]. What happens if we consider total carbon footprint instead? Various sources cite around 20 metric tons per year as the average carbon footprint for someone living in the US. That's about 120 times higher than the amount exhaled, and since log(a*b) = log(a) + log(b) we can just add 3540 years [4] to our above calculation ~= 54,000 years. So above a millennium, but much less than a billion years. [0] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2009/08/are-you-heating-the-planet-when-you-breathe.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2009/08/are-you-heating-... [1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=59000+pounds+%2F+mass+of+carbon+dioxide https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=59000+pounds+%2F+mass+... [2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=608,000+moles+to+atoms https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=608,000+moles+to+atoms [3] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=-log_(739%2F740)(3.6614616%C3%9710%5E29) https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=-log_(739%2F740)(3.661... [4] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=-log_(739%2F740)(120) https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=-log_(739%2F740)(120)